Jackie Mac: Reflections of a Jazz Revivalist on his Birthday
The late anthropologist and long time student of transformative social movements, Dr. Luther P. Gerhlach, demonstrated that those movements among human beings which change people’s lives and compel them to action in behalf of a vision or ideal have several things in common which hold true across time, geography or the specific ideology of the movement. Whether the activists are feminist, communist, fascist, or Catholic, all of them are propelled along and given a sense of esprit de corps through the actions of charismatic revivalists, those gifted voices who speak truth to power and personify the ideals of the movement, which is to say that through some inexplicable alchemy these chosen ones manage to embody the ideals of the movement, which is synonymous with the aspirations of the people, in their personalities. And that personality finds its highest expression in the work of the Charismatic revivalist, whose role is first and foremost to preach the good news with fervor and conviction; thus inspiring the true believers to action while converting others. That’s what Jackie McClean was to all who love and play the great American art of Jazz.
We often see this in the religious context where the preacher preaches a message of personal salvation through religious conversion, but it also happens in the secular realm. In the latter years of his life Jackie McClean was not only a seminal artist on the saxophone, he was also a jazz preacher, a charismatic Revivalist with a horn who was a leader in the movement to keep jazz alive and miles ahead of any other musical art born since the twentieth century. A professor of music in the fullest sense of the term, he taught inside and outside the academy. He tutored the students who were fortunate to attend the University of Hartford, and for those who were not so fortunate, whether through age or financial circumstance. He built a cultural center in the community along with the very able assistance of his wife, Dolly, without whom, I frankly can’t imagine it happening on the scale that it did.
A compulsive pedagogue
Like the master craftsman in a mediaeval guild, he taught by example. It was always on-the-job training when you were around Jackie Mac. I learned something of importance about the music every time I was lucky enough to be in his presence. His natural generosity of spirit and his total dedication to the task of preserving and perpetuating Jazz music was such, he became a compulsive pedagogue dropping science 24/7 on all who had the intellectual curiosity and stamina to dig it. Fortunately for me, Jackie liked my writings about the music so he presented me in lectures up in Hartford many times. In fact, he once commissioned me to deliver a paper on “Bird” at the prestigious Anatheum Art Museum in Hartford and I damn near got me and him run out of town!
Titled, Blues and the Abstract Truth: Notes on the Art of Charles Yardbird Parker, this ambitious essay sought to answer the question: Where do Original Ideas come from? In an attempt to answer this perplexing question, I asked what is the nature of innovation? After all I was trying to understand Charlie Parker’s art, the man who did for music what Albert Einstein did for theoretical physics: Change the way his most gifted colleagues conceived of the relationship between time and space forever. So, to make a short story shorter let’s just say I ended up making some unfavorable comparisons between Jazz and Abstract Expressionism — America’s contribution to modern graphic art — unaware that the museum was a major promoter of the genre, and the audience of mostly subscribers — who had been enthusiastically following my presentation — suddenly found my critique unpalatable and to my surprise, became quite vocal about it.
How I first came to know of Jackie McClean
But I’ve gotten too far ahead in the story of my association with the musical seer Jackie Mac. I’d like to say a word or two about how I first came to know of Jackie McClean, because only then can you understand what a continuous thrill it was for me to get to know him and work with him. I grew up in a time and place where musicians were heroes. The racial caste system that ranked the value of human beings on the color of their skins, rather than the content of their character, produced some unexpected consequences. One of these was that great black musicians who were denied access to concert stages and recording studios wound up as band masters and music appreciation teachers in the all black public schools and colleges in the American south. While the formal curriculum in these music programs was heavily weighted toward European classical music, and the great body of Afro-American sacred music Dr. Dubois called “The Sorrow Songs,” mother to both gospel and the blues, that the learned DuBois declared “the most beautiful expression of human life born this side of seas.”
Jazz as such, was largely ignored in our formal musical instruction. But it was not ever thus. The pool of talented and well trained Afro-American musicians was so deep and rich — thanks to the musical curriculums developed by the Johnson brothers, James Weldon and J. Rosamond, authors of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which was called “The Negro National Anthem” when me and Jackie were coming up — that there were young, hip, music teachers on the scene who were a lot like Wynton Marsalis, masters of the European classical and Afro-American art music idioms. It was one such hip young music teacher, Mr. Chuck McClendon, alto-saxophonist par excellence, who introduced me to the versatile and sensuous beauty of the saxophone.
