Compared to What is eight and a half minutes long and it does not warm up. Les McCann starts singing about thirty seconds in, the band is already cooking, and by the second verse the crowd is clapping along. Put that on at the start of a forty minute drive and the drive is handled.
Here is the part that gets me every time. Almost none of these guys had played together before that night.
Swiss Movement was recorded June 21, 1969 at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Les McCann had his trio with him, Leroy Vinnegar on bass and Donald Dean on drums. Eddie Harris was there on tenor. Benny Bailey was on trumpet. Harris and Bailey had not rehearsed with the trio and were not given the music. They walked out and played it.
McCann told the trumpet story himself in interviews years later. He and Harris went looking around town for a horn player, listening to whoever was jamming. They found a guy, asked him to sit in, and mentioned it was going on an Atlantic record. He passed. That was Clark Terry. So they got Benny Bailey instead, who had been living in Europe since 1948, and Bailey plays like he had known the tunes his whole life.
The record sold in the millions. So did the single. It went to number one on the Billboard jazz chart, number two R and B, number 29 on the pop album chart, and it picked up a Grammy nomination. Atlantic did not even record it. The festival organizers taped the show, Atlantic bought the tapes for under a hundred dollars, and put it out.
Compared to What is a Gene McDaniels tune. Roberta Flack cut it first, earlier that same year on First Take, and hers is the careful version. McCann's is not careful. He is half singing and half yelling and you can hear the room reacting to the lyrics in real time. It is a protest song and it is also a party record, which almost never works and works completely here.
Track two is Cold Duck Time and that one is Eddie Harris's tune. Six and a half minutes, one riff, everybody solos, nobody overplays. If Compared to What is the one that wakes you up, Cold Duck Time is the one that keeps you there. It became a standard on its own.
The rest of the album is McCann originals. Kathleen's Theme, You Got It in Your Soulness, The Generation Gap. All good, none of them are what you came for, and that is fine.
Not everybody loved it at the time. Harvey Pekar reviewed it in DownBeat and called it cliche ridden. He is entitled to that. But the thing about Swiss Movement is that you are not supposed to study it. Five musicians walked onstage, four of them barely knowing each other, and the tape happened to be rolling. The looseness is the whole point. Any more preparation and it would sound like something else.
Buy the record if you see it. Original Atlantic pressings from 1969 are still out there and they are not expensive.
Under a hundred dollars for the tapes, and millions of copies sold. Atlantic never made an easier bet.