Philly great Joey DeFrancesco returns to the Clef Club to play a hallowed instrument

Sitting in an empty fourth-floor rehearsal room at the Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts on South Broad Street, the organ looks like nothing more than a piece of vintage furniture.

The bulky wood frame wouldn't look out of place sitting among countless thrift store couches throughout the city, and without the Clef Club's intervention it might have met a similar fate. But this is an instrument with a direct link to jazz history: It's one of the earliest instruments owned by legendary organist Jimmy Smith.

The Hammond C3 is a slightly larger version of the more portable B3, which would become the instrument of choice for Smith and the generations of organ players who followed in his influential wake.

Following the death of Smith's ex-wife, Edna Joy Goins, the organ was left behind in the garage, where it had likely sat for decades.

Fortunately, the house's new owner realized its significance and called the Clef Club, whose managing director, Don Gardner, had given Smith his start in the early 1950s.

"When Jimmy left his wife, he walked out and left everything, including that organ," says Gardner. "Jimmy started with me, and I remember when he got that organ. When he left my band, that's the organ he rehearsed on for a year before he broke out. So now it's come full circle."

Smith was born in Norristown, and his pioneering work helped establish Philly as the mecca of jazz organ in the 1960s. He joined Gardner's band, the Sonotones, as a pianist in 1952 and gradually switched to the B3 over the next few years. That instrument belonged to Gardner, however, so after leaving the Sonotones Smith purchased the C3. While it rarely left his house after that, Gardner remembers Smith hauling it to one of his first major solo gigs. "I used to have a hearse that we used to carry our instruments and travel all over the place," Gardner says. "Jimmy borrowed my hearse to go to the Newport Jazz Festival, and that's the organ he took."

The Clef Club has worked to restore the organ for the last four years, in order to remedy the moisture damage and effects of disuse accrued from nearly a half-century of neglect. But it will be heard again on Friday, when Joey DeFrancesco performs on the instrument with his new trio. It will be his first performance in his native Philadelphia since 2011, and the debut of his new trio with drummer George Fludas and guitarist Jeff Parker, best known for his work with the Chicago post-rock band Tortoise.

"There's a special honor and something magical to me about playing an instrument that was owned or even just played by one of the greats," DeFrancesco says. "There's something spiritual happening in that for me. Some people would say, 'It's just an organ. So what?' But I'm very excited to play that instrument because of the fact that I know it's one of Jimmy's early axes. It's cool because that's what he used at home, so he probably wrote material on it and used it for a lot of shedding. That's history there."

There;s history as well in DeFrancesco returning to play at the Clef Club. DeFrancesco met Lovett Hines, the longtime music education director of the Clef Club, as a child prodigy when Hines was running an earlier version of the program at Settlement Music School. Hines recalls the 10-year-old being brought in by his father, organist Papa John DeFrancesco. He also remembers balking at working with such a young student.

"I looked down and saw this little guy with a Beatles haircut and said, 'All my kids are 14 or 15 and have been playing for a while, but I'll give him a chance.' He sat down and started playing Sonny Rollins' 'Sonnymoon For Two,' and he was so short that his little feet dangled from the piano stool, but that was it. That's how he joined the ensemble."

DeFrancesco and fellow future jazz giant Christian McBride formed a close bond with Hines, often conference-calling their mentor late at night to play records they were excited about, while he tried not to get caught dozing on the other end of the line.

As DeFrancesco says, "Philly is where it all started for me, and it's still very nostalgic for me to play there. The fact that I'm going to be playing the Clef Club and what that place represents, on Jimmy Smith's organ - it's not just a gig in Philly, it's going to be an event."

Joey DeFrancesco plays 7:30 p.m. Friday, June 27, at the Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz & Performing Arts, 738 S. Broad St. Tickets: $35, members $30. Information: 215-893-9912, www.clefclubofjazz.org.