SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2016
VOLUME TWO NUMBER TWO
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2016
VOLUME TWO NUMBER TWO
NINA SIMONE
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
NAT KING COLE
January 2-8
ETTA JAMES
January 9-15
JACKIE MCLEAN
January 16-22
TERRI LYNN CARRINGTON
January 23-29
NANCY WILSON
January 30-February 6
BOB MARLEY
February 7-13
LOUIS ARMSTRONG
February 14-20
HORACE SILVER
February 21-27
SHIRLEY HORN
February 28-March 6
T-BONE WALKER
March 7-13
HOWLIN’ WOLF
March 14-20
DIANNE REEVES
March 21-27
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/arts/music/03mclean.html?_r=0
Jackie McLean, Jazz Saxophonist and Mentor, Dies at 74
by PETER KEEPNEWS
April 3, 2006
New York Times
Jackie McLean, an acclaimed saxophonist who took a midcareer detour to become a prominent jazz educator, died on Friday at his home in Hartford. He was 74.
Nabil Mounzer/European Presssphoto Agency
Jackie McLean in July 2004.
His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the University of Hartford, where Mr. McLean had taught since 1970. No cause was given.
Mr. McLean was one of many gifted young musicians who burst onto the New York scene after World War II in the wake of the musical revolution known as bebop. He worked with Bud Powell and Miles Davis before he was out of his teens, and later he gained valuable seasoning in the bands of Art Blakey and Charles Mingus before he began leading his own groups.
Also a prolific composer, Mr. McLean was one of the first alto saxophonists to absorb the pervasive influence of Charlie Parker and shape it into a distinctive personal style. While the influence was clear, especially in his approach to harmony, Mr. McLean's astringent tone and impassioned phrasing marked him as more than just another Parker disciple.
His career had a second act as well. In the late 1960's he put performing aside to concentrate on teaching.
On his arrival at the University of Hartford in 1970, he was a music instructor at the Hartt School. Ten years later he was named director of the university's newly formed African-American music program, one of the first degree programs in the field. In 2000, a year before he received a Jazz Masters grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the university renamed the program the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz.
For more than two decades he performed and recorded only occasionally. He devoted most of his energy to teaching, both at the university and at the Artists Collective, a community cultural center in Hartford that offered classes in music, theater, dance and the visual arts to local young people, which he founded and ran with his wife, Dollie. She survives him, along with his son Rene, of New York, a saxophonist who frequently performed with him; another son, Vernone, and a daughter, Melonae, both of Hartford; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In the early 1990's Mr. McLean shifted some of his focus back to performing. "I've always wanted to be remembered for being more than a saxophone player," he told Peter Watrous of The New York Times in 1990, when he returned to New York to perform at the Village Vanguard. "It's been important to put aside my horn and help people, act on what I believe. But the building for Artists Collective will be going up in the next two years, and the music department is now a full-degree program, so it's time to get back to playing."
John Lenwood McLean was born in Harlem on May 17, 1931. (Many sources give his year of birth as 1932, but The Grove Dictionary of Jazz and other authoritative reference works say he was born a year earlier.) The son of a jazz guitarist, he began studying saxophone at 14, starting on soprano but switching to alto after a few months.
Bud Powell, a neighbor who was the leading pianist of the bebop movement and a neighbor, took Mr. McLean under his wing. He also worked with the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, another neighbor, and soon caught the attention of Miles Davis, who was just beginning his career as a bandleader. Davis used both Mr. McLean and Mr. Rollins as sidemen on one of his first recordings, in 1951.
Mr. McLean began recording his own albums in 1955. He also had a brief but memorable stage and screen career, appearing in the 1959 Off Broadway production of "The Connection," Jack Gelber's play about drug addiction, and in the 1961 film version, directed by Shirley Clarke.
Mr. McLean was in a sense playing himself. His character was a member of a jazz combo, which provided the music as well as taking part in the action. His character was also a heroin addict — as, he later acknowledged, was Mr. McLean himself. He eventually kicked the habit, and when he became a teacher he often spoke to his students about the dangers of drugs.
In his younger days Mr. McLean was identified with the aggressive, rhythmically charged offshoot of bebop known as hard bop. But in the early and middle 1960's he surprised his listeners (and alienated some critics) by embracing the avant-garde movement then known simply as "the new thing" and later called free jazz, on a series of daring albums for Blue Note with names like "Destination Out" and "One Step Beyond." He even enlisted Ornette Coleman, one of the fathers of the new music, as a sideman on "New and Old Gospel." Although Mr. Coleman's main instrument, like Mr. McLean's, was alto sax, he played trumpet on that album.
But Mr. McLean preferred not to talk about his music in terms of categories. "I've grown out of being just a bebop saxophone player, or being a free saxophone player," he told Jon Pareles of The Times in 1983. "I don't know where I am now. I guess I'm somewhere mixed up between all the saxophonists who ever played."
Jackie McLean: Saxophonist Who Advanced Study of Jazz
Jackie McLean listens to a young trumpeter in 2001 in Hartford, Conn., where he lived. McLean, a musical descendant of bebop master Charlie Parker, recorded more than 60 albums and was a mentor to younger musicians. (By Tom Brown -- Hartford Courant Via Associated Press)
by Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
April 2, 2006
Jackie McLean, 74, one of the foremost alto saxophone players of the past 50 years, who also helped elevate jazz studies to a serious academic discipline, died March 31 at his home in Hartford, Conn. His family said that he died of "a long illness" and that the cause of death would be announced later.
A musical descendant of bebop master Charlie Parker, Mr. McLean developed a strong, uncompromising style in the 1950s and remained a prominent voice on his instrument for decades. He recorded more than 60 albums and was a mentor to younger musicians as a bandleader and as a teacher.
He grew up in Harlem, where his neighbors included such jazz greats as Duke Ellington, Don Redman, Nat "King" Cole and Thelonious Monk. He often recalled those heady days in interviews and was a principal interview subject in Ken Burns's 10-part documentary on jazz in 2000.
For the past 35 years, he lived in Hartford, where he established the jazz studies program at the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford, now called the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz. It was one of the country's first comprehensive jazz programs.
With his wife, Dollie, he also founded the Artists Collective, a cultural arts center in Hartford that has educated thousands of primarily African American students in music, dance, drama and the visual arts. He also maintained a long involvement in civil rights, dating from the 1960s.
His interest in education derived from his experiences with the jazz giants of an earlier era. At 16, he met bebop pianist Bud Powell, who often invited the young saxophonist to his house to study and practice. In his teens, Mr. McLean would wait at subway stops to meet Parker and walk with him to nightclubs, gleaning musical insights from his idol.
ad_iconThe younger musician copied both Parker's playing style on alto saxophone and his addiction to heroin. For much of the 1950s and early 1960s, Mr. McLean struggled with narcotics and often found himself in legal trouble.
After Parker's death in 1955, Mr. McLean worked with bassist and bandleader Charles Mingus, who encouraged him to find his own style, free from Parker's influence. From 1956 to 1958, Mr. McLean was a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, where he honed his powerful searing tone, which was usually slightly sharp.
"He had his own sound," said critic Ira Gitler, who knew Mr. McLean for 55 years. "He had a cry in his playing and a lot of fire."
The late 1950s and early '60s were perhaps Mr. McLean's most fruitful musical period, during which he composed such memorable tunes as "Melody for Melonae," "Appointment in Ghana," "Dr. Jackie" and "Minor March." He also made a series of outstanding recordings, including "4, 5 and 6" and "McLean's Scene" (both 1956), "Jackie's Bag" (1959), "Let Freedom Ring" (1962) and "One Step Beyond" (1963).
After making 21 albums for Blue Note Records between 1959 and 1967, Mr. McLean turned more toward teaching and grew less active as a performer. In the 1980s and 1990s, he returned to the stage and the recording studio with renewed vigor, and he often performed with his son, saxophonist Rene McLean.
"It was my most rewarding, my most exciting and my most challenging musical experience," Rene McLean said yesterday. "I had to rise to the occasion. It made no difference if I was his son or brother.
Jackie McLean, 74, one of the foremost alto saxophone players of the past 50 years, who also helped elevate jazz studies to a serious academic discipline, died March 31 at his home in Hartford, Conn. His family said that he died of "a long illness" and that the cause of death would be announced later.
A musical descendant of bebop master Charlie Parker, Mr. McLean developed a strong, uncompromising style in the 1950s and remained a prominent voice on his instrument for decades. He recorded more than 60 albums and was a mentor to younger musicians as a bandleader and as a teacher.
He grew up in Harlem, where his neighbors included such jazz greats as Duke Ellington, Don Redman, Nat "King" Cole and Thelonious Monk. He often recalled those heady days in interviews and was a principal interview subject in Ken Burns's 10-part documentary on jazz in 2000.
For the past 35 years, he lived in Hartford, where he established the jazz studies program at the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford, now called the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz. It was one of the country's first comprehensive jazz programs.
With his wife, Dollie, he also founded the Artists Collective, a cultural arts center in Hartford that has educated thousands of primarily African American students in music, dance, drama and the visual arts. He also maintained a long involvement in civil rights, dating from the 1960s.
His interest in education derived from his experiences with the jazz giants of an earlier era. At 16, he met bebop pianist Bud Powell, who often invited the young saxophonist to his house to study and practice. In his teens, Mr. McLean would wait at subway stops to meet Parker and walk with him to nightclubs, gleaning musical insights from his idol.
ad_iconThe younger musician copied both Parker's playing style on alto saxophone and his addiction to heroin. For much of the 1950s and early 1960s, Mr. McLean struggled with narcotics and often found himself in legal trouble.
After Parker's death in 1955, Mr. McLean worked with bassist and bandleader Charles Mingus, who encouraged him to find his own style, free from Parker's influence. From 1956 to 1958, Mr. McLean was a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, where he honed his powerful searing tone, which was usually slightly sharp.
"He had his own sound," said critic Ira Gitler, who knew Mr. McLean for 55 years. "He had a cry in his playing and a lot of fire."
The late 1950s and early '60s were perhaps Mr. McLean's most fruitful musical period, during which he composed such memorable tunes as "Melody for Melonae," "Appointment in Ghana," "Dr. Jackie" and "Minor March." He also made a series of outstanding recordings, including "4, 5 and 6" and "McLean's Scene" (both 1956), "Jackie's Bag" (1959), "Let Freedom Ring" (1962) and "One Step Beyond" (1963).
After making 21 albums for Blue Note Records between 1959 and 1967, Mr. McLean turned more toward teaching and grew less active as a performer. In the 1980s and 1990s, he returned to the stage and the recording studio with renewed vigor, and he often performed with his son, saxophonist Rene McLean.
"It was my most rewarding, my most exciting and my most challenging musical experience," Rene McLean said yesterday. "I had to rise to the occasion. It made no difference if I was his son or brother.
Jackie McLean listens to a young trumpeter in 2001 in Hartford, Conn., where he lived. McLean, a musical descendant of bebop master Charlie Parker, recorded more than 60 albums and was a mentor to younger musicians. (Photo: Tom Brown -- Hartford Courant Via Associated Press) Network News
"We had very magical musical moments together."
John Lenwood McLean was born in New York City on May 17, 1931. His father was a jazz guitarist who died in 1939, and his childhood friends included future jazz stars Sonny Rollins, Walter Bishop Jr., Kenny Drew and Art Taylor.
Mr. McLean made his recording debut in 1951 with Rollins on Miles Davis's "Dig!," often considered the first "hard-bop" album in jazz, blending bebop complexity, blues feeling and rhythmic drive.
He adopted modal and free-jazz techniques later in his career, but he retained the same intensity he had in his youth.
On one of his final efforts, "Nature Boy" (2000), he showed a more sensitive side of his musical persona with an album of ballads. In 2001, he was recognized as an American Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Mr. McLean was especially popular in Japan and once came across a tiny club in Yokohama called the "Jackie McLean Coffeehouse" that was a virtual shrine to his career. He gave his final performances during a tour of Europe and the Middle East in 2004.
"Many times, we could finish each other's ideas," said Rene McLean, who was with his father on that final tour. "It was just unique and mystical."
Besides his son, of New York, survivors include his wife, Dollie McLean of Hartford; a daughter, Melonae McLean, and son, Vernone McLean, both of Hartford; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/obit/2006/04/a_bittersweet_melodic_imagination.html
Obit
Bringing out the dead.
