Charles Earland (May 24, 1941 – December 11, 1999) was an American jazz organist.
Charles Earland came into his own at the tail-end of the great 1960s wave of soul-jazz organists, gaining a large following and much airplay with a series of albums for the Prestige label. While heavily indebted to Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff, Earland came armed with his own swinging, technically agile, light-textured sound on the keyboard and one of the best walking-bass pedal techniques in the business. Though not an innovative player in his field, Earland burned with the best of them when he was on. His hard, simmering grooves earned him the nickname "The Mighty Burner".
Earland actually started his musical experiences surreptitiously on his father's alto sax as a kid, and when he was in high school, he played baritone in a band that also featured fellow Philadelphians Pat Martino on guitar, Lew Tabackin on tenor, and yes, Frankie Avalon on trumpet. After playing in the Temple University band, he toured as a tenor player with McGriff for three years, became infatuated with McGriff's organ playing, and started learning the Hammond B-3 at intermission breaks.
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When McGriff let him go, Earland switched to the organ permanently, forming a trio with Martino and drummer Bobby Durham. He made his first recordings for the obscure Choice label in 1966, then joined Lou Donaldson for two years (1968-1969) and two albums before being signed as a solo artist to Prestige. Earland's first album for Prestige, Black Talk!, became a best-selling classic of the soul-jazz genre; a surprisingly effective cover of the Spiral Starecase's pop/rock hit "More Today Than Yesterday" from that LP received saturation airplay on jazz radio in 1969. He recorded eight more albums for Prestige, one of which featured a young unknown Philadelphian named Grover Washington, Jr., then switched to Muse before landing contracts with Mercury and Columbia.
By this time, the organ trio genre had gone into eclipse and there followed a succession of successful jazz / soul / funk albums including 'Odyssey' in 1976, featuring 'Intergalactic Love Song', 'The Great Pyramid', featuring 'Driftin' and perhaps his best remembered album from this period 'Perceptions', featuring the Randy Muller (Brass Construction) produced 'Let The Music Play'. The record was in the U.S. charts for five weeks and reached number 46 in the UK Singles Chart. With Earland's playing on synthesizer, the track also had his wife Sheryl Kendrick as an uncredited singer.
Kendrick's death from sickle-cell anemia in 1985 left Earland desolate, and he stopped playing for awhile, but a gig at the Chickrick House on Chicago's South Side in the late '80s brought him out of his grief and back to the Hammond B-3. Two excellent albums in the old soul-jazz groove for Milestone followed, and the '90s found him returning to the Muse label.
Earland traveled extensively from 1988 until his death in 1999, performing throughout the U.S. and abroad. One of the highlights of his latter years was playing at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1994. Among the musicians that performed with him at the Berlin Jazz Festival was the Alabama-born Chicago resident, Zimbabu Hamilton on the drums.
Earland died of heart failure on December 11, 1999, the morning after playing a gig in Kansas City; he was 58.
(Edited from AllMusic & Wikipedia)