RIP Les McCann
- Thread starter Brad Little
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I don't follow jazz all that much but do enjoy it. All these players could really wail. Thanks for sharing.
Canard
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McCann is generally and sadly very much underrated! In part this is because he was a great musician struggling to adapt and stay relevant to popular music in an era when Jazz clubs were noted for their lack of audiences. His recorded output is varied as he struggles to find a niche or formula that will generate both sales and gigs and keep food on the table. Purist critics were often dismissive of him. Whatever ...
His chops and soul are solid throughout.
His often right hand guy, saxophonist Eddie Harris, with his slightly gimmicky electric Varitone saxes, suffered similar abuse for the same reasons.
His 1973 album, Layers, was quite revolutionary, although is does not sound so now. He was one of the first Jazz musicians to adopt synthesizers and use them as integral parts of the music rather than as generators of funky outer space noises. Like the electric organ records from the 1920s, it doesn't sound that great now--and for the same reasons. Early electric organs were limited in tone and timbre., so too with early synths. The chops and soul are there, though.
Album Playlist:
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His often right hand guy, saxophonist Eddie Harris, with his slightly gimmicky electric Varitone saxes, suffered similar abuse for the same reasons.
Harris also sometimes used a saxophone mouthpiece on a trumpet, I'd have to listen to it again to give a good assessment, but don't recall it as being anything special.
