Harold Burroughs Rhodes, whose invention of a unique electric piano revolutionized the sound of jazz and pop music in the 1960's, died of complications from pneumonia on December 17. He passed away at the Beverly Manor nursing home in Canoga Park where he was residing since his health began failing in recent years. Mr. Rhodes is survived by his third wife, Margit, his brother, John and his children Harold Jr., David, Carol Newman, Janice Wylie and Linda; his stepchildren Karlyn McCarroll, Mona Lumtin, Karlyn Hale, Jorjann Mohr, Robyn Smith and Merrilyn Herrera; plus nine grandchildren. Private services were held at The Little Brown Church in Studio City on December 28, which would have been Mr. Rhodes's 90th birthday.

A piano teacher by trade, Mr. Rhodes spent his spare time training his buddies on the piano while going through an Army Air Forces Flight Instructor Training Course during WWII (he had also done some crop dusting). A hospital surgeon on the base got wind of his talent and asked him to help rehabilitate wounded soldiers with his quick, easy and fun method. Unable to find a piano small enough to sit on the lap of someone in bed, Mr. Rhodes decided to build one himself and fashioned it from spare airplane parts. The program was so successful that the War Department asked him to expand it by writing a training manual and drawing up blueprints for them to manufacture the piano, which was called a "Xylette."

After the war and a few false starts to produce the then-called "Pre-Piano" on his own, Mr. Rhodes partnered with Leo Fender in the late 50's, and a bass piano went into mass production in 1959. CBS Musical Instruments bought the Fender/Rhodes Company in 1965, keeping Mr. Rhodes on as a consultant, and the full 73 and 88-key versions were developed and produced until 1984 when the company was sold to William Schultz. Since then many other electric pianos that emulated and simulated the Rhodes' distinctive sound came on the market, but none could match it. Though the rights were sold again in 1987 to the Japanese keyboard company, Roland, no more Rhodes pianos were ever made.

Many prominent musicians brought Mr. Rhodes' piano into the limelight along with them. Miles Davis' 1968 Miles in the Sky album featured the Rhodes piano with Herbie Hancock playing the keyboard for the first time. In a May 1975 interview in Columbine magazine Hancock recalled the recording session: "When I got to the studio, I kept looking around for the piano [and] finally I asked Miles, 'Where's the piano? What am I going to play?' Miles pointed to what looked like a small box sitting in the corner. I said, 'That? It looks like a toy." Later that day, they made the first recording with electric instruments, "Stuff," and thus ushered in the new musical genre of jazz-rock.

Jazz and pop musicians loved the Rhodes piano because it was the first that could amp up without distortion and be heard with other electric instruments, but had the touch dynamics of the acoustic piano: the sound could be soft if the key was pressed softly or it could be loud if hit hard. The Rhodes piano held its tune much longer than an acoustic and the player had the power to hold a note as long as the key was pressed. This meant less silent spaces between notes giving the "wall of sound" effect. The technology of the Rhodes piano, generated by tuning fork-like metal rods called tines, is so unique that Mr. Rhodes was able to secure more than a dozen patents for it.

Other musicians who established the Rhodes sound in their work include Ray Charles, Chick Corea, Donald Fagan of Steely Dan, Pete Jolly, Chuck Mangione, Roger Manning of Beck, Ray Manzarek of the Doors, Les McCann, Paul McCartney, and Joseph Zawinul of Weather Report. After 25 years of struggle since the first piano was produced, finally the Rhodes became the overwhelming choice of contemporary musicians. Mr. Rhodes said in (CBS Musical Instruments') Insider magazine "I can hear my piano played six or seven times every half an hour on the FM station I listen to each morning" - and by then every three of four electric pianos sold were Rhodes. In 1990 Mr. Rhodes had his handprints immortalized in the RockWalk of Fame in Hollywood and in 1997 the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences honored him with the NARAS President's Merit Award for a lifetime of dedication and inspired work as a scientist, inventor, architect, educator and musician.

A lover of jazz artists such as Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and Art Tatum, Mr. Rhodes began taking piano lessons in his teens. According to an interview with him in a 6/15/74 Downbeat article, he was intent on "plumbing the depth of these men's minds to find the key to the inventive chord changes which seemed to flow endlessly from their fingers." Although his other passion, architectural engineering, led him to winning a scholarship to the USC School of Architecture (with a minor in music), three major events happened in rapid succession during his college years. "The bottom dropped out of the world economy, my parents separated, and my music teacher got married and decided to move to San Francisco and to turn her Los Angeles Studio of Popular Music over to me. Faced suddenly with the need to support a mother and younger brother, I elected to drop school and to accept my teacher's offer."

Seven of the original 54 students he inherited stuck with him over the long run as he immersed himself with "every book in the library which even remotely touched on the physics of music. Within three years I had it all together. I had reduced the whole subject of improvising to four simple steps. Taken in order, these four steps would unfailingly analyze the harmonic innovations of Tatum, Ellington, et al. But far more importantly, they would enable my students to come up with their own unique styles. Convinced that I had the clue to what every fledgling novice musician wanted to know, I opened and conducted successful studios in all the major cities in the West. By 1940, I had opened studios in New York and Washington, D.C.

"Then the War came along and grabbed me, and the whole thing went to pot!" - fortunately for the Air Force: by the time his program was instituted at all the Air Force hospitals, "music instruction became the single most popular elective" over many other choices. He ultimately trained 250,000 G.I.'s on the piano he created and was given the War Department's highest civilian honor, a Commemoration of Exceptional Civilian Service, for "the development of a patient participation musical therapy program."

Mr. Rhodes himself believed that his greatest contribution was not his electric piano, he told a Keyboard magazine interviewer in December 1993, but "The Rhodes Method" of teaching piano. About that time he had just begun to teach piano to inner city kids at Foshay Jr. High School in Los Angeles and gave them as their first assignment a trip to the wood shop where each one would build their own piano. This program was established at other L.A. area schools and in 1997 Los Angeles County honored him with a special Commendation "in recognition of dedicated service to the affairs of the community and for the civic pride demonstrated by numerous contributions for the benefit of all the citizens of Los Angeles County."

In his personal life, Mr. Rhodes was an accomplished golfer, but being the classic absent-minded professor-type, he wasn't always the most attentive father or husband and he struggled in business. He did, however, receive a miraculous gift in the last decade of his life. When he was just starting teaching at the Los Angeles Piano Studio he had fallen in love with one of his students, Margit, who was 10 years younger than he. Being the proper gentleman, Mr. Rhodes sent a letter to her father requesting her hand in marriage. When he received no reply, he thought she didn't love him and went on with his life, eventually marrying someone else. In 1991, Margit, by then a widower, heard a Rhodes piano playing while she was in Las Vegas and decided to give him a call. He was elated, they were married soon thereafter and he spent the last nine years of his life with his first love.

Inspired by Margit and urged on by letters and phone calls from musicians around the world wanting to play the coveted Rhodes sound, Mr. Rhodes was intent on putting his famous piano back into production, a task that will be carried on by the Rhodes family.