Music Notes

When you reflect on the brilliant organists in the annals of American popular music, you’d be remiss not to talk about the likes of Booker T. Jones, Jimmy Smith, Garth Hudson, Al Kooper, Bill Doggett, Larry Young, Keith Emerson, and a host of others.

You’d also, pardon the pun that will be evident below, miss the ball if you didn’t include Jane Jarvis in there somewhere, too.

Now, you likely never saw Ms. Jarvis in concert at the Fillmore, Avery Fisher Hall or Birdland. You might, however, have heard her melodious tones at a major league baseball ballpark.

That’s right, the ballpark. You see, despite a varied career at her first love as a jazz player, Jane Jarvis, who passed away recently at the age of 94, was the original organist at Shea Stadium, the home of the New York Mets baseball team.

Despite what she might have euphemistically and happily referred to baseball entertainment as her “night” job, Ms. Jarvis’ musical pedigree was clearly her first love, jazz. She formed her first band in her native Indiana as a teenager, and she worked steadily as a jazz pianist, mostly in New York, from her mid-60s into her 90s.

But for more than two decades she was best known as the sound of the Mets. After eight years playing for the Braves at County Stadium in Milwaukee, she was the spotlight at Shea Stadium from 1964 to 1979, performing a repertory that mixed jazz staples like Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple From the Apple” with more conventional fare like the traditional baseball anthem “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and the team’s theme song, “Meet the Mets.”

As a kid, I remember going to many Mets games (yeah, I know, kind of weird for a devoted Yankees fan) at a time when, while the team on the field was awful, the music was heavenly, clever and inspired.

And, while few Mets fans knew that Ms. Jarvis had begun her career as a jazz pianist, even fewer probably knew that she had still another day job, with the Muzak Corporation.

Muzak was synonymous with soothing background sounds piped into elevators when Ms. Jarvis was hired for a clerical job there in 1963, not long after she moved to New York, and shortly before she was hired by the Mets. She worked her way up to vice president in charge of programming and recording, and, when she began supervising sessions, she hired Lionel Hampton, Clark Terry and other jazz musicians as performers. The result was canned music considerably more swinging than the Muzak norm, much of which the musicians, including Ms. Jarvis, composed themselves.

Nearing retirement age and wanting to engage the public more directly, Ms. Jarvis left her job at Muzak in 1978 and the Mets a year later (she was not replaced) and, at 64, began looking for work as a jazz pianist.

By the mid-1980s she was a fixture at the West Village nightclub and restaurant Zinno, where she worked with Milt Hinton and other top-tier jazz bassists. She recorded her first album as a leader in 1985, the year she turned 70.

She began her musical odyssey by picking out melodies on the piano at age four, and a year later her parents arranged for her to study classical piano at Vincennes University. She went on to study at several conservatories in Chicago.

She began her professional career at 11 on a radio show in Gary, Indiana that featured child entertainers. Within two years she was the house pianist at a radio station in Chicago, accompanying nationally known performers like Ethel Waters and Sophie Tucker.

In 1954, Ms. Jarvis was playing piano and organ in nightclubs and on television in Milwaukee when she was approached by the Braves, whom had moved by Milwaukee from Boston, and she was offered the job of organist.

“I wasn’t a sports fan, and I was uncertain about doing it,” she told The New York Times in 1984. “But money overcame my worries.” By the time she began her long tenure with the Mets, 10 years later, she had become a knowledgeable and enthusiastic baseball fan.

Despite health problems, Ms. Jarvis continued to perform and record into the 21st century, both as a bandleader and with the Statesmen of Jazz, an ensemble consisting mostly of musicians over 65. She was the only woman in the group.

“I figure I’ve got another 25 years,” she told The Indianapolis Star in 1999. “At least I’ve got 25 years booked.”

Play ball. And, play the organ, Ms. Jarvis.