Musical artisan

SELF PORTRAITDate and place of birth: Aug. 27, 1951, DeRidder, La.

My guilty pleasure is rice and gravy.

The food I will absoutely not eat: Organ meats The people I’d invite to my fantasy dinner party are four Cajun-inspired chefs: Marcelle Bienvenu, Paul Prudhomme, Justin Wilson and John Folse.

The last good book I read was The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I actually read the entire Stieg Larsson trilogy.

If I’ve learned one thing in life, it’s that tomorrow is not a sure thing, so live life today.

I’m proudest of my daughter, Emma Kate White. A goal I’ve yet to achieve is to perform stand-up comedy.

Something hardly anybody knows about me is that I am intolerant of incompetence.

The most rewarding thing about building church organs is knowing we are building something that will last for generations to help bring the joy of worship to a congregation. A well-made organ can last a century.

My favorite composer for organ is Maurice Duru-◊e, a 20th-century French master.

One word to describe me: PerspicaciousLITTLE ROCK - Joe Nichols was just 7 years old when first seduced by what became his life’s passion and profession: church organs. No, not the playing of those magnificent instruments, but rather the intricate art and craft of building them.

Nichols and partner Wayne Simpson have earned a stellar reputation during three decades of constructing customized high-end organs at their Little Rock workshop, now on Woodrow Street just south of Interstate 630. As Nichols recalls, his path to this painstaking and rarefied line of work began one Sunday in 1958 in his native southwest Louisiana.

“My family took a weekend trip from our home in DeRidder to visit my mother’s sister 40 miles away in Lake Charles,” he says.

“We went to worship at First Baptist Church, which had a relatively new pipe organ. It was the first pipe organ I’d ever seen or heard. After the service, as organist Goldie Higdon played the postlude, I got to see the organ up close. I was immediately and totally swept away. I wanted to look inside it.”

Back home in DeRidder, the youngster already had an upright piano in his bedroom. He insisted that the piano be realigned so that he could pretend the slats on the floor were his pedal boards.

“I was playing the piano and imagining it was an organ,” he says. “I was absolutely smitten.”

By the time he was 12, Joe had read every book he could track down about pipe organs through thelocal library. He knew organ statistics - manuals, ranks and stops - in the way other boys knew runs, hits and errors.

Parents James Wallace Nichols and Emma Lee Nichols humored him. Dad, after all, would go into his own unlikely line of work later in life: raising crickets. But Mom and Dad were nonplussed when Joe told them he aimed to be an organ builder.

“Their first thoughts were, ‘You can’t do that,’” he remembers. “They said, ‘Nobody does that.’”

Today, Nichols & Simpson Inc. prospers by doing exactly that, as the Natural State’s only professional builder of church organs with an increasingly national clientele. The two owners and their six employeesare working these days on a massive instrument to occupy the strikingly contemporary St. Monica Catholic Church in Dallas.

This is Nichols & Simpson’s 67th organ project, and about the 50th the firm has put together from scratch as opposed to updating. The owners belong to the select company of the 200-member American Organ Builders Institute, which focuses on one-of-a-kind creations for churches, synagogues and other public venues.

Their work draws praise from clients like Richard Crofts, minister of music at Moorings Presbyterian Church in Naples, Fla., where a Nichols & Simpson organ was installed six years ago.

“Joe Nichols is an artisan whose crafts reach the level of fine art - with wood, design, organ pipes, facade, engineering and much more. Joe’s achievements, developed over years of research, study and experience, result in genius-level creations … unsurpassed in musical instruments built today.”

Michael Batcho, director of liturgy and music at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Milwaukee, praises the Nichols & Simpson organ inaugurated in 2005 as “an absolutely beautiful instrument. Each stop is so well-voiced. I love the warm, rich tones.The organ isn’t overbearing at all. Its tone generously fills the room without ‘screaming’ at people.”

Nichols’ first hands-on dealings with an organ came back in DeRidder during junior high school, when he helped New Orleans-based builder J.C. Williams install a new instrument at First Methodist Church.

“They’d let me out of school to hold keys for Mr. Williams, who was tuning the organ as he finished it,” he says. “For payment, he’d take me to lunch. I’d pepper him with questions about things I’d read in the organ books that I didn’t understand. He’d turn a napkin over and draw a diagram of a wind chest or whatever.”

Music, though not the organ, dominated Nichols’ extracurricular life in high school. He played percussion and sousaphone in the DeRidder Dragons marching band.In the concert band, he played contra bass clarinet, bassoon and oboe.

He enrolled as an organ major at McNeese State College in Lake Charles. But the curriculum was designed for learning to play, not for building.

“I spent more time poking around inside the organ than I did on the bench playing it,” he says.

To earn spending money, he played the organ for $50 a month at First Baptist Church. The pianist there was Goldie Higdon, the same woman who’d been on the organ that seduced him in 1958. He remembers her as playing “the most accurate arpeggios [successive, not simultaneous, chord notes] on the keyboard that my organ teacher Fred G. Sahlmann had ever heard.”

By his junior year, Nichols figured out that he wasn’tlearning what he needed to become a builder of organs. So he dropped out of college, “and I have never regretted that. I was of single purpose. All I wanted to do was build organs.”

That ambition took a detour for six years while Nichols made a living on the road as organ accompanist for noted contralto Bette Stalnecker, a Memphis resident who has recorded 33 albums of gospel and classical works.

