Les McCann

February 4, 1960, United Recording in Hollywood, and the whole album went down in one day. Piano trio, no horns, no overdubs, thirty nine minutes, with Leroy Vinnegar on bass and Ron Jefferson on drums. Note the billing while you are here: the jacket reads Les McCann Ltd. rather than Les McCann, and the title itself varies: Wikipedia calls it Les McCann Ltd. Plays the Truth, while Discogs lists the 1960 original pressing simply as The Truth, with Plays the Truth on a later repress.

Four of the eight titles are his own, including "Vacushna" and "Fish This Week", and the one that stops you is not his at all. Vinnegar's "For Carl Perkins" is an elegy for the Los Angeles pianist who died in March 1958, and the trio plays it like men who knew him, which they did. McCann's touch is already finished on this record: heavy left hand, gospel cadences, phrases that land on the beat instead of dancing around it.

What makes it work is how little he is trying to be a bebop pianist. There are no long strings of eighth notes. He plays figures, repeats them, and builds a groove out of the repetition, which is what the whole soul jazz movement went on to do for the next decade. Frank Evans wrote the notes, Ivan Nagy shot the cover, and AllMusic gives it four stars.

One caveat, because credits get repeated carelessly. Richard Bock ran Pacific Jazz and Wikipedia lists him as producer, but Discogs shows no producer on the original PJ-2 jacket and no engineer is named anywhere by anybody, so treat Bock as label-attributed rather than printed. There is a stereo issue from the same year, ST-2, if you would rather have the wider picture.

Three completely different records fighting over one LP, and that is a description rather than a complaint. A Gerald Wilson big band on some tracks, a string section with Dolo Coker added on rhythm piano on others, and one organ combo track dropped into the middle of the sequence. The only constant is the trio of McCann, Herbie Lewis on bass and Ron Jefferson on drums. Four sessions across 1961 fed it, at Rex Productions in Hollywood and Pacific Jazz Studios in Los Angeles.

Look at who Wilson had in that band. Teddy Edwards and Harold Land on tenors, Buddy Collette and Charles Lloyd on altos, Jack Nimitz on baritone, and Lloyd is playing alto and flute here rather than the tenor he became known for, which is how Wikipedia credits him. That is a serious Los Angeles horn section lined up behind a piano player who had decided he wanted to sing on his own record.

"Next Spring" is that track, a one-off cut at Pacific Jazz Studios in March 1961 with Webster on tenor, Holmes on organ, George Freeman on guitar and Lawrence "Tricky" Lofton on trombone. It sits in the middle of the album with no explanation attached and it is the most alive stretch on the whole thing, which is a problem for everything sitting around it.

Three stars from me. Ron Wynn at AllMusic calls it a super set and gives it four, and I hear the argument, but the voice is not yet the instrument it became by Montreux and the settings keep changing before anything has time to settle. Get the billing right if you go looking: the jacket reads Les McCann, Orchestra Under The Direction Of Gerald Wilson, so this is not a McCann solo credit. Vicki Arnold wrote the notes and co-wrote one of the tunes.

New Year's Eve, 1965, at Shelly Manne's own club in Hollywood, with Wally Heider running the tape. That is about as good a combination of room and engineer as the West Coast could offer at the time. It is also a different trio from the Pacific Jazz records: Victor Gaskin on bass and Paul Humphrey on drums, the pair already on Beaux J. Pooboo earlier in 1965, with Leroy Vinnegar and Ron Jefferson both gone. Recorded on the last night of 1965 and issued in 1966 on Limelight, not on Pacific Jazz.

Five of the eight titles are McCann's, including one called "She Broke My Heart (And I Broke Her Jaw)" and a closing theme called "How's Your Mother", which gives you a rough idea of what the between-tune patter must have been like. A club audience does something to this band. The tempos sit looser than on the studio records and the vamps run longer, because nobody in the room is watching a clock.