April 4 2006
A Bittersweet Melodic Imagination
Remembering the saxophonist Jackie McLean.
by Stanley Crouch
SLATE
JACKIE MCLEAN
(1931-2006)
"The cry of jazz" is one of those clichéd phrases firmly rooted in the fact of a certain kind of sound. It almost always refers to saxophone players, although trumpets and trombones were once known as "singing" or "talking horns" because rubber plungers and mutes were used to better their imitation of the human voice. Saxophone players, however, use nothing but the brass-bodied reed instrument itself, expressing their battle with the limitations of life through two things—timbres that tailor the notes with vocal inflections and rhythms that imply speech or song. In the hands of an artist, those techniques can delineate the minuscule or vast distances between joy and pain. Such musicians are often known for the stubborn delivery of frail dreams and the fierce rhythm with which they play. Now and again they evoke no particular emotion, only an earnest refusal to be run down by life that translates as heroic.
The alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, who died last Friday at 73 in Hartford, Conn., was one of those players. A hero to his listeners, McLean had an unapologetic New York sound that embodied the hard sorrow of urban life, but answered it with the triumphal dance of swing. His jazz audience would fill the clubs, but he was not a well-known commodity. The essence of jazz is symbolized by players like him who are neither epic innovators nor pace-setters (very few are, regardless of the hype). Early on, McLean attained one of the highest achievements of a jazz musician: He found his own sound on the alto. This separated him from his fellow imitators of Charlie Parker. McLean's immediately recognizable tone was displayed in many indelible situations over more than five decades of recording.
Born in 1931, John Lenwood McLean came up in a time when jazz ceased to be a dance music. With the arrival of the World War II bebop generation, musicians collided with the entertainment conventions that were wrapped up in minstrelsy. McLean grew up in Harlem and was one of the Sugar Hill boys, a group of musicians that included Sonny Rollins, Kenny Drew, and Arthur Taylor, all of whom became drug addicts by the time they left high school. "I remember," McLean said, "right after the war everybody was trying to be hip, which meant being rebellious with a super cool style of awareness. Shooting heroin was considered a form of hipness and being aware. Now young musicians, thank God, think it's corny to be a dope fiend."
With few exceptions, most of the bebop generations had drug problems because so many of the men they admired, like Charlie Parker, were addicts. For McLean, Parker was an early hero, influence, and model. "Bird was always an extremely aware person, and no matter what he did in order to handle his addiction and his appetites, he had great dignity. His discipline was shown in the way he played his horn."
McLean came up fast. He studied chords with Bud Powell, the major influence on bebop piano, played jobs with his buddies, and, when he had the nerve, sat in with Charlie Parker. "When I sat in with Bird, it was not so much to play but to be up there on the bandstand where I could listen to him as closely as possible. Every time he played was a lesson. You could learn how to develop a melody, how to negotiate some harmony, and how to phrase. Bird was an academy of excellence. Just listening, you could hear the artistry of the horn and that artistry could make you aware of something beyond everything you knew. Not just music. Whatever creation means on the deepest level is what Charlie Parker had to offer."
During the early '50s, McLean went to North Carolina, where he lived with relatives for a year and was able to clean up his drug habit. While living the country life, he got a deep, down-home soaking on jobs where the saxophonist literally walked the bar and played the blues all night. That Southern sound of blues is one of the most distinctive aspects of McLean's style and remained in place throughout all his artistic evolutions.
By the middle '50s, McLean was rising to prominence among the men of his generation. He made hard-swinging records with drummer Art Blakey and innovative ones with Charles Mingus. His richest period of recording was in the late '50s and '60s. Most of his best work was captured on Blue Note, where he led exemplary sessions of unapologetic New York swing and was later to successfully experiment in the wake of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.
"Coltrane taught me something about determination when I watched him kick the habit in public," McLean once recalled. "He made the decision and came to work looking like a mess. He wasn't shaving or combing his hair; his suit was all wrinkled up, the collar of his shirt turning brown. That's how he had to do it. He wouldn't accept even a little bit of dope to help him get through. No. There he was playing his heart out every night. He wasn't hiding, he didn't disappear. We all saw it. By the end of the gig, he started combing his hair and shaving and looked like a new man. He had conquered himself."
McLean made many excellent records before leaving New York in 1970 and dedicating a part of his life to education. Those recordings prove him a timeless original who could put his own flavor on bebop and the modal developments that followed. Much of this was the result of McLean's bittersweet melodic imagination, his blowtorch tone, and the palpable daring that underlay his intense rhythmic drive. Examples include New Soil; Swing, Swang, Swinging; Jackie's Bag; A Fickle Sonance; Let Freedom Ring; Destination Out;and One Step Beyond.
At the University of Hartford, he started what eventually became the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz. And he considered the Artists Collective, a sizable community center that offers an alternative to the pitfalls of the streets through the teaching of the arts, his finest achievement outside of music. He and his wife, Dolly, conceived it, led the fund-raising drive, and saw it built. All the dues had been paid off because McLean remained a superb player throughout his career and made a solid offering to his community through the teaching of aesthetic discipline. McLean will be missed and remembered as an artist, an educator, and a community leader dedicated to leaving monuments rather than hot air. He always believed in deeds achieved with heat, discipline, humility, and compassion. He embodied the best jazz has to offer.
http://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/jackiemclean
Jackie McLean
Biography
John Lenwood (Jackie) McLean was an alto saxophonist, composer, bandleader and educator, born in New York City. His father, John Sr., who died in 1939, played guitar in Tiny Bradshaw's orchestra. After his father's death, his musical education was continued by his godfather, by his stepfather, who owned a record store, and by several noted teachers. He also received informal tutoring from neighbours Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Charlie Parker. During high school he played in a band with Kenny Drew, Sonny Rollins, and Andy Kirk Jr. (the tenor saxophonist son of Andy Kirk). He recorded with Miles Davis, on Davis' Dig album, when he was 19 years old. Rollins played on the same album. As a young man McLean also recorded with Gene Ammons, Charles Mingus, andGeorge Wallington, and as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (he reportedly joined the Jazz Messengers after being punched by the notoriously violent Mingus and, fearing for his life, stabbing him in self-defence). His early recordings as leader were in the hard bop school. He later became an exponent of modal jazz without abandoning his foundation in hard bop. Throughout his career he was known for his distinctive tone (often described with such adjectives as withering, piercing, or searing), his slightly sharp pitch, and a strong foundation in blues. McLean was a heroin addict throughout his early career, and the resulting loss of his New York City cabaret licence forced him to undertake a large number of recording dates; consequently, he produced a large body of recorded work in the 1950s and 60s. He was under contract with Blue Note Records from 1959 to 1967, having previously recorded for Prestige. Blue Note offered better pay and more artistic control than other labels, and his work for Blue Note is highly regarded. In 1962 he recorded Let Freedom Ring for Blue Note. This album was the culmination of attempts he had made over the years to deal with harmonic problems in jazz, especially in soloing on his piece "Quadrangle." (*"Quadrangle" appears on BST 4051, Jackie's Bag, recorded in 1959). Let Freedom Ring began a period in which he performed with avant-garde musicians rather than the veteran hard bop performers he had been playing with. His recordings from 1962 on, in which he adapted the innovations of modal and free jazz to hard bop, made his body of work distinctive. In 1964, he served six months in prison on drug charges. The period immediately after his release from prison is known as his acid period because the three albums he released during it were much harsher in tone than his previous albums. In 1967, his recording contract, like those of many other progressive musicians, was terminated by Blue Note's new management. His opportunities to record promised so little pay that he abandoned recording as a way to earn a living, concentrating instead on touring. In 1968, he began teaching at The Hartt School of the University of Hartford. He later set up the university's African American Music Department (now the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz) and its Jazz Studies degree program. In 1970, he and his wife, Dollie, founded the Artists' Collective, Inc. of Hartford, an organization dedicated to preserving the art and culture of the African diaspora. It provides educational programs and instruction in dance, theatre, music and visual arts. He received an American Jazz Masters fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2001. His stepson René is a jazz saxophonist and flautist as well as a jazz educator. After a long illness, McLean died on March 31, 2006, in Hartford, Connecticut
McLean’s Scene: Jackie McLean as Improviser, Educator, and Activist
by Stephen H. Lehman
In a career spanning nearly sixty years, the alto saxophonist and composer Jackie McLean (1931-2006) developed a model of collaborative and socially engaged pedagogy that was to prove enormously fruitful, both for his own career and for those of the younger musicians who came into his sphere of activities. Based on a rigorous musicianship essential to Afrological[i] forms of improvisation, an uncommon depth and breadth of experience, professional ties to seminal artists like Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Ornette Coleman, and a personal self-confidence which allowed for a radical openness, McLean was able to integrate performance, pedagogy, and sociocultural advocacy into a uniquely coherent whole which was much greater than the sum of its parts. His process was opportunistic in the best sense of that word, and it was improvisational.
My research for this paper draws from a wide variety of sources including scholarly literature from the emerging field of jazz studies as well as older and less formal jazz histories and criticism, archival materials such as McLean’s commercial recordings and their associated liner notes, formal interviews (which I conducted with McLean in 2000), and many informal conversations that took place from 1996-2000, during which time I audited several of McLean’s undergraduate courses at the University of Hartford.[ii] Special mention should be made of Ken Levis’s 1976 documentary Jackie McLean On Mars, which provided me with particularly valuable insights into the nature of McLean’s early work as a community activist and educator. McLean’s own comments, whether in response to an interviewer or in the form of liner notes, while not representing a comprehensive picture of his activities and thinking, nevertheless, are especially important for a tightly focused study of this kind which attempts to examine the manifold of an artist’s life against the background of the artistic developments and broader cultural currents of his time. In identifying and exploring some of the main themes or “scenes” of McLean’s musical practice, encompassing improvisation, education, and activism, I hope to contribute to a deeper understanding of the powerful cultural space delineated by this musician.
Video excerpt from Jackie McLean on Mars (Levis 1976) 0:57 min.
McLean’s Early Career
The astonishing pace of McLean’s early professional development can be understood not only in terms of his strong work ethic and his determination to immerse himself in the improvised music of the period, but also as a response to the creative matrix in which he found himself. As a young man growing up in Harlem in the late 1940s and 1950s, during one of the most fertile periods in the history of American music, McLean was soon challenging himself to keep up with the extraordinary musicians by whom he was welcomed and with whom he was invited to play.[iii] Arguably, the self-awareness and self-confidence that would be invaluable to him throughout his career was rooted in these early Harlem experiences.
In the early stages of his career, from around 1950 to 1962, McLean’s linear/harmonic language as an improviser and a composer was most significantly influenced by the music of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. Of his relationship with Powell, McLean later said:
Bud was the most significant person in terms of my development in my early years [. . .] The time I spent hanging around his house between 15 and 17 were very important, formative years for me. I think my growth and development happened because I was in his presence. (Primack 38)
The kind of learning that took place in Powell’s house was not in the form of formal lessons:
A lot of people have the idea he was giving me theory lessons. That wasn’t it at all. I heard him practice a lot, play a lot. He also let me take my horn out and play along with him. He taught me some things he was writing, kind of coached me along. (Primack 38)
Years later in his own classes at the University of Hartford, McLean would indeed teach music theory, but his teaching style would remain informed by these early experiences with Bud Powell’s hands-on approach.
Powell’s pervasive influence, and also that of Charlie Parker, can be heard on Dig (1951) and Miles Davis Vol. 1 (1952), McLean’s first recordings as a featured soloist with Miles Davis. Here, McLean demonstrates an internalized understanding of the rhythmic and harmonic concepts put forth by Charlie Parker and his contemporaries, and he often incorporates direct quotations from Parker and Powell’s recorded solos into his improvisations. During this period, McLean was also developing the unique sound, which would separate him from other alto saxophonists.
The timbre of McLean’s alto on the early Miles Davis recordings is marked by a noticeable dryness and incisiveness, accentuated, in part, by an extremely precise sense of rhythm and by phrasing that is uncommonly severe. McLean, who admired the playing of Lester Young, Ben Webster, and Dexter Gordon, attributes this unusual sound to his early determination to make his alto sound like a tenor. (This was his characteristically resourceful response when his mother refused to provide him with a tenor saxophone.)[iv] McLean continued to refine and cultivate his unique sound on the alto saxophone and by the late 1950s had established what is considered one of the most easily recognizable instrumental sounds on any instrument in African-American creative music.
The Avant-Garde Scene
In the early 1960s, McLean began to expand the breadth of his musical interests. While his apprenticeship under the iconoclastic bassist/composer Charles Mingus influenced his music during this period, even more significant was McLean’s growing awareness of the work of musicians like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. McLean also began to think about his improvisational and compositional output in relation to his cultural and political milieu. In the liner notes for his 1962 album Let Freedom Ring, McLean cites Coleman’s influence: “Today I am going through a big change compositionwise, and in improvising. Ornette Coleman has made me stop and think. He has stood up under much criticism, yet he never gives up his course, freedom of expression. The search is on.”
