EUGENE, Ore. – Paul Jacobs is a very serious musician. Who else would memorize all of J.S. Bach’s organ works and play them non-stop for 18 hours, sustaining himself with water, a measly cup of pudding, and his adoration of Bach? He staged that feat 24 years ago in 2000 when he commemorated the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, and he made history. Jacobs, now 48, is the only organist to have won a Grammy Award. No wonder music critics, including highly influential Alex Ross of The New Yorker, call him the best American organist.

Jacobs continues to make history. April 4, he helped to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the acoustically admired University of Oregon’s Beall Concert Hall (pronounced Bell) in Eugene with a no-intermission concert of organ pieces from Bach to Charles Ives. He played them on the handsome Baroque Jürgen Ahrend organ, custom-made and installed in 1972 in Beall Hall. And he played them by heart, his usual modus operandi.

Jacobs, who looks much younger than 48, might be serious and love Bach with all his heart, as Bach loved the organ with his, but he doesn’t miss out on fun. His brilliant technique has been honed since he began piano lessons at 5 years old and organ lessons at 12 when he could reach the huge instrument’s pedals in his Washington, Pa. church. Combined with his rare and rarefied musicality, sometimes fierce, other times lyrical and light, he can make the dullest piece of classical music come alive. An entertainer as well as virtuoso, as he illustrated at the Eugene concert, he explained each piece with juicy offbeat tidbits of information that persuaded non-organ players and any reluctant organ fans to appreciate the music and chuckle along with him.

Who knew Charles Ives loved making his cheeky “Variations on `America,’” officially called “America,” as much as he loved baseball? He wrote the organ piece at 17 years old in 1891, and, then at least, Ives was as American as apple pie, Jacobs said. The audience was all grins over Ives’ irreverent riffs and Jacobs’ witty interpretation of the defacto national anthem.

Or, who knew that Felix Mendelssohn said of his Sonata in F Minor, Op. 65, No. 1 that he “had so much fun he continued to dance the pedal passages” after playing it? That sonata started out austerely and “ended with a burst of sunshine,” as Jacobs explained before he played the 16-minute 19th-century piece, one in a series of Mendelssohn’s organ sonatas.

Jacobs has little problem keeping an audience’s attention. He has taught organ at Juilliard for 21 years and is the youngest to head up a Juilliard music department. His patience (he listened to a young student post-concert for more than 10 minutes about memorization, while others were waiting to grab a moment) and ability to explain complicated music in clear ways make him a good teacher. He runs the Organ Institute, which attracts organists from around the world, at Eugene’s Oregon Bach Festival – this summer June 27 through July 13 – though the organ institute goes July 7 through 12. Jacobs will be playing Bach’s The Art of  Fugue on July 7 at the Central Lutheran Church in Eugene. This will be the first time he has played the piece publicly.

To manipulate and to improvise

But back to the concert. Jacobs sandwiched César Franck’s four-part “Prelude, Fugue and Variation, Op. 18” between Mendelssohn and Ives. Franck spent most of his time in France, though he was born in Belgium and had a penchant for German music, especially Beethoven. Though the composer was considered eccentric, and perhaps too German-leaning, his students loved him, and so does Jacobs. He changed the organ’s stops for this piece, letting the audience hear the various tones of the clean-sounding Ahrend organ.

The last half of the concert included blind British organist John Stanley’s  (Handel’s contemporary) three-part Voluntary in D Minor, No. 8. British organs in the 18th century were less ornate and complex than other European organs. They had two keyboards (not three and one-half as the Ahrend organ has) and no pedals. So Jacobs played the melodic piece in that pared-down way, and as he said, it’s the kind of music “you end up whistling down the road,” recalling the clarity and brightness of the British organs and of Stanley’s piece.

Before concluding with his beloved Bach, Jacobs played one of Johannes Brahms’ chorale preludes, “Es Ist ein Ros entsprungen” (“Lo, how a rose ere blooming”), a familiar three-minute tune for which Jacobs used the four-foot flute stops instead of the eight-foot unison flutes. The four-foot pitch sounds exactly one octave higher than what is notated in the Brahms score, Jacobs explained, and the sound caught the tenderness of a rose and of the choral music.

There is so much to understand about the organ, to manipulate and to improvise, and Jacobs does it all. Part of the reason he memorizes everything for concerts is because he has so much other work besides the score to keep track of on this athletic instrument, including pulling out one of the 42 stops on the Ahrend, pedaling, and playing. Each organ has its idiosyncrasies and differences; musicians have to size them up and adjust. But in the end, if maintained, the organ is “timeless, beautiful and gives us a sense of awesomeness,” Jacobs said from New York in our March phone interview. Through it, “we are experiencing a timeless situation.”

The final piece, Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532.2,” lasted 10 glorious minutes, and Jacobs was in his element with his favorite composer. “Bach inspires me every day,” he said in the interview. With his feet pedaling and dancing at a mighty clip, his hands crossing over – and all this by memory – he wrung the majesty out of Bach. Too much praise? Nope. His gracious nature, colored with whimsey, makes him almost as much of a draw as his musical prowess, boundless expressiveness and prodigious memory. No wonder his concerts are almost always sold out.

Jacobs’ repertoire ranges over centuries and countries. He plays contemporary music as well as Bach. One of his many missions is to persuade orchestra leaders to integrate more organ music into symphonic programs. Organs are not only for sacred music, though we often associate them with that. He calls his efforts “building a bridge from the organ to classical music.” You can’t carry an organ around  –  Jacobs doesn’t have one in his New York apartment –  but you can play and hear organs at more places than churches. “No other instrument other than the organ has an unbroken chain since the 14th century,” he said. “The organ has never ceased to inspire the human imagination.”

Wherever the organ music, we want “to connect with human hearts,” Jacobs said in our interview. “People want to be moved. They want to be stirred. People crave beauty.”

Jacobs told me, in his expansive organ-loving way, that “it’s never too late” to learn the king of instruments. Ha!