Eugene Chadbourne at AllMusic gives it four stars and calls it one of the best things from McCann's early acoustic days, which is the right frame for it. Almost everything after this gets electric, arranged, produced, or all three at once. This is the last long look at him as a straight jazz pianist playing in front of people, and he is extremely good at it.

A correction, because this album gets misdated constantly, including on lists that ought to know better. It is 1965 into 1966, and Limelight rather than Pacific Jazz. The 1961 Pacific Jazz live album people are thinking of is a different record entirely, Les McCann Ltd. in San Francisco, cut at the Jazz Workshop in December 1960. Mono is LM 82036 and stereo is LS 86036, in the gatefold sleeve Limelight was known for.

The Atlantic debut, and the record that sets up everything that follows. Cut across three days in July 1968 plus one November date, with Joel Dorn producing and Adrian Barber engineering, and crucially with Leroy Vinnegar back on bass and Donald Dean on drums. That is the exact rhythm section that walked onstage at Montreux eleven months later. Whatever Swiss Movement does, this album is already doing a version of it in a studio.

William Fischer wrote and conducted the strings, and the personnel holds a detail people miss every time. Ron Carter plays cello on this date, not bass. He is one of three cellists in Fischer's section while Vinnegar keeps the bass chair. Victor Pantoja is on congas and Willie Bobo on timbales, both on "Doin' That Thing", "Burnin' Coal" and "Love for Sale".

AllMusic gives it five stars and calls it an underrated classic, praising the strings and the Latin percussion for enhancing the trio's groove rather than smothering it. That is the right test for this kind of production and it passes. "With These Hands" got pulled as a single in March 1969 backed with "Burnin' Coal".

Four stars from me rather than five, and only because the Montreux record does these same things with an audience in the room and gains something a studio cannot supply. Still, if you only know McCann through "Compared to What", this is the album to hear next. It is where the sound was assembled, piece by piece, with a producer and a budget and nobody yet expecting a hit.

June 21, 1969, one set, at the Casino de Montreux, and the horn players had never played with this trio before they walked out. Eddie Harris and Benny Bailey were both new to the band, and according to Richie Unterberger at AllMusic, Harris was not even handed the music. What comes out of that is the least polished and most alive record on this page. The billing is joint too: Les McCann and Eddie Harris, not McCann with a guest.

Atlantic did not record it. The festival's own organisers taped the set and Atlantic bought the tapes afterward for a fee under a hundred dollars, which is why no engineer appears anywhere on the jacket. Then it went to number one on Billboard's jazz album chart, number two on the R&B chart and number 29 on the pop LP chart, and picked up a Grammy nomination for best jazz performance by a small group. Under a hundred dollars.

"Compared to What" is the reason, and it is not a McCann tune. Gene McDaniels wrote it, McCann had already recorded it as a ballad on a 1966 Limelight album, and Roberta Flack opened her debut with it the same year as Montreux. Here it turns into something else: a protest song sung by a piano player over a rhythm section that will not let up, with Harris blowing across the top of a lyric he had never heard in his life.

Opinion was not unanimous at the time. Harvey Pekar panned it in DownBeat in February 1970 as cliche-ridden, and I understand the objection without sharing it, because the looseness he heard as sloppiness is exactly what the document is for. Two buying notes: "Kaftan" is a 1996 CD bonus and is not on the 1969 LP, and Discogs shows several near-identical 1969 US pressings, so first-pressing claims need deadwax evidence rather than the catalog number.

The studio follow-up, cut January 25, 1971 at Atlantic Studios, roughly nineteen months after Montreux, and the only other album these two made together. The billing flips: the original pressing files it as Eddie Harris and Les McCann, with Harris first. Donald Dean is still on drums and almost nothing else carries over. No Leroy Vinnegar, no Benny Bailey in the Wikipedia credits, and McCann on Fender Rhodes rather than acoustic piano.

