Makin’ The Changes Record Vinyl Jackie McLean New Jazz NJ-8231 https://youtu.be/oe_IJBzcIO4 Original Liner Notes: "I've been on the scene since 1951," Jackie McLean was saying recently, "and although I know I'm not as famous as some other guys, I do think it's ironic that the first article ever written on me was in a British, not an American, magazine, and it didn't happen until 1959." Jackie was referring to Michael James. Jackie McLean—An Introduction, which appeared in the December, 1959, Jazz Monthly. Makin' The Changes, the title of this album, refers, of course, to a jazzman's capacity to improvise on the right chord progressions of a tune and also to select those combinations of notes that are not only harmonically correct but are also most imaginative and evocative. He is not only thoroughly skilled in change-making, but as Michael James pointed out in his article, "As the years have passed, his playing has taken on a wide melodic sense that underlines his constant devotion to his art. There has been an encouraging and gradual improvement in the quality of his choice of phrase, and a finer melodic perception has been gained with no harm done to the emphatic verve that has always been the hallmark of his style." Jackie was born in New York on May 17, 1952. His father, John McLean, had been a guitarist with Tiny Bradshaw. His mother gave him a saxophone when he was 13, and he became deeply involved in jazz from that point on. Growing up in the Washington Heights section (around 158th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue), McLean's neighborhood friends included Sonny Rollins and Arthur Taylor. Mclean started to attend the BenjaminFranklin High School, but Rollins had graduated the year Jackie came. Feeling without sufficiently empathic comrades, Jackie left after a year and switchedto the Theodore Roosevelt High School in the Bronx. A remarkable player whom he came to know there was Andy Kirk, Jr., who is no longer active in music. "Bird," McLean recalls, "used to come to Andy's house and just listen." In McLean's own development, Bud Powell was a key initial influence. "Bud made me play by ear and taught me a lot about chords. Sometimes I'd come by his house on a Friday afternoon after school, and we'd play, off and on, until Sunday. He also revealed much about himself to me, but I was only about 17 then, and I didn't understand all I heard. It was McLean who started the late Ritchie Powell playingpiano. "You're Bud Powell's brother," he used to explode. "How can you not play?" Miles Davis gave Jackie his first major league job in 1950, although he had previously played in Sonny Rollins' neighborhood combo. Jackie has since been with George Wallington, Charlie Mingus, and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers; and for the past eight months, as this is written, he has had an acting-player role in Jack Gelber's The Connection, a brilliant and unsentimental probing of the addicts' world, produced at The Living Theatre in New York. Jackie plays with biting passion on stage, although he is getting very bugged at having to play roughly the same music night after night for so long. As an actor, he's displayed unexpected skill, playing his role with sardonic, deadpan effectiveness. This album is made up of two different sessions. The larger group includes Curtis Fuller, trombone; Webster Young, trumpet; Gil Coggins, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; and Louis Hayes, drums. The quartet tracks have Mal Waldron, bassist Arthur Phipps, and Arthur Taylor Coleman. Hawkins Bean and the Boys was first recorded by Hawkins on Sonora in 1946 with Milt Jackson, Fats Navarro, J. J. Johnson, and Max Roach. It's based, according to tune detective Martin Williams, on Lover Come Back to Me. Jackie's playing has a characteristic urgency and strikingly alive sense of time; Waldron, by contrast, is more thoughtful and contained and complements McLean's burning impatience. Arthur Taylor is his usual non-diffident self, and Arthur Phipps's bass is warm and dependable. Phipps, by the way, is also from the same neighborhood as Rollins, Taylor, and McLean. What's New opens with a short lyrical solo by Webster Young, a Washington trumpet player who has been encouraged by McLean. There's also a brief comment by the mellow-toned trombonist, Curtis Fuller, currently a member of the Art Farmer-Benny Golson Jazztet. It's interesting to contrast both the musical temperaments and timbres here of Young and Fuller in their larger solos, on the one hand, and McLean on the other. Jackie's tone (which has become rounder in recent years) is nonetheless still piercingly impassioned, and his approach to a solo has always been that of someone who has only this one solo left before Armageddon. Fuller and Young, by contrast, while emotionally committed to the music, aren't as embroiled. There's a robust solo by Paul Chambers and a clean-lined, functional statement by Coggins; Louis Hayes is bristlingly alert. I Never Knew is taken briskly and played incisively. I Hear A Rhapsody begins and ends with an introspective