This was the first instance in which McLean chose to write his own liner notes and it seems clear that he was aware of the power that such self-representation could afford him. During an interview for National Public Radio, he explained to Terry Gross that his album’s title, Let Freedom Ring, was intended to show the connection between the freedom demonstrated by creative improvisers and that sought by civil rights activists. In articulating his support for the civil rights movement in this manner, McLean aligned himself with musicians like Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Archie Shepp, all of whom used their commercial recordings to advance political agendas.[v]
While McLean did adopt what he perceived to be Coleman’s political and philosophical stance, the music on Let Freedom Ring is not as close to Ornette Coleman’s musical universe as the liner notes would indicate. It is, in fact, much closer to the music of John Coltrane’s quartet, which included McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones. Not until the late 1960s was the influence of Coleman’s music evident in McLean’s improvisational and compositional style. (See, for example, McLean’s Action, recorded in 1965, and New and Old Gospel, recorded with Ornette Coleman in 1967.) Like Mary Lou Williams in the 1940s, who endorsed the music of Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell long before her music would show their influence, McLean seemed to need time to work out the implications of Coleman’s music for his own.[vi]
McLean further commented on this evolution in his practice in a 1996 interview for Ken Burns’s PBS documentary Jazz:
My band made a transition in the 1960s [. . .] John F. Kennedy was blown away in 1963, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, all of this assassination went on. The cities were burning. The civil rights movement was going on; people were screaming, the Vietnamese war. And so the music went that way. (McLean 23)
Like many other African-American musicians during the 1960s, McLean responded to such events by using music and his reputation as a musician to support activist organizations.[vii] Throughout the 1960s, he organized and performed in benefit concerts for the Black Panthers up and down the East Coast, and he raised money for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and performed during the Newark riots in 1967.[viii] This participation began a commitment to social action that McLean would maintain throughout his life.
In the end, based, in part, on a shared sense of the political potential of their music, but also on the “radical openness” which was characteristic of McLean, he was able to forge meaningful professional and personal relationships with Coleman and others associated with the 1960s avant-garde in a way that almost no other musician of his generation would. (One important exception is composer/percussionist Max Roach.) Both Ornette Coleman and Rashied Ali, for example, recorded for Blue Note in 1967 as sidemen under McLean’s leadership. McLean points out that while he admires Coleman’s music for its freshness and its contemporaneity, he does not view it as radically divergent: “It’s just good music or bad [ . . .] The same way with Ornette. They hung the ‘New Thing’ title on Trane and Ornette but is Ornette any newer than Charlie Parker? I don’t think Ornette thinks so” (Spellman 233).
This ability to conceptualize Ornette’s music as a necessary evolution, as opposed to a break from the concepts put forth by Charlie Parker, may have allowed McLean to expand his musical language much more successfully than most other prominent musicians of his generation. In turn, by integrating members of the avant-garde into his working ensembles, McLean gave these emerging musicians a certain credibility with more traditional stylists, some of whom eventually began to change their own practice.
As author and jazz critic A.B. Spellman points out in his seminal Four Lives in the Bebop Business:
[McLean’s] conversion, if it may be called that, gave the avant-garde an enormous boost when most of his contemporaries were screaming “fraud” [. . .] He was looked up to as someone who had paid his dues [. . .] So when he adapted his music to enter the avant-garde, he took with him some of the promising young musicians who had not developed a fixed concept in their own work. (230)
Alto saxophonists Gary Bartz and Eric Person were two younger musicians deeply influenced by McLean’s embrace of the1960s avant-garde. Here is Bartz: “I always trusted [McLean]. If he said ‘I’m really looking into this new stuff,’ I wanted to look into it too” (Panken 14).
And Person:
[Jackie McLean] had a great impact on me because he showed all that you needed to be great in jazz. McLean stepped from under the wings of Charlie Parker not by discarding the bop or blues language, but by augmenting it with the freer expression of the avant-garde. (56)
In addition to influencing young musicians like Bartz and Person, McLean also integrated into his performing and recording ensembles several up-and-coming improviser/composers, including drummers Tony Williams and Jack DeJohnette, trumpeters Charles Tolliver and Wood Shaw, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, pianists Larry Willis and Hilton Ruiz, and trombonist Grachan Moncur III, bringing them to the attention of the international jazz community.[ix] Even after he began to work as an educator in more formal academic settings, McLean continued throughout his entire career to use his performing ensembles to provide what George Lewis has referred to as “an explicit pedagogical nurturance,” developing a kind of “hybrid pedagogical experience and musical practice” (“Teaching” 91).[x]
However, at the same time that McLean was making these significant creative strides and becoming, in many ways, a role model for a younger generation of musicians, he was, like many other musicians at that time, also negotiating the negative effects of an ongoing struggle with heroin addiction. He had begun using the drug around 1948, at the age of seventeen, and by 1957 had been arrested several times and briefly incarcerated for possession of illegal narcotics. As a result, his cabaret card was revoked, making it illegal for him to perform in New York City clubs, even as a sideman, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. He continued to record for Blue Note and to perform as both a leader and a sideman outside of New York, but as he explained in the 1976 Ken Levis documentary Jackie McLean On Mars, the loss of his cabaret card put him “on another course.”
In 1959 McLean was asked to act and perform in the Living Theater production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection, an experimental play about a group of heroin-addicted drifters, some of them musicians, waiting for the arrival of their dealer. McLean performed in The Connection until 1961, traveling outside of the United States for the first time when the play went to London in 1960 and later working with experimental filmmaker/director Shirley Clarke on a film adapted from the play. In addition to introducing him to new communities of experimental artists, McLean’s involvement in The Connection, which offered parallels between his own life and the character he depicted, may have led him to think differently about his own experience with substance abuse in a milieu where musicians were often involved with drugs. It may also have helped him to eventually overcome his addiction and to become involved with addiction prevention programs in a variety of settings.
After leaving the Living Theater in 1961, McLean began to work with young people in African-American communities throughout New York City. He worked with incarcerated youth as a bandmaster in a penitentiary and also contributed to programs like Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited-Associated Community Teams (HARYOU-ACT) and Robert Kennedy’s “Mobilization for Youth” initiative, where he remained for almost five years.[xi] In the documentary film Jackie McLean on Mars, McLean observes: “This was the first job that I had in town that I liked a little bit [. . .] [I] worked with kids two or three afternoons a week and I got a salary for it.”
McLean’s decision to work with troubled young people was, in part, a response to his need to find alternative sources of income after the loss of his cabaret card in 1957. However, it must also be understood as another instance of McLean’s ability to respond, constructively and resourcefully, to personal and professional challenges. In this respect, McLean’s ingenuity can be viewed as akin to his improvisational gifts as a musician: a positive response to change, opportunistic/creative solutions to problems that presented themselves, an orientation to social cooperation, and a careful attention to process. In spite of the addiction to heroin, from which he did not fully recover until 1964, and the consequent loss of his cabaret card, McLean was able to avoid a downward spiral. During this period he continued to earn a living, he maintained his commitment to social activism on behalf of the African-American community, and he began to lay the groundwork for a career in teaching that he would later effectively integrate with his work as a composer/performer.
The Academic Scene
In 1968, McLean began his association with the University of Hartford. He first worked as a drug counselor, drawing credibility from his own experiences. Then, after being approached by students who were dissatisfied with the school’s Eurocentric music curriculum, he began teaching classes in music history and improvisation.[xii] Like many other African-American creative musicians of his generation, McLean’s move into academia was directly connected to the black student activist movement of the late 1960s. Responding to the demand for Black Studies curriculums, many major universities, including the University of Hartford, began to hire African-American artists and scholars in increasing numbers.[xiii] It is important to note that, in many cases, the first African-American musicians to make the move into academia in the late 1960s were those who had already demonstrated a deep connection to community activism and the civil rights movement. For example, Horace Tapscott joined the University of California, Riverside music faculty in 1968; Archie Shepp joined the SUNY Buffalo faculty in 1969; and Jackie McLean became part of the Hartt School of music faculty in 1970.
In the WGBH 89.7 radio series Jazz Portraits, McLean remembered that in spite of his enormous credibility as a musician, and more than five years of teaching experience in community-based organizations, he at first felt ill-prepared for teaching at the university level:
When I arrived at the Hartt School of Music to teach a history course, I told them, I said “Look, I don’t know anything about anything except what I experienced.” And I talked to other musicians, they said “Well, that’s what they’re hiring you for, man. They don’t expect you to talk about ragtime and all that [. . .] go with what you know. Build a course around your experiences.” So that’s what I did in the beginning.
However, though McLean’s early teaching relied heavily on the authority afforded to him through his close personal and professional ties to many of the seminal figures in the history of African-American creative music and, in fact, on his own direct experience, he would soon feel the need to possess a more comprehensive understanding of the history of that music. By the early 1970s, he had taken it upon himself to learn about African-American musicians from earlier generations—Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton, among others—to be better equipped to teach his classes at the University of Hartford. In Jazz Portraits, McLean talks about his decision to have his teaching encompass more than just his personal experience:
[I remember thinking that] it won’t be bad if I find out what came before me, and maybe I need to find that out. And I was very happy that I did it because what came before me really made my [musical] style mellow and blossom and it made me more comfortable, and it also pointed to where I should go.
McLean’s decision to investigate traditions of music from before 1945 and its subsequent effect on his playing, as well as his teaching, provide one more example of the ways in which he was able to integrate his work as an educator with his work as an improviser/composer.
In the film Jackie McLean on Mars, McLean states:
I have been through several levels of the music business. I came out and went through the 50s and made whatever name I have, and in the 60s. And it’s just the same thing out there now [. . .] You’re just either playing or you’re not playing. And when you’re not playing then you got to worry about how you’re going to pay your bills and a lot of things. And I don’t want to go through that anymore [. . .] Personally, I see a little security at the university [. . .] I was interested in getting out of just playing every night. I wanted to go somewhere where I could perpetuate some concepts from another vantage point and not always just on the bandstand.
Here, McLean demonstrates his construction of the move to academia in positive terms, as an opportunity to find the institutional support that can free his creativity from the vagaries and pressures of the jazz marketplace, rather than as a step that is being forced upon him by financial necessity. While making another comment, in Jackie McLean on Mars, he is even more explicit about the advantages of his new role:
I feel like an exploited poor musician in 1976 [. . .] And I also feel like a professor of [music] history at the University of Hartford. If I feel good about anything, it’s about being able to turn down jobs that are offered to me for scale and below which I was forced to take at other times. That’s what I feel good about.
In fact, McLean also felt good about, and increasingly committed to, functioning as Professor McLean. He became increasingly confident and successful in academia, and he soon began to make changes in the institutional setting within which he had created his niche. When he had arrived at the University of Hartford in 1968, African-American music was not accorded the same respect as Western European classical music:
[T]hese were the terms that were thrown at me when I arrived on the academic scene: “legitimate music,” “serious music.” Making an inference that music that wasn’t Western classical music wasn’t serious or wasn’t legitimate. So I have used that term. What they call “jazz,” I call that a classical music. It’s an American classical music. (Jackie McLean on Mars)
But McLean wanted to do more than just change the labels and categories he encountered at the University of Hartford. Having quickly caught on to the academic game, he saw that his contributions to the University of Hartford would only have continuing meaning and real impact if his efforts were integrated into academic hierarchies at the departmental level, and if he himself became a tenured member of the faculty. By the middle of the 1970s he had established one of the first university departments of African-American Music, bringing in pianist/composer Jaki Byard and saxophonist/composer Paul Jeffries as additional faculty, an achievement that was especially significant within the context of academic politics in the 1970s. Eric Porter describes it in the following manner:
Teaching positions were often temporary or part-time and could be contingent upon uncertain funding sources and academic politics. Some musicians recognized that their inclusion on an academic faculty smacked of tokenism, while others found that their own notions of jazz education could not easily be transposed from informal networks to collegiate settings.[xiv] (234-35)
McLean’s gift for teaching and his reputation beyond academia, no doubt, were crucially important to the success of the new department, which was soon established as a degree granting entity. His teaching style, always rooted in his own experiences, by then also included more theoretical and critical approaches, and he very effectively engaged and inspired his students, but he also perpetuated a traditional apprentice based model of music teaching and learning. Just as he had spent as much time as possible with Bud Powell and Charlie Parker, so too did many of McLean’s students, myself included, make any excuse to spend an additional few moments in his presence.[xv] In his book, Thinking in Jazz, Paul Berliner cites one unidentified young saxophonist on the value of his personal relationship with McLean:
More than anything specific, it was a matter of Jackie McLean being a model for me [. . .] It had to do with his personality, too, his sense of humor about life. He was always so positive that just to have a word from him was enough to send me home to practice for hours. It was enough to keep me going until the next time I saw him again. (41)
McLean presented information formally through meticulously organized lectures, but it was his personal anecdotes, his overwhelming openness about his own perceived shortcomings as a saxophonist, and his commitment to his students and subject matter that made his classes a kind of educational experience which went beyond what was usually available in a university setting. In drawing from a continuum of teaching devices and ignoring the binary that normally separates institutional and non-institutional traditions of pedagogy, McLean’s African-American music program was emblematic of educator/improviser Willie Ruff’s “conservatory without walls” ideal.[xvi] Certainly his own ongoing connections to non-academic communities, both as an active performer and as a community activist, helped McLean in “extending the academic concept to incorporate what’s happening outside of its walls” (Lewis, “Teaching” 91).
