On June 21, 1969, at the third Montreux Jazz Festival, Les McCann's trio walked onto the stage of the Montreux Casino on Lake Geneva with two extra horn players. McCann played piano and sang, with Leroy Vinnegar on bass and Donald Dean on drums completing his trio. Eddie Harris played tenor saxophone. Benny Bailey, an American who had lived in Europe for years, was on trumpet. The festival's organizers taped the set. Atlantic Records bought the tapes afterward for less than a hundred dollars and released them that year as Swiss Movement, credited to Les McCann and Eddie Harris, and the record went to No. 1 on Billboard's jazz album chart.
The festival itself was only two years old. Claude Nobs, Géo Voumard and René Langel had started it in 1967 as a three-day event, almost entirely jazz, and they had substantial help from Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun of Atlantic. The 1969 edition ran from June 18 to 22 at the Casino, the building that burned down during a Frank Zappa concert in December 1971 and gave Deep Purple the subject of "Smoke on the Water." Nesuhi Ertegun is credited as a producer of Swiss Movement with Bob Emmer. The bargain price makes the record sound like a stroke of luck, but Atlantic had backed the festival from its first year, and both McCann and Harris were Atlantic artists by 1969.
How prepared the band was depends on who is telling it. WRTI, in a 2017 piece on the performance, says the musicians had never played together and had not rehearsed. McCann, interviewed by Michael Bourne for WBGO, said it was the first time the group played together, but that he and Harris had rehearsed and the rest of the band arrived a day late. A later review of the album describes McCann's trio and Harris's quartet as booked separately, with Harris sitting in. What every account agrees on is that this quintet had not existed before that night.
The trumpet chair was filled at the last minute. McCann told Bourne that he and Harris went around the town's jam sessions looking for a horn player. They found one and asked him to sit in, mentioning that they were "getting ready to make a record" for Atlantic. The man was Clark Terry, and his answer, as McCann told it, was "No, I don't want to do it." McCann called his telling "just the lite version of the story." The trumpeter they found instead was Bailey. Born in Cleveland in 1925, he had stayed in Europe after a tour with Lionel Hampton, and had worked in Sweden with Harry Arnold's big band, with Quincy Jones's orchestra, and with the Kenny Clarke and Francy Boland Big Band. WBGO dates his move abroad to 1948. Wikipedia notes that Swiss Movement was not his usual style of music, which makes his playing on it more impressive.
McCann was thirty-three that summer. He was born Leslie Coleman McCann in Lexington, Kentucky, on September 23, 1935, taught himself piano almost entirely, joined the Navy at seventeen, and won a singing contest in the service that put him on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956. His trio's first job, at the Purple Onion in San Francisco in 1959, was accompanying the singer Gene McDaniels, and they toured together. That old connection matters here, because McDaniels wrote "Compared to What." McCann went on to Los Angeles and Pacific Jazz, then to Limelight, then to Atlantic, where he worked with the producer Joel Dorn. His Atlantic album Much Les came out in 1969. He is also credited with bringing Roberta Flack to the label.
"Compared to What" had been around for three years. McDaniels copyrighted it in 1966, and McCann recorded it that year as a ballad on Les McCann Plays the Hits. Flack recorded it in February 1969 for her debut album, First Take, and it was her first single. Wikipedia notes that McCann was managing her that year. So when he sang it at Montreux four months later, the song had already been through his hands as a slow number and through Flack's as a studio performance, and what he did with it that night was something else again: WRTI describes him singing it as a raspy rant. The lyrics are social commentary. They go after the Vietnam War and Lyndon Johnson, question how the government treated dissent, and set the ideal of equality against the facts of poverty and hypocrisy. By June 1969 Richard Nixon had been president for five months and the war was still going, so the song had not gone out of date.
Harris brought his own history. Born in Chicago on October 20, 1934, he studied under Walter Dyett at DuSable High School and then at Roosevelt University. His jazz version of the theme from Exodus, on his first Vee-Jay album in 1961, got heavy radio play and reached No. 16 on the R&B chart. He moved to Atlantic in 1965, and in the late 1960s he took up the electric Varitone saxophone and the electric piano. The Electrifying Eddie Harris reached No. 2 on the R&B album chart and earned a Grammy nomination, and its "Listen Here" went to No. 11 R&B and No. 45 on the Hot 100. He was already a hitmaker on the same label as McCann. His "Cold Duck Time" follows "Compared to What" on the album and runs 6:31.
"Compared to What" is the track I put on at the start of a forty-minute drive at seven in the morning. It runs 8:41, and it does not take any time to warm up. The live sound is part of it. A later review of the vinyl reissue notes that the crowd noise is still prominent, and the audience is very much in the performance. I do not hear it as a careful record, and I do not think it was meant as one.
The rest of the album is McCann's writing: "Kathleen's Theme," "You Got It in Your Soulness" and "The Generation Gap," the last of them the longest track on the album at 8:45. A 1996 CD reissue added Vinnegar's "Kaftan." The original LP was Atlantic SD 1537.
The numbers were extraordinary for a jazz record. Besides the No. 1 jazz placing it reached No. 2 on the R&B album chart and No. 29 on the pop LP chart, and NPR reports that it spent thirty-eight weeks on the Billboard 200. Atlantic put out "Compared to What" as a single, and its chart record was modest by comparison: No. 35 on the R&B chart, four weeks on the Hot 100 according to NPR, and two weeks on the Cash Box Top 100 in January 1970, peaking at No. 96. Both the album and the single still sold in the millions, and the album was nominated for a Grammy for best jazz performance by a small group.
Not every critic was persuaded. Harvey Pekar reviewed the album for DownBeat when it came out and called it "cliche-ridden." Later writers have mostly gone the other way. Richie Unterberger at AllMusic called it one of the most popular soul jazz albums of all time and one of the best, and a Billboard writer in 2006 credited it with putting Montreux on the map as a place to make live records. Atlantic recorded McCann there again in 1972, and the pair made a studio sequel, Second Movement, released in 1971.
McCann died in Los Angeles on December 29, 2023, at eighty-eight, and "Compared to What" had long since become his signature.