McLean. In between, he wails loosely, with Mal Waldron contributing a lucid solo. "Mal," McLean points out, "is a beautiful accompanist, as you can hear here. He leaves room for the soloist. I gave Mal his first record date and have always been attracted by his melodic skill as a writer and player." The angular Jackie's Ghost contains intelligent solos by all, with perhaps the most arresting being Paul Chambers' bowed flight. Chasin' the Bird, a bop standard, is played with the kind of unselfconscious conviction that the jazzmen of Jackie's generation possess almost by osmosis when working with the material with which they grew up. After also making this point, Michael James went on to say that the primary characteristic of McLean's own playing is "its utter frankness." There are no concessions to good taste in the form of evasions of the less attractive moods. McLean, probably unconsciously, certainly with pretense, has brought a heroic touch to the music of his place and his time; no other word better illustrates the stabbing sense of purpose that comes through even in the confines of a four-bar exchange. Nor does this have anything to do with the false charm of the conventional hero, that tight-lipped cynosure of every eye. McLean's is a quality that carries with it all the hurt and humiliation the sensitive spirit is prey to in a hostile society..." I find James's definition of a "hero" in this sense—the heroine/dualistic butcher—does project some of the harrowing quality in McLean's playing. Jackie fortunately does not have a "hero" image of himself except as anyone does who is involved in self-expression and aware of mortality. Currently he is concerned, as most jazzmen are doomed to be, "with the fight to stay as modern as I can be, and even more so. Jazz has really taken a change in the past few years, especially because of Coltrane, and Coltrane comes through Monk. I go to Monk's house quite often, and he's helping me. He'll play a chord, and then I'll make a run through that chord. Monk will then show me the other possibilities I overlooked." Jackie, in short, is continuing to make changes, as all jazzmen have to do, one way or another, to keep getting themselves heard. My own feeling is that Jackie is just reaching a stage where the accumulated experience and personal anguish he's known are fusing into a musical message that is going to be unmistakably significant even to those who write feature articles on jazzmen. -Nat Hentoff, Co-Editor, The Jazz Review
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Makin’ The Changes Record Vinyl Jackie McLean New Jazz NJ-8231
https://youtu.be/oe_IJBzcIO4
Original Liner Notes:
"I've been on the scene since 1951," Jackie McLean was saying recently, "and although I know I'm not as famous as some other guys, I do think it's ironic that the first article ever written on me was in a British, not an American, magazine, and it didn't happen until 1959." Jackie was referring to Michael James. Jackie McLean—An Introduction, which appeared in the December, 1959, Jazz Monthly.
Makin' The Changes, the title of this album, refers, of course, to a jazzman's capacity to improvise on the right chord progressions of a tune and also to select those combinations of notes that are not only harmonically correct but are also most imaginative and evocative. He is not only thoroughly skilled in change-making, but as Michael James pointed out in his article, "As the years have passed, his playing has taken on a wide melodic sense that underlines his constant devotion to his art. There has been an encouraging and gradual improvement in the quality of his choice of phrase, and a finer melodic perception has been gained with no harm done to the emphatic verve that has always been the hallmark of his style."
Jackie was born in New York on May 17, 1952. His father, John McLean, had been a guitarist with Tiny Bradshaw. His mother gave him a saxophone when he was 13, and he became deeply involved in jazz from that point on. Growing up in the Washington Heights section (around 158th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue), McLean's neighborhood friends included Sonny Rollins and Arthur Taylor. Mclean started to attend the BenjaminFranklin High School, but Rollins had graduated the year Jackie came. Feeling without sufficiently empathic comrades, Jackie left after a year and switchedto the Theodore Roosevelt High School in the Bronx.
A remarkable player whom he came to know there was Andy Kirk, Jr., who is no longer active in music.
"Bird," McLean recalls, "used to come to Andy's house and just listen." In McLean's own development, Bud Powell was a key initial influence. "Bud made me play by ear and taught me a lot about chords. Sometimes I'd come by his house on a Friday afternoon after school, and we'd play, off and on, until Sunday. He also revealed much about himself to me, but I was only about 17 then, and I didn't understand all I heard. It was McLean who started the late Ritchie Powell playingpiano. "You're Bud Powell's brother," he used to explode. "How can you not play?"