Just as McLean sought to situate his music in its cultural context with albums like Let Freedom Ring, and through his highly visible support for the Black Panthers and SNCC, so, too, did he make a concerted effort to integrate his commitment to the African-American community into his teaching. For him, education was never a one-way process. Always opening up his classes to dialog, he helped his students to ground their study of music in contemporary realities. In Jackie McLean on Mars, he remembers coming up against resistance when discussing the ways in which music could be influenced by its wider context:
One night, I made the subject matter [of my class at the University of Hartford] the death of John F. Kennedy and one of my bright students raised his hand [. . .] and he couldn’t see where this was relevant to my subject matter. And I explained to him that the government and what it perpetuates is a reflection of what the art form is. And surely in Nazi Germany they didn’t have any John Coltranes because they outlawed certain art forms and burned certain books and that was it [. . .] And I saw the death of John F. Kennedy as being very relevant [. . .] to where the art was going in this country.
In choosing to incorporate cultural history into his courses on the history and performance of African-American music, McLean was in the vanguard of what would become a fruitful rapprochement between cultural studies and music education. In fact, McLean’s description of his student’s resistance to his discussion of John F. Kennedy’s death recalls George Lewis’s account of the music department at the University of California, San Diego in the 1990s where opposition to critical thinking was heard in the students’ frequent question: “why do we have to do all this talking? Why can’t we just play music?” (Lewis, “Teaching” 94).
McLean continued his culturally situated teaching of music history, and what is now the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz at the Hartt School of Music has since produced scores of internationally recognized musicians, including saxophonists Antoine Roney, Thomas Chapin, Sue Terry, Abraham Burton, Jimmy Greene, and Lee Rozie, drummer Eric McPherson, trombonist Steve Davis, guitarist Kevin O’Neil, and bassist Nat Reeves, making its own contribution to music history.
The Collective Scene
In 1970, while teaching full-time at the University of Hartford, McLean, in partnership with his wife Dollie and others, founded the Artists Collective, a cultural center located in one of Hartford’s poorest neighborhoods. Here, he would be even freer to create a unique curriculum based on the notion of the arts in relation to pan-African cultural and individual histories. His belief that he could create a significant cultural and social impact further increased McLean’s commitment to the city in which he was now centering his activities:
[I remember thinking] in New York City, there’s a thousand Dollie McLeans and a million Jackie McLeans, but in Hartford, perhaps we can do something that we couldn’t do so readily in New York and that is, build a cultural center. And try to steer some of these young people away from bad things—narcotics and drinking and early pregnancy. Some place where kids can grow up and have a great time. So that’s how the Artists Collective was born. We teach dance, drama, the visual arts, music, and the martial arts. (Jazz Portraits)
The McLeans’s founding of the Artists Collective in 1970 was part of a broader cultural trend that found African-American musicians creating institutions for community education and activism, usually centered in the country’s most economically depressed urban areas. Significant examples include Horace Tapscott’s Underground Musicians Association (UGMA) founded in Los Angeles in 1961; The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), founded in Chicago in 1965; The Detroit Creative Musicians Association (DCMA) in 1967; The Black Artist Group (BAG) in St. Louis in 1969; and Collective Black Artists (CBA), founded in New York in 1970.[xvii] These community organizations provided McLean and other musician-directors with comprehensive institutional structures within which to establish models of cultural learning that focused on the African Diaspora and that provided an alternative to more Eurocentric approaches; they resisted what George Lewis has referred to as “the erasure of cultural memory” (“Teaching” 72-3). Many of the rooms in the Artists Collective’s main building are named after prominent African-American artists such as Paul Robeson and Max Roach, and as McLean emphasized in the radio series Jazz Portraits, the classes at the Collective are designed to teach children about “the history of Africa. Things that are not taught in the public school.”
While Dollie McLean’s talents as an administrator soon became evident, McLean’s stature as a performer and his ties to prominent African-Americans in the entertainment industry helped draw attention to the Artists Collective. His wide professional network allowed the Collective to sponsor concerts by Max Roach, McCoy Tyner, and Randy Weston, among others, and performances by actor/comedian Bill Cosby, providing important opportunities for Hartford’s inner city youth to come into direct contact with seminal African-American artists. McLean also leveraged his position at the University of Hartford in helping to move the Artists Collective forward, encouraging his most advanced student at the Hartt School of Music to give private instrumental lessons at the Collective.[xviii]
In speaking about the success and longevity of the Artists Collective with writer Ben Sidran, McLean cited his and his wife Dollie’s unflagging commitment to the organization and explicitly cited their creative opportunism: “[I] find that most of the strides that Dollie and I have made have been shooting from the hip and keeping our dream in front of us and not wavering from it. It’s been very helpful improvising” (Sidran 134).
It is important to note that of all the community organizations founded by musicians in the 1960s and 1970s, the Artists Collective and the seminal Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians are the only two that remain active (and thriving) at the present time.
The Later Scene
By the late 1980s, both the Artists Collective and the African-American Music Department at the University of Hartford had moved past the developmental stage and McLean was able to perform throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan with increasing regularity.[xix] His main working ensemble in this period included South African pianist Hotep Galeta; bassist Nate Reeves, a former student of McLean’s from the University of Hartford; and McLean’s son, Rene McLean, a saxophonist and a professor of music at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Influenced by his son’s experiences and knowledge of African music, McLean began to connect his musical output and his performance practice to the pan-African musical Diaspora. For example, many compositions from the ensemble’s repertoire, many of them composed by Rene McLean, incorporated rhythmic devices borrowed from both West African and South African musical traditions, and McLean often asked his entire group to perform in traditional South African clothing. Additionally, McLean dedicated his 1992 album Rhythm of the Earth to the Dogon people of Mali, and in 1993 his quintet performed in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Mozambique, and South Africa as part of a tour sponsored by the United States Information Agency. McLean viewed these evocations of the African musical Diaspora, and his tour of Southern Africa, as a means of strengthening his connection to the origins of his music.[xx] These evocations also reinforced, and were doubtless reinforced by, the African studies curriculum he had designed for the youngsters at the Artists Collective.
During the 1990s, McLean’s evolution as a creative musician continued to reap the benefits of his role at the University of Hartford. By 1993, McLean’s main working ensemble included four of his University of Hartford students: drummer Eric McPherson, pianist Alan Palmer, trombonist Steve Davis, and Rene McLean (who also studied under his father privately). As had been his practice since the 1960s, McLean encouraged all of the members of his band to contribute compositions to the group’s repertoire. These young musicians, in turn, opened up new musical perspectives to McLean through both their performing and their composing. In the radio series Jazz Portraits McLean comments on this aspect of his practice:
It would be much easier for me to get five experienced musicians: Billy Higgins, Cedar Walton [. . .] go out and play. Then I wouldn’t have any worries about what might not go right or what could happen. But I like young musicians because they make mistakes and they cause things to happen on the stage. And then we straighten it out and we keep moving forward. And at the same time, little new things slip in here and there through these encounters.
For McLean, the mistakes, like misfortunes, could often be a means of “moving forward,” and of finding the unexpected. The influence of younger musicians on McLean’s musical style is quite obvious in the evolution in his improvisational syntax that took place throughout the 1990s. McLean’s soloistic language in this period moved much farther away from the influence of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, and even from that of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, and drew heavily upon a set of highly personal improvisatory strategies which he referred to as “systems.” These systems involved the sounding of pitch constellations, marked by an internal integrity resulting from each pitch being separated by a repeating interval or set of intervals—often a perfect fourth. In this way, McLean was able to produce improvisations that remained rooted in his exquisite sense of timing and phrasing, while demonstrating a new linear syntax that was non-diatonic, fragmented, and highly abstract. Having codified his use of systems by the late 1990s, McLean began sharing this methodology with his advanced students at the University of Hartford. Since that time, several of his former students have continued to adopt and expand McLean’s concept of systems in their own work, including trombonist Steve Davis, guitarist Kevin O’Neil, and saxophonists Jimmy Greene, Mike DiRubbo, Wayne Escoffery, Kris Allen, and the author, among many others. McLean, himself, continued to perform and develop new music almost until the time of his death in 2006.
Conclusion
In examining McLean’s ability to incorporate new musical ideas into his practice throughout a career whose complementary themes were performance, teaching, and social activism, it is important to keep in mind that the displacements and transitions in his career were not easy ones. McLean never fully resolved the conflict he felt about the compromises he had made in order to maintain a fully integrated professional model. In an interview in the film Jackie McLean On Mars, McLean complained about his inability to practice the saxophone on a regular basis while working at the Artists Collective and the University of Hartford:
It is a serious sacrifice. But at this point [. . .] I don’t get a chance to practice. I don’t have the energy to practice after I get up and do all the things that I have to do in the course of a day, and that’s a problem that I’m constantly fighting. And every time I get through playing and get back to a certain place playing I always say, “Well man, I’m not going to let this go. When I get back to Hartford I’m going to get up every day, at least practice an hour so that I can keep myself in shape.” But I always get back and always let a day go by and a couple of days and then it’s a week and then I don’t play.
The creative and artistic sacrifices that a commitment to teaching and community activism entail are too easily overlooked or underestimated. Bassist/educator Reggie Workman’s comments on the severe difficulties inherent in integrating community activism, teaching, and performance, echo McLean’s own:
And of course the artistic endeavor is compromised when you get involved with all of these things, because you can’t practice, study, and create as much when you’re divided like this. It took a lot out of my family, took a lot out of my art; but it was important, it was necessary [. . .] it adds something to your being, so that when you pick up your instrument you have more to talk about anyway, more to say. (qtd. in Porter 238-39)
For McLean, by the 1990s, the balance had subtly shifted:
I keep saying “this is it [. . .] when this kid graduates I’m finished.” And I come in September and here’s some little kid [. . .] that can play so great. And I say [. . .] “maybe I can do four more years and get him out of here.” Because when I see them arrive [. . .] I don’t want to leave them [. . .] I want to help them [. . .] and see where they can go. (Jazz Portraits)
In a description of his musical evolution in Downbeat Magazine, McLean offered the following modest self-appraisal: “I have never been in the forefront of any new style, but I have been able to align myself with [different styles] and maybe add to them” (qtd. in Whitehead). Here, McLean embraces his contribution to African-American creative music, not as an innovator, but as a stylist, while making reference to his ability—rooted, I would argue, in his integrative and improvisational gifts as well as his tremendous stature as a musician—to play new rhythms against familiar ones in a way which has had a profound impact, not only on his music, but on all of the participants in McLean’s several spheres of activity. McLean could not have become what he did without his own ability and strength of character, but his life was uniquely embedded in the historical, political, and cultural forces of his time. The past, present, and future inflections of those forces will, I hope, become a little clearer when seen through the prism of McLean’s lived experience and unique achievements.
Notes
[i] The term Afrological is used in this context to denote understandings of improvisation in which careful preparation, formalism, and intellect are as privileged as spontaneity and real-time decision making. See Lewis’s “Improvised” for his usage of the terms “Afrological” and “Eurological.”
[ii] My transcriptions of McLean’s recorded compositions and improvised solos also provided me with an intimate familiarity with his music. See Lehman, Music.
[iii] In 1950, when he was still only nineteen, McLean was asked to join Miles Davis’s sextet. By the late 1950s, after fruitful apprenticeships in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and Charles Mingus’s Jazz Workshop, both important launching pads for up-and-coming musicians, McLean had established himself as one of the major stylists on the alto saxophone.
[iv] In speaking about his decision to model his sound on the alto saxophone after that of tenor saxophonist Lester Young, McLean does not make reference to the specific technical adjustments this entails. On the saxophone, one develops a specific timbre by favoring a specific network of performance practices that if refined and cultivated over time, result in the desired instrumental timbre. Early in my own career as an altoist, I chose a mouthpiece which I felt accentuated the similarities between my own instrumental sound and McLean’s, and made several minor adjustments to my embouchure, my phrasing, and my pitch choice with the same goal in mind. When, after a saxophone class at the University of Hartford in 1998, McLean told me that I needed to change my sound because it was “too harsh and sounded too much like [him] in the early 90s,” I took what was intended to be constructive criticism as an incredible compliment.
