Jan-
Thanks for posting this. I have a few instructional videos on How To Play
Piano by him. He took the ethods he developed during the war and made videos
that I found at the NAMM show a few years ago. I also use to own a Roland
Rhodes Piano (which they licensed the name from him) till I sold it to Steve
Barber (keyboards with Eric Johnson during the Venus Isle era).
Paz
NP-Pretzel Logic-Steely Dan
on 1/4/01 2:56 PM, jan gyn at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Harold Rhodes Los Angeles Times Tuesday, January 2, 2001
>
> Los Angeles -- Harold Burroughs Rhodes, a music teacher turned
> inventor whose revolutionary electric piano became a favorite of jazz
> and rock musicians, died of complications from pneumonia Dec. 17 in a
> nursing home in Los Angeles. He was 89.
>
> Mr. Rhodes was the creator of the famed Rhodes electric piano, an
> instrument that grew from a crude model he fashioned out of airplane
> scrap during World War II into a classic favored by such performers
> as Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder.
>
> The introduction of the Rhodes piano in 1965 is considered a critical
> development in the evolution of jazz-rock in the 1970s. It gave the
> music of artists such as Hancock, Miles Davis and Chick Corea an
> unexpected mellowness, blended well with other instruments and had a
> true piano touch.
>
> "Certainly the Rhodes piano was an instrument that had to be
> available for anything like our music to have happened," Hancock said
> in a 1975 interview. "I simply couldn't play the same tunes we're now
> doing on an acoustic piano. It just wouldn't work."
>
> Mr. Rhodes was born in the San Fernando Valley, the son of a real
> estate agent and a seamstress. He was exposed to jazz as a child,
> listening to his brother's phonograph collection, and was so
> intrigued by some of the more unusual chord voicings he heard that he
> asked for piano lessons. By 1940 he was operating a successful chain
> of piano studios from Los Angeles to New York.
>
> In World War II, Mr. Rhodes was assigned to flight instructor
> training in the Army, and he gave piano lessons to his buddies to
> kill time. The lessons became so popular that a surgeon at the base
> hospital in Greensboro, N.C.,talked him into teaching piano to
> injured soldiers as part of their rehabilitation.
>
> There was one problem: He could not find a piano suitable for
> teaching injured GIs confined to bed. "So, I thought, 'Hell! I'll
> make it myself,' "he recalled in an interview with Down Beat magazine
> in 1974.
>
> Mr. Rhodes scavenged wood scraps and hydraulic tubing from old B-17s
> to make a crude, lap-sized piano that could play 29 notes.
>
> After the war, he went into partnership with guitar and amplifier
> maker Leo Fender in 1955, producing Mr. Rhodes' 32-note piano bass --
> essentially, the bottom half of an electric piano keyboard that, when
> played, sounded like an electric bass guitar. Not until CBS took over
> Fender in 1965 was Mr. Rhodes' piano made and successfully marketed.
