Jon Lord

Jon Lord — born in Leicester, England, on 9 June 1941, died on 16 July 2012 — was Deep Purple's founding keyboard player and the author of one of the most consequential ideas in heavy rock: treating the organ as an instrument of equal weight to the guitar. His technical solution was direct and radical. He ran a Hammond organ through Marshall amplifiers, the same ones guitarists used, and obtained a distorted, dirty, cutting sound no keyboard had produced before. It is what one hears in "Child in Time" and "Highway Star": Lord and Ritchie Blackmore duelling as equals, each answering the other's phrase. That contest between keyboard and guitar became one of the defining traits of Deep Purple's sound. His training was classical, and he never hid it. In 1969 he composed the Concerto for Group and Orchestra, performed at the Royal Albert Hall with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra — a serious attempt to write a work in which a rock band and an orchestra played together as partners, not as decoration for one another. The result divided critics and irritated part of the band itself, but it opened a path that symphonic rock and later orchestral metal would travel. He left Deep Purple in 2002, after thirty-four years, to devote himself to classical composition, and was replaced by Don Airey. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2012, aged seventy-one.