[v] See Carles and Comolli, Jones’s Blues People, Radano, Taylor, Willener, and Wilmer for discussions of the response of African-American improvisers to the 1960s civil rights movement.
[vi] See Kernodle for the ways in which Mary Lou Williams supported younger African-American experimental musicians in the 1940s.
[vii] See, for example, Looker, Porter, and Radano, for the connections between African-American improvising musicians and Black activist organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), and the Black Panthers.
[viii] The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), founded in 1960 by a group of African-American college students in North Carolina, played an important role in the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. For a more in-depth overview of SNCC, see Zinn.
The 1967 Newark Riots took place between July 12 and 17 of that year and were triggered, in part, by the response of the local African-American community to the brutal beating of an African-American cab driver by Newark police.
[ix] In the case of pianist/composer Hilton Ruiz, McLean also used his influence to secure Ruiz’s first commercial recording on the Steeplechase label. Ruiz commented on McLean’s role in the events leading up to his first recording in a video interview posted on the internet site <www.youtube.com> in 2007. The video has subsequently been removed. No more information on this source is currently available.
[x] Using their performing ensembles to develop the talents of younger musicians—like McLean—Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Betty Carter, Anthony Braxton, and Steve Coleman are African-American improvising musicians who exemplify the “explicit pedagogical nurturance” George Lewis refers to, in “Teaching.” See, also, Lewis’s “Teaching,” for an account of the role that pedagogy has played in several performing ensembles of which he has been a member, Jones’s “You Know” on Julian “Cannonball” Adderley as an educator of young musicians and Lehman’s “Nine Compositions,” on Anthony Braxton’s work as a bandleader-educator.
[xi] Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU) merged with Associated Community Teams (ACT) to form HARYOU-ACT in 1964. Jackie McLean participated in a HARYOU-ACT program in which African-American artists and musicians were placed in Harlem public schools as teachers and after-school activity directors. See Spellman and Porter.
Mobilization for Youth was founded in the early 1960s to create cultural outlets and employment opportunities for African-American and Puerto Rican youth. In addition to McLean, Archie Shepp was also affiliated with the Mobilization for Youth program. See Porter.
[xii] In Donaldson, Dollie McLean remembers her husband was asked to teach at the University of Hartford by “several young black students [who] felt that the school needed courses that were relevant to them. They wondered why jazz could not be represented there.” She tells us that, “at that time, African-American music wasn’t taught in any of the universities.”
[xiii] See Aldridge and Young for a history of the institution of Black Studies and Africana Studies curricula at major American universities.
[xiv] See Joseph for an examination of the ways in which major universities have ignored the demands of African-American students and scholars for Black Studies and Africana Studies as part of the core curriculum.
[xv] I audited several of McLean’s classes at the University of Hartford from 1996-2000, while matriculating at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Jimmy Greene, a saxophonist then studying under McLean, first invited me to attend one of McLean’s classes in 1996. After meeting McLean and demonstrating a serious interest in studying under him, I received his permission to audit his courses as often and for as long as I’d like. He was ready to challenge normative admissions policies and fee structures in order to maintain an unusual degree of control over what would go on in his classroom.
[xvi] See Ruff for a history of his work as a performer and educator at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
[xvii] See Porter for an overview of the overlapping histories of the AACM, BAG, the CBA, and UGMA. See also Looker for a comprehensive history of BAG.
[xviii] Currently, the programs at the Artists Collective serve twelve hundred children a year from the Greater Hartford area. Since 1974, the Collective has received annual support from the National Endowment for the Arts and several Connecticut state arts organizations and has emerged as one of Hartford’s most important institutional presences. More recently, in 1999, the Collective moved into a new six million dollar complex, the construction of which was made possible by a fifteen-year capital campaign spearheaded by Dollie McLean. See Donaldson. See <www.artistscollective.org>.
[xix] McLean continued to perform and record for labels like Steeplechase, Inner City, and Blue Note throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but the formation of his quintet/sextet with his son Rene McLean in the mid-1980s and his recording contract with the Triloka label marked a renewed interest in McLean’s music in the global jazz marketplace. The albums Dynasty (1988) and Rites of Passage (1990) appeared, and there were annual performances at the Village Vanguard in New York City as well as frequent performances in Europe, Japan, and Africa. See Whitehead for a more thorough examination of the renewed interest in McLean’s work in the 1990s.
[xx] McLean is part of an emergent continuum of African-American improvising musicians who have asserted their connection to Africa through composition titles, performance attire, and the use of musical instruments and musical concepts normally associated with African music. For an examination of the ways in which contemporary African-American musicians have sought to evoke Africa through their music see Weinstein.
McLean’s Afrocentric performance practices should be understood as continuing the tradition exemplified by the Art Ensemble of Chicago of paying homage to the rich histories of pan-African music. In many cases, these performance practices have been misinterpreted by music critics as reinforcing their own narrow views of African music. See, for example, Lehman’s “I Love You,” on the response of the French jazz press to the work of African-American experimental musicians in the 1970s.
Works Cited
Aldridge, Delores P. and Carlene Young, eds. Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000.
Bradley, Edward. “Jazz at Lincoln Center Radio with Ed Bradley: Jackie McLean.” 1990 <www.jazzatlincolncenter.net/radio>.
Carles, Philippe and Jean-Louis Comolli. Free Jazz Black Power. 1971. Paris: Gallimard, 2000.
Davis, Miles. Dig. Prestige Records, 1951.
—. Miles Davis, Volume 1. Blue Note Records, 1952.
Donaldson, Bill. “Dollie McLean.” Jazz Improv’s New York Jazz Guide. 1.11 (2006): 34-8.
Gitler, Ira. “Harvest Time.” Downbeat 63.3 (1996): 32-5.
Jackie McLean on Mars. Dir. Kenneth Levis. Rhapsody Films, 1976.
Jackie McLean Sextet in Vienne. Perf. Jackie McLean. Paris Premiere Video, 1993.
Jones, LeRoi. Blues People. 1963. Edinburgh: Playback Press, 1995.
Jones, Ryan Patrick. “‘You Know What I Mean?’: The Pedagogical Cannon of ‘Cannonball’ Adderley.” Spec. double issue of Current Musicology 79-80 (2005): 169-205.
Joseph, E. Peniel. “Dashikis and Democracy.” Journal of African American History 88.2 (2003): 182-203.
Kernodle, L. Tammy. Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2004.
Lehman, H. Stephen. “I Love You With An Asterisk: African-American Experimental Music and the French Jazz Press, 1970-1980.” Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation 1.2 (2005). 20 Oct. 2005 <http://quasar.lib.uoguelph.ca /index. php/csieci/article/view/18/50>.
—.The Music of Jackie McLean. Unpublished undergraduate thesis. Wesleyan U, 2000.
—. Nine Compositions (Iridium). Liner Notes. Firehouse 12 Records, 2007.
—. Personal communication with Jackie McLean, 1996-2000.
Lewis, George E. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” Black Music Research Journal 16.1 (1996): 91-122.
—.“Singing Omar’s Song: A (Re)construction of Great Black Music.” Lenox Avenue 4 (1998): 69-92.
—. “Teaching Improvised Music: An Ethnographic Memoir.” Arcana: Musicians on Music. Ed. John Zorn. New York: Granary Books, 2000. 78-109.
Looker, Benjamin. “Point From Which Creation Begins”: The Black Artists’ Group of St. Louis. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2004.
McLean, Jackie. Action. Blue Note Records, 1965.
—. Dynasty. Triloka Records, 1988.
—. Interview with Terry Gross. “Fresh Air: Jackie McLean.” National Public Radio. 2001.
—. Interview. Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns. New York: Public Broadcasting Service Home Video, 2001. <http://www.pbs.org/jazz/about/pdfs/McLean.pdf>.
—. Let Freedom Ring. Liner Notes. Blue Note Records, 1962.
—. New and Old Gospel. Blue Note Records, 1967.
—. Rhythm of the Earth. Birdology Records, 1992.
—. Rites of Passage. Triloka Records, 1991.
Panken, Ted. “Remembering Jackie McLean.” 73:6 Downbeat (2006): 14.
Person, Eric. “Jackie McLean’s ‘Floogeh’ Solo: An Alto Saxophone Transcription. Downbeat 60:10 (1993): 56-57.
Porter, Eric. What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African-American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
Primack, Brett. “Jackie McLean: Man with a Mission.” Jazz Educator’s Journal 31.1 (1998): 38-42.
Radano, M. Ronald. New Musical Configurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
Ruff, Willie. A Call to Assembly: The Autobiography of a Musical Storyteller. New York: Viking, 1991.
“Saxophonist Jackie McLean.” Jazz Portraits. WGBH, Boston. 1994.
Sidran, Ben. Talking Jazz: An Oral History. New York: Da Capo Press, 1992.
Spellman, A. B. Four Lives in the Bebop Business. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966.
Taylor, Arthur. Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews. 1977. New York: Da Capo, 1993.
Weinstein, Norman C. A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz. New York: Limelight Editions, 1993.
Whitehead, Kevin “Back on Earth.” Downbeat 57:10 (1990): 21-2.
Willener, Alfred. The Action-Image Society. New York: Random House, 1970.
Wilmer, Valerie. As Serious As Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz. 1977. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992.
Zinn, Howard. SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Cambridge: South End Press, 2002.
Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation is generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (through both its Major Collaborative Research Initiatives and Aid to Scholarly Journals programs) and by the University of Guelph Library.
ISSN: 1712-0624
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/apr/03/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries2
Jackie McLean Jazz saxophonist, who played with Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman
by John Fordham
by John Fordham
2 April 2006
The Guardian (UK)
The Guardian (UK)
Proteges may get to kick their mentors in the ass metaphorically as the years change the balance of power - not many do it literally. Jackie McLean, the New York-born alto saxophonist, who has died at the age of 74, did exactly that to Charlie Parker while the two were prowling Greenwich Village one night in 1954, looking for anybody who would let them play. Parker, the genius, had become so exasperated by having to beg club-owners for work, that he insisted on the 22-year-old McLean giving him a public kicking for sacrificing his career to hard drugs and self-neglect.
A few years later, the gifted McLean was to let much the same thing happen to him, losing precious years in his playing prime to addiction, and being banned from the New York jazz clubs that were his natural habitat. But Parker died at 34, while McLean bounced resoundingly back to become a leading light of the popular hard-bop movement of the 1960s, an educationist, actor, community worker with inner-city youth, and a comprehensively skilled and intelligent contemporary musician with an understanding of many styles.
McLean emerged on the jazz scene at a time in the early 1950s when almost every young saxophonist wanted to sound like Charlie Parker. The newcomer could have been lost in that crowd, and in his early career it was certainly convenient to tag McLean as a Parker clone. But closer listening revealed him to be significantly different, even when he was still under Parker's spell. McLean was not as harmonically byzantine as his model, and his tone had a distinctively piercing cry. He sometimes sounded as if he were on the borders of a more abstract, less chord-based manner of jazz improvising even before the free-jazz era had dawned, and it was not surprising that the free-improviser Ornette Coleman was to become almost as significant a model for him as Parker had been.
McLean's urgent, pungent sound and soulful directness appealed to many leading players, and he had worked for Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, and was in drummer Art Blakey's legendary Jazz Messengers, while still in his 20s. And as a gifted blues player, McLean was well equipped to dominate the raw, emotional and gospel-inflected style of hard-bop. He recorded and played prolifically in the idiom during its heyday in the 1960s.
His father, John McLean, had been a guitarist in Tiny Bradshaw's successful swing orchestra in New York. McLean took up the saxophone in his teens, moving from the soprano to the alto instrument, and often practising with jazz-playing neighbourhood contemporaries, including Sonny Rollins, the pianists Kenny Drew, Walter Bishop, and the formidable bebop virtuoso Bud Powell. McLean and Powell played together regularly in 1948 and 1949, and the saxophonist also worked extensively with Rollins, then a comparative unknown.
McLean made his recording debut in a boppish sextet with Miles Davis in 1952, and was already sounding like a star on the rise in his fierce confidence and attack. Davis and many of those in his circle were heroin addicts during this period. Rollins was to join them briefly, and so did McLean. None the less he began a long succession of prestigious and challenging jobs in the middle 1950s, working with the advanced bop pianists Paul Bley and George Wallington, in the visionary workshop bands of Charles Mingus (in 1956 and 1958-59), and for three years of intermittent appearances in Jazz Messengers.