The touring brought them to Little Rock in 1977 for a performance at Pulaski Heights Baptist Church. There Nichols met organ builder Lecil Gibson, who offered him a job.

In what amounted to an apprenticeship, Nichols started his chosen career in Gibson’s workshop on a parttime basis. That began his ties with future colleague Simpson, who already worked for Gibson.

After moving to Little Rock in late 1978, Nichols became a partner with Gibson. Doing a service call on the Second Baptist Church organ, he was amazed by a final encounter with Higdon and her amazing arpeggios.

As he and Simpson entered the church’s side door on Cumberland Street, “I heard this piano playing arpeggios. I knew it was Goldie, so we went down to the fellowship hall, and there she was, playing as marvelously as ever. She’d had a stroke and had been moved to Little Rock by a daughter. She seemed unaware of who I was, but she still played beautifully. She never lost that.”

In 1983, Nichols and Simpson took a leap of faith by forming their own company. It was initially a precarious undertaking.

“We built our first organ, for Central Presbyterian Church in Pine Bluff, in the garage of my business partner’s parents in Sheridan,” he says. “We leased the woodworking equipment from our accountant. We knew this was - and it still is - a very competitive business.”

By Nichols’ account, business picked up quickly. “After that first contract came out of the blue, the next one came and then the next one,” he says. “There was a point a half-dozen years ago when we were backed up five years on contracts.”

LONGTIME EMPLOYEES

As the company grew, the workshop moved three times, lastly to an 8,000-square-foot facility on Woodrow Street in 1998, where it remains today.

Its employees include office manager and computer-aided drawing and design technician Bryan K. Gray (22 years on staff), pipe-organ technician Timothy Bovard (20 years), woodworker and shop foreman Jorge Osorio (17 years), woodworker Duane Vanderpluym (17 years), pipe-organ technician David Scribner (14 years) and woodworker John Fusaro (two years).

Partner Simpson calls Nichols “family. We have lived together and worked through more than most people ever will - 36 or 37 years. In the early years, usually six days a week for long hours and verylittle pay. Neither of us would be the same had we not happened into the same situation all those years ago.”

Nichols salutes Simpson as “one of the finest flue voicers working in the organ business today. He has a special talent that is a rare gift. One thing that has never changed in our years of working together is that each organ we build is tonally finished by Wayne and me together.”

The flue voicing is one aspect in the flabbergasting amount of fastidious hand labor that goes into building a church organ. That’s why a new Nichols & Simpson instrument can cost as much as several million dollars - although “a little baby” starts around $300,000.

Some of the most delicate and time-consuming effort goes into the voicing and tuning of each pipe - some 4,700 pipes in the case of the St. Monica organ, which will take about 16 months of work until installation.

“Each pipe is like a separate musical instrument of its own,” Nichols says. “And each pipe must not only play well with its neighbors but also with the other ranks.”

A rank is a set of pipes responsible for producing a specific timbre or tone quality for each key of its keyboard. Nichols says an organist will generally describe a church’s instrument as having, say, “two manuals and 15 ranks” - a manual being a keyboard. “Stop,” another organist’s word of art, refers to a set of pipes similar in tone quality that may consist of more than one rank.

If some of this seems arcane, that’s mainly due to the sheer intricacy of a large pipe organ, whose ancestors date back to Greece in the third century B.C. It is often said that the pipe organ was the most complex manmade device until urban telecommunication was developed at the turn of the last century.

Nichols points out that the organ “cut its teeth in churches.” He is a member of Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church, where Nichols & Simpson built and installed the organ in 1999.

His own playing these days is mostly confined to occasional playing of the electronic organ at his home. Divorced for some years, he has a daughter, Emma Kate White, and a 10-month-old grandson, Jacob Wallace, who live in Denton, Texas.

BY WORD OF MOUTH

Nichols & Simpson takes an interesting approach to attracting new customers.

“We soon determined that the best use of our advertising budget is to pay really good organists to come and play the organs we’ve installed,” Nichols explains. “They spread the word about our high quality. I’m working on three proposals now that are strictly based on word of mouth from organ professors who have played our instruments.”

By his own account, Nichols is something of a control freak, as is his partner.

“We both decided early on that we wanted to be in total control of every project,” he says. “So we’ve kept it a small shop. We’re absolutelyin charge. The very last thing that happens onsite, once we’re satisfied that every pipe is doing what we think it should, is that we affix our nameplate.

“Then we go home and say, ‘You can pay us now.’”

Nichols also sees a spiritual side to the building of church organs.

“My partner and I both sense this to be as much a calling as an occupation,” he says. “What we do is part of corporate worship, which is all the congregation participating together. And the organ is leading everybody.”

He contrasts this active “corporate worship” with what he calls “spectator sport - an acoustically dead auditorium with a big stage and spotlight and microphone. They put the spotlight on the preacher. They dim the lights on the congregation, and you’re thereto watch the show.”

Nichols & Simpson promotes the notion of corporate worship at the dedication services for its new organs.

“We always ask the music director to include a hymn to be sung by the congregation,” he says. “I can sit there and listen all day long to the finest organist in the world playing organ literature, and it doesn’t really affect me.

“But when they start playing the hymn, when the organist is really good and using all the colors of the organ, and when the congregation is in full voice, I am usually overcome with emotion and cannot sing. That’s when the organ is really doing its job, leading the congregation in joyful worship.”