Organ and Piano | b. 1948

Doug Carn was born in St. Augustine, Florida on July 14, 1948, grew up in a household where his mother had gigged with Dizzy Gillespie and his uncle introduced him to jazz records, and was playing piano at five and alto saxophone at eight before studying oboe and composition at Jacksonville University and completing his education at Georgia State College in 1969. He and his wife Jean moved to Los Angeles in the late 1960s alongside a cohort of Atlanta musicians, and it was in Los Angeles, studying organ with Larry Young Jr. and writing lyrics to existing jazz compositions, that his approach crystallised. Gene Russell heard about his lyric adaptations of Wayne Shorter's "Infant Eyes," John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," Bobby Hutcherson's "Little B's Poem" and Horace Silver's "Peace" and signed him to the newly founded Black Jazz Records. The four albums Carn recorded there between 1971 and 1974, "Infant Eyes," "Spirit of the New Land," "Revelation" and "Adam's Apple," all featuring Jean Carn on vocals, fused post-bop organ and piano with spiritual jazz harmonics, R&B grooves and lyrically charged vocal performance into a body of work that has since achieved cult classic status and been extensively sampled in hip-hop. He later converted to Islam, worked as a sideman with Nat Adderley, Earth Wind and Fire, Lou Donaldson and Stanley Turrentine, and collaborated with Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad on the Jazz Is Dead series in 2020. Carn remains active.