Working with the impassioned and volatile Mingus, whose art was influenced by both the black churches and European classical music, and whose invitation to soloists was always to go to the emotional edge, was a landmark experience for McLean. The saxophonist also worked with saxophonist Gene Ammons and tuba player Ray Draper.
His career was interrupted when his addiction led to the withdrawal of his police cabaret card at the end of the 1950s, but in the next decade he began working extensively for the Blue Note record label, making dozens of recordings as both leader and sideman and appearing with hard-bop stars including trumpeters Donald Byrd and Lee Morgan, and saxophonists Hank Mobley and Tina Brooks. By the time he made the classic Blue Note album Let Freedom Ring (1962), McLean was already revealing an Ornette Coleman influence on both his sound and his expanding harmonic horizons, and emerging as an eloquent writer of originals too, in themes such as Melody for Melonae, and Rene.
The saxophonist's experiences with narcotics also made him a persuasive contributor to Jack Gelber's play The Connection as an actor, and he performed it in New York and also in a film made in 1961. McLean brought the play to Europe the same year, and returned to it in a New York production in 1963.
In 1968, he became a teacher at the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, and four years later head of the African-American music programme there. Through Hartford's Artists' Collective, he also began working to expand opportunities for inner-city children, and to explore music-based rehabilitation programmes for addicts.
Often with his sax-playing son Rene, McLean took to teaching and touring in Europe during the 1970s, recording hard-hitting albums including Live at Montmartre with his old neighbourhood friend Kenny Drew, and working in high-class postbop groups with musicians of the calibre of Gary Bartz and Dexter Gordon.
He appeared at Carnegie Hall in 1994 on a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Verve Records, and played a concert with Rollins and worked on the PBS television show Jazz the same year. McLean took a band of his former students into New York's Village Vanguard club in 1995, but his later recordings suggested the edge of his playing was softening, and the repertoire becoming more uneven.
His molten-metal sound has been, however, a more significant influence on the evolution of postbop and free-jazz than is often credited, and he redeployed the inspirational and liberating qualities of the music selflessly as a counsellor and teacher.
He is survived by his wife Dollie, his daughter Melonae, and two sons, Rene and Vernone.
· John (Jackie) Lenwood McLean, musician, born May 17 1931; died March 31 2006.
A few years later, the gifted McLean was to let much the same thing happen to him, losing precious years in his playing prime to addiction, and being banned from the New York jazz clubs that were his natural habitat. But Parker died at 34, while McLean bounced resoundingly back to become a leading light of the popular hard-bop movement of the 1960s, an educationist, actor, community worker with inner-city youth, and a comprehensively skilled and intelligent contemporary musician with an understanding of many styles.
McLean emerged on the jazz scene at a time in the early 1950s when almost every young saxophonist wanted to sound like Charlie Parker. The newcomer could have been lost in that crowd, and in his early career it was certainly convenient to tag McLean as a Parker clone. But closer listening revealed him to be significantly different, even when he was still under Parker's spell. McLean was not as harmonically byzantine as his model, and his tone had a distinctively piercing cry. He sometimes sounded as if he were on the borders of a more abstract, less chord-based manner of jazz improvising even before the free-jazz era had dawned, and it was not surprising that the free-improviser Ornette Coleman was to become almost as significant a model for him as Parker had been.
McLean's urgent, pungent sound and soulful directness appealed to many leading players, and he had worked for Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, and was in drummer Art Blakey's legendary Jazz Messengers, while still in his 20s. And as a gifted blues player, McLean was well equipped to dominate the raw, emotional and gospel-inflected style of hard-bop. He recorded and played prolifically in the idiom during its heyday in the 1960s.
His father, John McLean, had been a guitarist in Tiny Bradshaw's successful swing orchestra in New York. McLean took up the saxophone in his teens, moving from the soprano to the alto instrument, and often practising with jazz-playing neighbourhood contemporaries, including Sonny Rollins, the pianists Kenny Drew, Walter Bishop, and the formidable bebop virtuoso Bud Powell. McLean and Powell played together regularly in 1948 and 1949, and the saxophonist also worked extensively with Rollins, then a comparative unknown.
McLean made his recording debut in a boppish sextet with Miles Davis in 1952, and was already sounding like a star on the rise in his fierce confidence and attack. Davis and many of those in his circle were heroin addicts during this period. Rollins was to join them briefly, and so did McLean. None the less he began a long succession of prestigious and challenging jobs in the middle 1950s, working with the advanced bop pianists Paul Bley and George Wallington, in the visionary workshop bands of Charles Mingus (in 1956 and 1958-59), and for three years of intermittent appearances in Jazz Messengers.
Working with the impassioned and volatile Mingus, whose art was influenced by both the black churches and European classical music, and whose invitation to soloists was always to go to the emotional edge, was a landmark experience for McLean. The saxophonist also worked with saxophonist Gene Ammons and tuba player Ray Draper.
His career was interrupted when his addiction led to the withdrawal of his police cabaret card at the end of the 1950s, but in the next decade he began working extensively for the Blue Note record label, making dozens of recordings as both leader and sideman and appearing with hard-bop stars including trumpeters Donald Byrd and Lee Morgan, and saxophonists Hank Mobley and Tina Brooks. By the time he made the classic Blue Note album Let Freedom Ring (1962), McLean was already revealing an Ornette Coleman influence on both his sound and his expanding harmonic horizons, and emerging as an eloquent writer of originals too, in themes such as Melody for Melonae, and Rene.
The saxophonist's experiences with narcotics also made him a persuasive contributor to Jack Gelber's play The Connection as an actor, and he performed it in New York and also in a film made in 1961. McLean brought the play to Europe the same year, and returned to it in a New York production in 1963.
In 1968, he became a teacher at the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, and four years later head of the African-American music programme there. Through Hartford's Artists' Collective, he also began working to expand opportunities for inner-city children, and to explore music-based rehabilitation programmes for addicts.
Often with his sax-playing son Rene, McLean took to teaching and touring in Europe during the 1970s, recording hard-hitting albums including Live at Montmartre with his old neighbourhood friend Kenny Drew, and working in high-class postbop groups with musicians of the calibre of Gary Bartz and Dexter Gordon.
He appeared at Carnegie Hall in 1994 on a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Verve Records, and played a concert with Rollins and worked on the PBS television show Jazz the same year. McLean took a band of his former students into New York's Village Vanguard club in 1995, but his later recordings suggested the edge of his playing was softening, and the repertoire becoming more uneven.
His molten-metal sound has been, however, a more significant influence on the evolution of postbop and free-jazz than is often credited, and he redeployed the inspirational and liberating qualities of the music selflessly as a counsellor and teacher.
He is survived by his wife Dollie, his daughter Melonae, and two sons, Rene and Vernone.
· John (Jackie) Lenwood McLean, musician, born May 17 1931; died March 31 2006.
Jazz Searches For The New Land: Jackie McLean's “Appointment In Ghana”
July 2015
From newly independent nations of Africa to locations in the Far
East and remote cosmos, jazz from the mid-1950s onwards imagined
liberation through distant places and spaces. In this series, Derek
Walmsley journeys through the sketches of these new worlds. Stop six
makes it in time for an "Appointment In Ghana"
Jackie McLean plays like a man in a hurry. There’s no attack to the sound of his alto sax, the notes are just suddenly there,
and he jumps from one to another as he negotiates a torrent of ideas in
real time. He sometimes misses the centre of a note and lands slightly
sharp or flat as if he is playing a high speed game of hopscotch.
“Appointment In Ghana”, from his 1960 album Jackie’s Bag, starts slow, but strikes up a sharp, business-like pace immediately. The piece, a McLean original, sees Blue Mitchell and Tina Brooks joining him, each of them taking solos over a sleek, cruising rhythm section of pianist Kenny Drew, drummer Art Taylor and understated, underrated bassist Paul Chambers. Perhaps the appointment in mind is a spy rendezvous, inspired by wartime film titles like Appointment In Berlin or Appointment In Tokyo; maybe the bag on the album cover, a satchel fastened with thread in a figure of eight, is some sort of diplomatic bag for Ghana, which had gained its independence just a couple of years previously. The urgency of the music fits the cosmopolitan allusions of the title: document hand-offs, undercover meetings, drive-by reconnaissances.
It’s one of several McLean tracks referencing distant places – the same album features “Fidel”, not an easy title choice in the years leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, alongside Tina Brooks’s “Isle Of Java” and (on the CD reissue) “Medina”. But McLean was no exoticist. Between 1959–65 he released more than a dozen albums for Blue Note and the theme and feel of them changes month by month. 1959’s New Soil was full of earthy jams with titles like “Hip Strut”, “Sweet Cakes” or “Greasy”;1961’s Bluesnik explored moods from “Blues Function” to “Cool Green”. Like many jazz musicians, he was writing compositions as quickly as he recorded them, and the variety of titles reflected the speed which he had got them down on tape.
McLean was stuck in the studio for a reason: drug problems caused him to lose his cabaret card in the late 1950s, so without gigs, he made his money doing sessions. And the way he chopped and changed in the early 1960s has a sense of cabin fever, as if McLean was trying to break out, somehow, anyhow. The idea of escape is reflected in the titles of many of his later Blue Note albums – Destination... Out!, Let Freedom Ring, One Step Beyond. They might echo the rhetoric of free jazz, but they are searching for something distinct from it, rooted in the hardbop where McLean cut his teeth.
His pieces, his albums and his life are all marked by brutal contrasts between freedom and constraint. What makes McLean so singular is that freedom is often communicated with the melodic fluidity of old school jazz, and constraint through the terse negotiations of avant garde styles. “Appointment In Ghana”, like “Quadrangle” from the same album, alternates flowing solos with angular group formations. This stimulatingly perverse structure, as if McLean is concocting devilish conundrums to wrestle with, reappears many times in his work, on 1963’s “Marney”, 1965’s “Eco”, and elsewhere.
His solo on “Appointment In Ghana” tells all kinds of stories in just a minute and a half. There are no easy melodic resolutions. Instead, he repeats sections, retracing his footsteps before abruptly moving elsewhere, a flourish like an editor’s red pen scrubbing out a sentence. McLean will hit one note and disproportionately sustain it to clean the palette of a previous section of playing. Most thrilling of all is where he spirals up or down a scale to alight on a higher or lower register, as if he’s suddenly stumbled across where the tune should have been all along. You can sense the whirring of the cogs in his mind all the way through his solo, and it has none of the patient logic, easy balance and eloquent punctuation of Tina Brooks’s tenor that follows later.
McLean’s cameo is like a scene from a nouvelle vague or Italian neorealist film where moments of awkwardness or serendipity are a crucial part of the language. His restless solo is particularly poignant because that appointment seems so distant. McLean’s songs about foreign lands were just one part of a body of work in a state of constant search, and he played like he had no time to waste.
Catch up with Derek on his journey: read the first instalment on Lee Morgan's "Search For The New Land" here, the second call on Herbie Hancock's "Oliloqui Valley" here, stop three takes in Yusef Lateef's Jazz 'Round The World, the fourth on Horace Silver’s “The Baghdad Blues”, “The Tokyo Blues” and “The Cape Verdean Blues” and "Saturn" the last stop before this.
“Appointment In Ghana”, from his 1960 album Jackie’s Bag, starts slow, but strikes up a sharp, business-like pace immediately. The piece, a McLean original, sees Blue Mitchell and Tina Brooks joining him, each of them taking solos over a sleek, cruising rhythm section of pianist Kenny Drew, drummer Art Taylor and understated, underrated bassist Paul Chambers. Perhaps the appointment in mind is a spy rendezvous, inspired by wartime film titles like Appointment In Berlin or Appointment In Tokyo; maybe the bag on the album cover, a satchel fastened with thread in a figure of eight, is some sort of diplomatic bag for Ghana, which had gained its independence just a couple of years previously. The urgency of the music fits the cosmopolitan allusions of the title: document hand-offs, undercover meetings, drive-by reconnaissances.
It’s one of several McLean tracks referencing distant places – the same album features “Fidel”, not an easy title choice in the years leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, alongside Tina Brooks’s “Isle Of Java” and (on the CD reissue) “Medina”. But McLean was no exoticist. Between 1959–65 he released more than a dozen albums for Blue Note and the theme and feel of them changes month by month. 1959’s New Soil was full of earthy jams with titles like “Hip Strut”, “Sweet Cakes” or “Greasy”;1961’s Bluesnik explored moods from “Blues Function” to “Cool Green”. Like many jazz musicians, he was writing compositions as quickly as he recorded them, and the variety of titles reflected the speed which he had got them down on tape.