Miles Davis gave Jackie his first major league job in 1950, although he had previously played in Sonny Rollins' neighborhood combo. Jackie has since been with George Wallington, Charlie Mingus, and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers; and for the past eight months, as this is written, he has had an acting-player role in Jack Gelber's The Connection, a brilliant and unsentimental probing of the addicts' world, produced at The Living Theatre in New York. Jackie plays with biting passion on stage, although he is getting very bugged at having to play roughly the same music night after night for so long. As an actor, he's displayed unexpected skill, playing his role with sardonic, deadpan effectiveness.
This album is made up of two different sessions. The larger group includes Curtis Fuller, trombone; Webster Young, trumpet; Gil Coggins, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; and Louis Hayes, drums. The quartet tracks have Mal Waldron, bassist Arthur Phipps, and Arthur Taylor Coleman. Hawkins Bean and the Boys was first recorded by Hawkins on Sonora in 1946 with Milt Jackson, Fats Navarro, J. J. Johnson, and Max Roach. It's based, according to tune detective Martin Williams, on Lover Come Back to Me. Jackie's playing has a characteristic urgency and strikingly alive sense of time; Waldron, by contrast, is more thoughtful and contained and complements McLean's burning impatience. Arthur Taylor is his usual non-diffident self, and Arthur Phipps's bass is warm and dependable. Phipps, by the way, is also from the same neighborhood as Rollins, Taylor, and McLean.
What's New opens with a short lyrical solo by Webster Young, a Washington trumpet player who has been encouraged by McLean. There's also a brief comment by the mellow-toned trombonist, Curtis Fuller, currently a member of the Art Farmer-Benny Golson Jazztet. It's interesting to contrast both the musical temperaments and timbres here of Young and Fuller in their larger solos, on the one hand, and McLean on the other. Jackie's tone (which has become rounder in recent years) is nonetheless still piercingly impassioned, and his approach to a solo has always been that of someone who has only this one solo left before Armageddon.
Fuller and Young, by contrast, while emotionally committed to the music, aren't as embroiled. There's a robust solo by Paul Chambers and a clean-lined, functional statement by Coggins; Louis Hayes is bristlingly alert. I Never Knew is taken briskly and played incisively.
I Hear A Rhapsody begins and ends with an introspective McLean. In between, he wails loosely, with Mal Waldron contributing a lucid solo. "Mal," McLean points out, "is a beautiful accompanist, as you can hear here. He leaves room for the soloist. I gave Mal his first record date and have always been attracted by his melodic skill as a writer and player."
The angular Jackie's Ghost contains intelligent solos by all, with perhaps the most arresting being Paul Chambers' bowed flight. Chasin' the Bird, a bop standard, is played with the kind of unselfconscious conviction that the jazzmen of Jackie's generation possess almost by osmosis when working with the material with which they grew up. After also making this point, Michael James went on to say that the primary characteristic of McLean's own playing is "its utter frankness." There are no concessions to good taste in the form of evasions of the less attractive moods. McLean, probably unconsciously, certainly with pretense, has brought a heroic touch to the music of his place and his time; no other word better illustrates the stabbing sense of purpose that comes through even in the confines of a four-bar exchange. Nor does this have anything to do with the false charm of the conventional hero, that tight-lipped cynosure of every eye. McLean's is a quality that carries with it all the hurt and humiliation the sensitive spirit is prey to in a hostile society..."
I find James's definition of a "hero" in this sense—the heroine/dualistic butcher—does project some of the harrowing quality in McLean's playing. Jackie fortunately does not have a "hero" image of himself except as anyone does who is involved in self-expression and aware of mortality. Currently he is concerned, as most jazzmen are doomed to be, "with the fight to stay as modern as I can be, and even more so. Jazz has really taken a change in the past few years, especially because of Coltrane, and Coltrane comes through Monk. I go to Monk's house quite often, and he's helping me. He'll play a chord, and then I'll make a run through that chord. Monk will then show me the other possibilities I overlooked."
Jackie, in short, is continuing to make changes, as all jazzmen have to do, one way or another, to keep getting themselves heard. My own feeling is that Jackie is just reaching a stage where the accumulated experience and personal anguish he's known are fusing into a musical message that is going to be unmistakably significant even to those who write feature articles on jazzmen.
-Nat Hentoff,
Co-Editor, The Jazz Review
Recording, Rudy Van Gelder
6 days ago | [YT] | 46