Already au courant with Parker’s Dial and Savoy recordings, McLean began taking weekly lessons from the master.īy 1949, McLean was sitting in with Charlie Parker and doing uptown gigs with Thelonious Monk. In 1948, pianist Richie Powell introduced McLean to his older brother, Bud. By then, bebop was efflorescent, and McLean, an early devotee of Lester Young and Dexter Gordon, was a fast learner, as were such running buddies as Sonny Rollins, Arthur Taylor and Kenny Drew. Briggs bought his jazz-obsessed stepson an alto saxophone in 1946. ![]() His father, John McLean, played guitar with swing bands led by Tiny Bradshaw and Teddy Hill, and his stepfather, Jimmy Briggs, owned a jazz-oriented record store. McLean also endorsed David Rosenthal’s Hard Bop (Oxford) as an insightful source.īorn May 17, 1931, McLean, raised in Harlem, heard jazz from the cradle. Spellman’s Four Jazz Lives (University of Michigan). The best chronicle of McLean’s formative years appears in A.B. More than a thousand people attended the April 7th funeral services at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, where McLean had played saxophone in the choir as a teenager. One of my great thrills during my years at WKCR was the chance to collaborate with him on a Musician Show and a Sunday Jazz Profile - one of my to-dos over the next year or two is to dig out those cassettes and transcribe the proceedings.Īlto saxophonist and educator John Lenwood “Jackie” McLean, whose searing tone, exuberant phrasing, questing attitude, and nurturing spirit inspired musicians and fans throughout a career spanning more than half a century, died on March 31st at his home in Hartford, Connecticut. His sound to me was the sound of New York City. I think Larry Willis was on piano and Larry Ridley on bass-can’t remember who was playing drums. ![]() He was one of my musical idols in fact, he was the first jazz musician I ever heard in person, when he played a concert at my high school in the spring, I believe, of 1969, when I was 14. In observance of the 81st birth anniversary of Jackie McLean, I’m posting the obituary I wrote for DownBeat after his death in 2006.
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