McLean was stuck in the studio for a reason: drug problems caused him to lose his cabaret card in the late 1950s, so without gigs, he made his money doing sessions. And the way he chopped and changed in the early 1960s has a sense of cabin fever, as if McLean was trying to break out, somehow, anyhow. The idea of escape is reflected in the titles of many of his later Blue Note albums – Destination... Out!, Let Freedom Ring, One Step Beyond. They might echo the rhetoric of free jazz, but they are searching for something distinct from it, rooted in the hardbop where McLean cut his teeth.
His pieces, his albums and his life are all marked by brutal contrasts between freedom and constraint. What makes McLean so singular is that freedom is often communicated with the melodic fluidity of old school jazz, and constraint through the terse negotiations of avant garde styles. “Appointment In Ghana”, like “Quadrangle” from the same album, alternates flowing solos with angular group formations. This stimulatingly perverse structure, as if McLean is concocting devilish conundrums to wrestle with, reappears many times in his work, on 1963’s “Marney”, 1965’s “Eco”, and elsewhere.
His solo on “Appointment In Ghana” tells all kinds of stories in just a minute and a half. There are no easy melodic resolutions. Instead, he repeats sections, retracing his footsteps before abruptly moving elsewhere, a flourish like an editor’s red pen scrubbing out a sentence. McLean will hit one note and disproportionately sustain it to clean the palette of a previous section of playing. Most thrilling of all is where he spirals up or down a scale to alight on a higher or lower register, as if he’s suddenly stumbled across where the tune should have been all along. You can sense the whirring of the cogs in his mind all the way through his solo, and it has none of the patient logic, easy balance and eloquent punctuation of Tina Brooks’s tenor that follows later.
McLean’s cameo is like a scene from a nouvelle vague or Italian neorealist film where moments of awkwardness or serendipity are a crucial part of the language. His restless solo is particularly poignant because that appointment seems so distant. McLean’s songs about foreign lands were just one part of a body of work in a state of constant search, and he played like he had no time to waste.
Catch up with Derek on his journey: read the first instalment on Lee Morgan's "Search For The New Land" here, the second call on Herbie Hancock's "Oliloqui Valley" here, stop three takes in Yusef Lateef's Jazz 'Round The World, the fourth on Horace Silver’s “The Baghdad Blues”, “The Tokyo Blues” and “The Cape Verdean Blues” and "Saturn" the last stop before this.
May 1, 2012
The Clippings File: The Jackie McLean Years
by Richard Brody
New Yorker
This week, in the magazine, I’ve written a Critic’s Notebook
about the welcome restoration and reissue of Shirley Clarke’s first
feature film, “The Connection,” from 1961, which is one of the finest
and harshest movies about jazz that exists. (It opens at IFC Center this
Friday.) The movie is based on a play by Jack Gelber, about a group of
junkies—including a quartet of musicians—who are waiting in a New York
loft for their dealer to arrive with their heroin fixes. Needless to
say, plenty of non-musicians (such as the four friends with whom the
musicians hang out in the loft) also shot heroin, but there was also a
terrible link between the modern-jazz milieu and the drug. Charlie
Parker, who figures significantly in the film (one of his records is
played onscreen, and there’s a picture of him on the wall), was an
addict, and many of the musicians who picked up on his musical advances
also picked up the habit. One of the crucial accounts of the subject is
found in the late pianist Hampton Hawes’s autobiography, “Raise Up Off Me,” from 1974 (co-written by Don Asher).
Hawes,
born in 1928 (he died in 1977) was a great bebop pianist who grew up in
Los Angeles and first heard Parker—with astonishment—in 1945: “Those of
us who were affected the strongest felt we’d be willing to do anything
to warm ourselves by that fire, get some of that grease pumping through
our veins. He fucked up all our minds. It was where the ultimate truth
was.” But, Hawes adds, “Bird was out and he was strung, and in order to
be around him you had to contend with that.” And here’s how Hawes
characterizes the situation that turned Parker to drugs:
There should be a monument to him in Washington, D. C.; instead the New York police had refused him a cabaret card, denied him his livelihood. He hated the black-white split and what was happening to his people, couldn’t come up with an answer so he stayed high. Played, fucked, drank, and got high. The way he lived his life he was telling everyone, You don’t dig me, you don’t dig my people, you don’t dig my music, so dig this shit.
Hawes
became a junkie, too, and writes in detail of the adventures and
misadventures of the scramble for a fix—his arrests, the collapse of his
early professional successes into degradation (in the company of other
addicted musicians, such as Sonny Clark),
his years in prison (commuted by President Kennedy), his struggle to
rebuild his career. He also says that, when white musicians asked him
for “the secret,” he “thought back to the church and the locked piano,
all those years strung and tore up, wasting in army dungeons…”
The question of drug use is inseparable from that of users’ legal persecution. (I wrote here recently
about the absurd waste of lives and the horrific inequities that result
from America’s prosecutorial approach toward drug addicts.) There had
been, after all, Prohibition—but Prohibition, for artists, had been a
joke. Alcohol use was rampant in the Roaring Twenties, speakeasies and
bootleggers were elements of the social whirl, and it was not the use of
alcohol but the rise of gangsters that was an element of social
critique (except for D. W. Griffith, whose final film, “The Struggle,”
from 1931, was as vehement and wrenching an anti-alcohol movie as has
ever been made). No one in “The Great Gatsby” worried about being
arrested for having a drink.
Drug
users face not just the physical hazards of addiction but arrest and
imprisonment. One of the bitter ironies of Hawes’s book concerns his
voluntary enrollment in rehab—and his equally voluntary departure from
it when he had a craving to get high. It turned out that he overcame his
habit only due to a ten-year jail sentence (the one that was commuted
by executive clemency, after five years, in 1963). Jackie McLean, the
saxophonist in the movie and also, of course, one of the greatest of
jazz saxophonists in real life spoke about the subject in an interview done in 1996 for Ken Burns’s PBS series “Jazz.” (His 1961 recording “A Fickle Sonance” is on the list of a hundred essential jazz albums that David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, did for this site and on which I lent a hand.)
McLean
says, “A lot of guys in my community that idolized and worshipped
Charlie Parker began to experiment” with heroin; he says that he was an
addict for eighteen years, and that Parker, whom he knew, was dismayed
that McLean had started using:
“You know, Jackie,” he said, “man, you should try to be like Horace Silver and some of the younger musicians that’s coming along today and, and, and, and get yourself together,” he said, “You know, man, you really ought to… I feel responsible for, for what you’re doing,” he said, “and you, you, you need to come on and kick me in the behind for this, you know?”
As for “The Connection,” McLean said,
No, it was like that. It was like that was a real hunk of life, that play. It was way ahead of its time. I mean, it’s… America now is experiencing for the past 30 years this, what this play predicted. ‘Cause see, when we went to London with that play, they couldn’t relate to it because they, they had legalized drugs over there, so they didn’t have anybody waiting in a house for a connection to come. You went to the doctor and got a prescription and went to the drugstore and procured your drugs, you know, you didn’t… And they didn’t have any drug convictions in London. I think when I was in London in 1961, they had 3 drug convictions in the whole country. So, legalized drugs can be an answer for a problem like that. Of course, when you say that in America, people get all excited and think that you going to stand on the streets selling drugs like hot dog stands, or something and it wouldn’t be like that.
In a 1998 interview with Mike Zwerin,
McLean, who died in 2006, said of the play—in which he performed
onstage for four years—“I fell in love with theater then and there. Even
my saxophone playing became a lot more theatrical after that.” I think
he’s right (I wrote here in 2008 and 2009 about a pair of recordings of the score from the play and the movie). He also talked about his life while an addict:
When I was strung out on dope my horn was in the pawn shop most of the time and I was a most confused and troublesome young man. I was constantly on the street, in jail, or in a hospital kicking a habit…. The New York police had snatched my cabaret card and I couldn’t work the clubs any more except with [Charles] Mingus who used to hire me under an assumed name.
In the PBS interview, McLean describes the experience of addiction:
Well, the addiction itself becomes a part of your everyday life so it isn’t a separate life. It is your life. You get up, your body craves the, the drug, it’s, you’re sick. So, you have to go out and get the money and then go and procure the, buy the drugs. And to relieve your body ache, to relieve the pain of, of the sickness that you have when you are addicted to a drug like heroin.
In
effect, drug use became itself a sort of drama, a master plot imposed
on life, one to which all other activities were subordinated. Hawes, in
his book, talks about some of the crazily reckless things he did to
procure drugs and to avoid arrest while buying or using. Neither chord
structures nor tough audiences seem to have figured much compared to the
cruel craving. It’s as if the artist took the whole ugliness—racial
discrimination, public indifference, struggles for money, the century’s
horrors, and their own personal devils—and distilled them into one
Sisyphean agony.
Here’s an early live performance by Hawes,
from 1952, with the short-lived tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray, whom
Hawes recalls fondly in his book. I had the privilege of seeing McLean
perform, in 1975 or ’76, with his sextet (one that included his son,
René McLean, on tenor saxophone), at the Five Spot on St. Mark’s Place.
Above is a tribute to Parker by McLean, recorded in 1992, a few blocks
further to the east.
"Jackie McLean On Mars" (1979)
Jazz documentary Produced, Directed & Edited by Ken Levis:
From the album "Bluesnik". Jackie McLean (Alto saxophone), Freddie Hubbard (trumpet), Kenny Drew (piano), Doug Watkins (bass), Pete La Roca (drums):
Recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Jan. 8, 1961
Personnel:
Freddie Hubbard - Trumpet
Jackie McLean - Alto Sax
Kenny Drew - Piano
Doug Watkins - Bass
Pete LaRoca - Drums
Recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Jan. 8, 1961
Personnel:
Freddie Hubbard - Trumpet
Jackie McLean - Alto Sax
Kenny Drew - Piano
Doug Watkins - Bass
Pete LaRoca - Drums
Jackie McLean - "Hipnosis":
Jackie McLean - "Dr. Jackle" - 1966 - Full Album:
Title: 1. Minor March ( Dr. Jackle ), 2. Melody for Melonae, 12:33 3. Closing, 23:31
Jackie McLean, alto saxophone
Lamont Johnson, piano
Scotty Holt, bass
Billy Higgins, drums
Jackie McLean - "Quadrangle":
"Appointment In Ghana" - Jackie McLean with Woody Shaw, McCoy Tyner, Jack DeJohnette, and Cecil McBee (1988)
Jackie McLean - "Love and hate" (from the album 'Destination...Out!'--1963:
Personnel:
Jackie McLean - alto saxophone
Grachan Moncur III - trombone
Bobby Hutcherson - vibraphone
Larry Ridley - bass
Roy Haynes - drums
JACKIE McLEAN--"Demon's Dance":
Opening
title track from McLean's "Demon's Dance" album.
Jackie McLean (alto
saxophone); Scott Holt (bass); Woody Shaw (trumpet); LaMont Johnson
(piano); Jack DeJohnette (drums).
Recorded at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ (12/22/1967).
Recorded at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ (12/22/1967).
"Melody for Melonae" --Jackie McLean
from the album: Let Freedom Ring
℗ Originally released 1962 by Blue Note Records. All rights reserved.
Composer: Jackie McLean
JACKIE McLEAN-- "Saturday And Sunday":
Opening track from Jackie McLean's "One Step Beyond" album. Recorded at the Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on April 30, 1963. Jackie McLean (alto saxophone); Grachan Moncur III (trombone); Bobby Hutcherson (vibraphone); Eddie Khan (bass); Tony Williams (drums).
Jackie McLean - "Blue Fable":
Jackie MacLean, Woody Shaw "Cool Struttin'" at Mt. Fuji Jazz in 1986:
Jackie
McLean: Alto saxophone
Woody Shaw: Trumpet
Buster Williams: Bass
Billy Higgins: Drums
Ceder
Walton: Piano
Jackie McLean Quartet - 1972 - Full Album:
"Live at Café Montmartre"
Jackie McLean, as.
Kenny Drew,p.
Bo Stief, b.
Alex Riel, dr.