Arif Mardin produced and handled the remix, and the room fills up with Atlantic's house players: Cornell Dupree on guitar, Jerry Jemmott and Bernard Purdie in the rhythm section, Jimmy Rowser on bass, Buck Clarke on percussion, and Judy Clay and Cissy Houston among the singers. It sounds like an Atlantic soul session with two jazz musicians standing in the middle of it, which is more or less exactly what it is.

Three stars here too. It got panned on release, AllMusic later reassessed it as a gem that keeps inspiring new soul jazz musicians and gives it four, and the Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide splits the difference at three. My problem is not the polish itself, it is that the polish is doing the work. Harris and McCann were interesting together because nobody was managing them, and here somebody clearly is, from the string chart down.

One credit note, since the horns are worth a sentence. Discogs credits Benny Bailey on trumpet on the original SD 1583, while Wikipedia does not list him and leaves the horn section unidentified, so this page keeps him out of the personnel block. The strings are anonymous in every source too. Discogs also credits Harris with electric saxophone alongside tenor; he was playing amplified in this period, but which tracks is undocumented.

Three tracks fill the entire album. "The Lovers" runs 26:02, "Beaux J. Poo Boo" 13:06 and "Poo Pye McGoochie (and His Friends)" 12:30, and all three were cut on one day, May 4, 1971, at Atlantic Recording Studios. Not three sessions, one. Whatever you make of the results, the logistics alone deserve a moment of respect, because getting thirteen musicians to agree on anything for fifty minutes is not a small thing.

The room held three drummers going at once in Donald Dean, Alphonse Mouzon and Bernard Purdie, plus Buck Clarke and Ralph MacDonald on percussion, two electric pianists in McCann and Jodie Christian, two guitarists in David Spinozza and Cornell Dupree, and Yusef Lateef bringing tenor, oboe, flute, pneumatic flute, plum blossom and temple bells. Corky Hale plays harp. McCann is on piano, electric piano and Moog, and he arranged and conducted the whole thing.

It should be a mess. It is not, largely because McCann builds on repetition rather than on solos. "The Lovers" moves the way a long groove record moves, small changes stacked up over a long time, and the percussion crowd stops sounding like a crowd about four minutes in. AllMusic gives it four stars and points it at fusion listeners, which is fair enough and undersells how physical the thing actually is.

Two notes for the shelf. The album is 1972 and the session is May 1971, so label it accordingly and ignore any list that folds the recording into the release year. And "Beaux J. Poo Boo" is a re-recording: McCann had already used the title for a 1965 Limelight album, spelled Beaux J. Pooboo on that jacket. Joel Dorn produced, Jimmy Douglass recorded it, and the remix was done at Fred Catero's room in San Francisco.

No horns, no guitar, no second keyboard player. McCann plays every keyboard part on this record plus drums and timpani himself, and the only other people in the room are Jimmy Rowser on bass and three percussionists in Donald Dean, Buck Clarke and Ralph MacDonald. November 1972 at Regent Sound Studios in New York, recorded and remixed in the same room. AllMusic gives it four and a half stars and calls it one of the first jazz albums built this heavily on electronics.

The track list shows how it was built: the eleven titles are two suites, side one as "Songs From Boston" and side two as "Songs From My Childhood". Once you know that, the album stops sounding like a pile of sketches and starts sounding like two long pieces, which is what it is.

The synthesizer here is an ARP rather than the Moog from Invitation to Openness, and the jacket thanks Tom Oberheim by name. What strikes me is how little the electronics get used for texture and how much they get used for parts. McCann writes lines for the synth the way he would write lines for a horn player, which was not the common instinct in 1972 and is the main reason this dates better than most keyboard records of the period.

Two cautions for the buyer. The release year is 1973: Wikipedia, the jacket copyright and the Discogs listing of the US Atlantic pressing all agree. Recorded 1972 either way. And on the sampling, Wikipedia's "Teardrop" article says Massive Attack built that song's beat from a sped-up sample of "Sometimes I Cry", and Slick Rick sampled it on "Behind Bars".