1. Smile
2. Das Dat 12:36
3. Parker's Mood, 25:03
4. Closing, 44:24
Recorded 5 August 1972 Jazzhus Montmartre, Copenhagen
Jackie McLean - 'A Fickle Sonance'--FULL ALBUM:
Jackie McLean – alto saxophone
Tommy Turrentine - trumpet
Sonny Clark - piano
Butch Warren – bass
Billy Higgins - drums
Released: 1961
1. 00:00 ”Five Will Get You Ten”
2. 07:07 ”Subdued”
3. 13:01 ”Sundu”
4. 17:56 ”A Fickle Sonance ”
5. 24:46 ”Enitnerrut ”
6. 30:35 ”Lost ”
Jackie McLean Quintet --"Quadrangle"-- (1988):
Jackie McLean: as
Wallace Roney: tp
Horace Parlan: p
Peter Washington: b
Kenny Washington: ds
Mt. Fuji Jazz Festival with Blue Note
Wallace Roney: tp
Horace Parlan: p
Peter Washington: b
Kenny Washington: ds
Mt. Fuji Jazz Festival with Blue Note
MAL WALDRON・JACKIE McLEAN--"LEFT ALONE" 1986:
MAL WALDRON（p）
JACKIE McLEAN（as）
HERBIE LEWIS（b）
EDDIE MOORE（ds）
JACKIE McLEAN（as）
HERBIE LEWIS（b）
EDDIE MOORE（ds）
September 1,1986 Tokyo
"Little Melonae" (Composition by Jackie McLean)
Jackie McLean: alto saxophone
Walter Davis: piano
Nat Reeves: bass
Ronnie Burrage: drums
Ancona, Italy 1987
Sonny Rollins Remembers Jackie McLean:
Jackie McLean
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Jackie McLean | ||
|---|---|---|
Jackie McLean at Keystone Korner SF 12/82 (Photo: Brian McMillen)
|
||
| Background information | ||
| Birth name | John Lenwood McLean | |
| Born | May 17, 1931 New York City, New York, U.S. | |
| Died | March 31, 2006 (aged 74) Hartford, Connecticut, U.S. | |
| Genres | Bebop, hard bop, modal jazz, progressive jazz, mainstream jazz, post-bop, avant-garde jazz | |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, bandleader, composer, educator, community activist | |
| Instruments | Alto saxophone | |
| Years active | 1951–2004 | |
John Lenwood "Jackie" McLean (May 17, 1931–March 31, 2006) was an American jazz alto saxophonist, composer, bandleader, and educator, and is one of the few musicians to be elected to the DownBeat Hall of Fame in the year of their death.
Contents
Biography
McLean was born in New York City.[1] His father, John Sr., played guitar in Tiny Bradshaw's
orchestra. After his father's death in 1939, Jackie's musical education
was continued by his godfather, his record-store-owning stepfather, and
several noted teachers. He also received informal tutoring from
neighbors Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Charlie Parker. During high school he played in a band with Kenny Drew, Sonny Rollins, and Andy Kirk Jr. (the tenor saxophonist son of Andy Kirk).
Along with Rollins, he played on Miles Davis' Dig album, when he was 20 years old. As a young man McLean also recorded with Gene Ammons, Charles Mingus on the seminal Pithecanthropus Erectus, George Wallington, and as a member of Art Blakey's
Jazz Messengers. McLean joined Blakey after reportedly being punched by
Mingus. Fearing for his life, McLean pulled out a knife and
contemplated using it against Mingus in self-defense. He later stated
that he was grateful that he had not stabbed the bassist.[2]
His early recordings as leader were in the hard bop school. He later became an exponent of modal jazz
without abandoning his foundation in hard bop. Throughout his career he
was known for a distinctive tone, akin to the tenor saxophone and often
described with such adjectives as "bitter-sweet", "piercing", or
"searing", a slightly sharp pitch, and a strong foundation in the blues.
McLean was a heroin addict throughout his early career, and the resulting loss of his New York City cabaret card
forced him to undertake a large number of recording dates;
consequently, he produced an extensive body of recorded work in the
1950s and 1960s. He was under contract with Blue Note Records from 1959 to 1967, having previously recorded for Prestige.
Blue Note offered better pay and more artistic control than other
labels, and his work for this organization is highly regarded and
includes leadership and sideman dates with a wide range of musicians,
including Donald Byrd, Sonny Clark, Lee Morgan, Ornette Coleman, Dexter Gordon, Freddie Redd, Billy Higgins, Freddie Hubbard, Grachan Moncur III, Bobby Hutcherson, Mal Waldron, Tina Brooks and many others.
In 1962, he recorded Let Freedom Ring
for Blue Note. This album was the culmination of attempts he had made
over the years to deal with harmonic problems in jazz, incorporating
ideas from the free jazz developments of Ornette Coleman and the "new breed" which inspired his blending of hard bop with the "new thing": "the search is on, Let Freedom Ring". Let Freedom Ring began a period in which he performed with avant-garde jazz musicians rather than the veteran hard bop performers he had been playing with previously. His adaptation of modal jazz and free jazz innovations to his vision of hard bop made his recordings from 1962 on distinctive.
McLean recorded with dozens of well-known musicians and had a gift for spotting talent. Saxophonist Tina Brooks, trumpeter Charles Tolliver, pianist Larry Willis, trumpeter Bill Hardman, and tubist Ray Draper were among those who benefited from McLean's support in the 1950s and 1960s. Drummers such as Tony Williams, Jack DeJohnette, Lenny White, Michael Carvin, and Carl Allen gained important early experience with McLean.
In 1967, his recording contract, like those of many other progressive
musicians, was terminated by Blue Note's new management. His
opportunities to record promised so little pay that he abandoned
recording as a way to earn a living, concentrating instead on touring.
In 1968, he began teaching at The Hartt School of the University of Hartford.
He later set up the university's African American Music Department (now
the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz) and its Bachelor of Music degree
in Jazz Studies program. His Steeplechase recording New York Calling, made with his stepson René McLean, showed that by 1980 the assimilation of all influences was complete.
In 1970, he and his wife, Dollie McLean, founded the Artists Collective, Inc. of Hartford, an organization dedicated to preserving the art and culture of the African Diaspora.
It provides educational programs and instruction in dance, theatre,
music and visual arts. The membership of McLean's later bands were drawn
from his students in Hartford, including Steve Davis and his son René, who is a jazz saxophonist and flautist as well as a jazz educator. Also in McLean's Hartford group was Mark Berman, the jazz pianist and broadway conductor of Smokey Joe's Cafe and Rent. In 1979 he reached No. 53 in the UK Singles Chart with "Doctor Jackyll and Mister Funk".[3]
He received an American Jazz Masters fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts
in 2001 and numerous other national and international awards. McLean
was the only American jazz musician to found a department of studies at a
University and a community-based organization almost simultaneously.
Each has existed for over three decades.
After a long illness, McLean died on March 31, 2006, in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2006, Jackie McLean was elected to the DownBeat Hall of Fame via the International Critics Poll.
Derek Ansell's full-length biography of McLean, Sugar Free Saxophone (London: Northway Books, 2012), details the story of his career and provides a full analysis of his music on record.
McLean's track, "Jacknife", from the 1965 Blue Note album entitled Jacknife was used in the Sons of Anarchy episode, "Suits of Woe".
Discography
As leader
- Ad Lib
- Presenting Jackie McLean (1955)
- Prestige
- Lights Out! (1956)
- 4, 5 and 6 (1956)
- Jackie's Pal (1956)
- McLean's Scene (1957)
- Jackie McLean & Co. (1957)
- Makin' the Changes (1957)
- A Long Drink of the Blues (1957)
- Strange Blues (1957)
- Alto Madness (1957)
- Jubilee
- Fat Jazz (1957)
- The Complete Jubilee Sessions (Lone Hill Jazz, 2008)
- Blue Note
- New Soil (1959)
- Swing, Swang, Swingin' (1959)
- Capuchin Swing (1960)
- Jackie's Bag (1959–60)
- Bluesnik (1961)
- A Fickle Sonance (1961)
- Let Freedom Ring (1962)
- Tippin' the Scales (1962)
- Vertigo (1962–63)
- One Step Beyond (1963)
- Destination... Out! (1963)
- It's Time! (1964)
- Action Action Action (1964)
- Right Now! (1965)
- Jacknife (1965)
- Consequence (1965, released 1979)
- Hipnosis (1967)
- New and Old Gospel (1967)
- 'Bout Soul (1967)
- Demon's Dance (1967)
- One Night with Blue Note Preserved Volume 2 (1985) with Woody Shaw, McCoy Tyner, Cecil McBee and Jack DeJohnette
- McCoy Tyner – It's About Time (1985)
- Junko Onishi – Hat Trick (Somethin' Else (J), 1996)
- Fire & Love (Somethin' Else, 1998)
- Nature Boy (2000)
- SteepleChase
- Dr. Jackle (1966 [1979])
- Live at Montmartre (1972)
- Ode to Super (1973)
- A Ghetto Lullaby (1974)
- The Meeting with Dexter Gordon (1974)
- The Source with Dexter Gordon (1974)
- Antiquity (1975) with Michael Carvin
- New York Calling (1975) with the Cosmic Brotherhood
- Contour (1980)
- Dynasty (1990)
- Others
- The Great Jazz Trio – New Wine in Old Bottles (East Wind (J), 1978)
- Monuments (RCA, 1979)
- The Jackie Mac Attack Live (1991)
- Rhythm of the Earth (Dreyfus, 1992)
As sideman
With Gene Ammons
- The Happy Blues (Prestige, 1956)
- Jammin' with Gene (Prestige, 1956)
- Funky (Prestige, 1957)
- Jammin' in Hi Fi with Gene Ammons (Prestige, 1957)
With Art Blakey
- Hard Bop (Columbia, 1956)
- Originally (Columbia, 1956 [1982])
- Drum Suite (Columbia, 1956)
- Ritual (Pacific Jazz, 1957)
- Tough! (Cadet, 1957 [1966])
With Kenny Burrell
- 2 Guitars with Jimmy Raney (Prestige, 1957)
With Donald Byrd
- 2 Trumpets (Prestige, 1956) – with Art Farmer
- Off to the Races (Blue Note, 1958)
- Fuego (Blue Note, 1959)
- Byrd in Flight (Blue Note, 1960)
With Sonny Clark
- Cool Struttin' (Blue Note, 1958)
With Miles Davis
- Dig (Prestige, 1951)
- Quintet / Sextet (Prestige, 1955)
With Walter Davis Jr.
- Davis Cup (Blue Note, 1959)
With Kenny Dorham
- Inta Somethin' (1961)
- Matador (1962)
With Ray Draper
- Tuba Sounds (Prestige, 1957)
With Dizzy Gillespie
- Bird Songs: The Final Recordings (Telarc, 1992)
- To Bird with Love (Telarc, 1992)
With Charles Mingus
- Pithecanthropus Erectus (Atlantic, 1956)
- Blues and Roots (Atlantic, 1958)
With Hank Mobley
- Mobley's Message (Blue Note, 1956)
- Hi Voltage (Blue Note, 1967)
With Grachan Moncur III
- Evolution (Blue Note, 1963)
With Lee Morgan
- Lee-Way (Blue Note, 1960)
- Tom Cat (Blue Note, 1964)
- Cornbread (Blue Note, 1965)
- Infinity (Blue Note, 1965)
- Charisma (Blue Note, 1966)
- The Sixth Sense (Blue Note, 1967)
With Freddie Redd
- The Connection (1960)
- Shades of Redd (Blue Note, 1960)
- Redd's Blues (Blue Note, 1961)
With Jimmy Smith
- Open House (Blue Note, 1960)
- Plain Talk (Blue Note, 1960 [1968])
With Art Taylor
- Taylor's Wailers (Prestige, 1957)
With Mal Waldron
- Mal/2 (Prestige, 1957)
- Like Old Time (1976)
- Left Alone '86 (1986)
With Jack Wilson
- Easterly Winds (Blue Note, 1967)
With Michael Carvin
- Antiquity (1975)
Filmography
- The Connection, as himself (Dir. Shirley Clarke)
- Jackie McLean on Mars (1980), as himself (Dir. Ken Levis) http://vimeo.com/12192828
- Ken Burns' Jazz (2000), as himself (Dir. Ken Burns)
References
- Roberts, David (2006). British Hit Singles & Albums (19th ed.). London: Guinness World Records Limited. p. 341. ISBN 1-904994-10-5.
Further reading
- Derek Ansell, Sugar Free Saxophone: The Life and Music of Jackie McLean. London: Northway Publications, 2012. ISBN 978-0-9557888-6-4
- Guillaume Belhomme, Jackie McLean. Nantes: Lenka lente, 2014. ISBN 978-2-9545845-4-6
External links
- Jackie McLean complete discography from Music City
- Jackie McLean at Find a Grave
- Allmusic
- NEA Jazz Masters
- Official history of the Artists Collective Inc.
- History of the Artists Collective Inc.
- Jackie McLean on the Hard Bop Home Page
- Obituary in The Guardian (London) by John Fordham, April 3, 2006
- "Blues for Jackie," Obituary by Owen McNally in Hartford Courant (Hartford, CT) April 1, 2006
- New England Jazz History Database – Audio Interviews
- Jazz Portraits from the WGBH Archives: Jackie McLean a radio documentary from WGBH Radio Boston
- Jackie McLean on Mars – the complete film