The first alto-voice I heard was the funky down home blues lyricism and flawless virtuosity of the Memphis Magician Hank Crawford. After suffering through the sonic nightmare of the late night practice sessions of my neighbor Maurice Singleton on the alto-sax; with his inept fingering, horrid out of control vibrato and frog like intonation, I was simply astonished that Hank was playing the same instrument. Then Mr. McClendon — who was so sweet on the alto and tenor that Ray Charles stole him from us just before our concert band was to perform at the baccalaureate ceremonies — told us that “Bennie Crawford” as he was known at Tennessee State College, where they had played in the band together — was a “musical genius.” Then he also turned us on David “Fat head” Newman, whom most think of as a tenor player but is very sweet on the alto too.
Jackie’s discovered in Minton’s Playhouse
From these two cats I started listening to Cannonball Adderly, whom I heard of because I had five next door neighborhoods who were musicians and all went to Florida A&M University — which had a world famous music department — on music scholarships and three of them played with Julian Adderly in school. Hence I was listing to a string of lazy lyrical southern blues voices on the alto when I first heard Jackie Mac. His sound was different; it had a hard edge swagger and raw energy about it that had been fashioned in the fast paced, ultra modern, Darwinian milieu of New York City. The art that inspired Jackie Mac was born and raised in Minton’s Playhouse, a place where my man Tabby once pointed out to me and said: “That’s where Minton’ Playhouse was, real gangsters used to hang out in there, I mean cats would pull their guns on each other!”
Since my man Tab was a bonefide gangster — an ex-US Marine and a former enforcer for Mafia boss Sonny Franchesi — I didn’t question his description of the milieu where be-bop was born. But what kind of cat do you suppose Bennie Golson is portraying in “Killer Joe,” the swagger of that striding bass line is a poignant sound portrait of the black hipster stroll. One night I was hangin out in the Apple with Tab, watching his body language as he strolled, and I could hear Benny Golson’s tune in my head. It inspired a poem that I recited to “Killer Joe,” When My Man Tab Strolls in the Big Apple Night. In spite of the gangster vibe, however, Minton’s was an incubator of great art, a neighborhood bar that holds the same importance in the creation of the modern complex instrumental African-American art music popularly know as be-bop that Zurich’s Café Voltaire was for the creation of Da Da, an irreverent and iconoclastic art movement that expressed the pessimism and even nihilism European artists felt in the aftermath of the barbarism and mass murder of World War I.
The art that developed in Minton’s, however, was neither nihilistic nor pessimistic; rather it expressed the heroic optimism that is the mother of all invention, an optimism that fuelled Jackie’s inventiveness on and off the bandstand til his dying day. It was also a music in rebellion against conventional wisdom waged by iconoclast rebels who wielded their instruments like battle axes. The great Afro-American writer, Ralph Ellison, might never have written a line had he not visited Minton’s Playhouse on a summer vacation from his studies at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. At the time Ellison, a music major, was studying with the distinguished Afro-American classical composer William Dorson. Aside from that he had grown up in the rich musical culture of Oklahoma City. When he strolled into Minton’s, trumpet in hand, he was certain that he was ready to pick up on anything these Harlem hep cats was puttin’ down.
Frozen faced introverts dedicated to chaos
What Ellison heard from the cats wailing on the bandstand was so shocking it caused him to abandon music and seek refuge in literature. In his essay “Things Remembered Times Past,” he recalls: “They were playing Bebops, I mean reboped be bebops,” and he described the drummers as “frozen faced introverts dedicated to chaos.” Ellison had entered Minton’s confident that his grounding in the Oklahoma “Stomp” had equipped him to hold his own in any jam session, he left terrified and befuddled. And he was not alone in his reaction from musicians grounded in the dominant big band tradition, the rules of which were set by the orchestras of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Andy Kirk, Earl “Fatha” Hines, et al.
In these bands the rhythm was dictated by the requirements of dancers, hence the steady pulse of the bass drum. Ellison described the approach of Bebop drummers as “dropping bombs!” A reference on how the bass drum was used for dramatic accents and punctuations rather than the steady pulse dancers relied on. And Kirk expressed unbridled hostility to the Boppers decades after the hey-day of Minton’s. He told me “They were egotist who didn’t want to play for nobody but themselves.” He explained how he could always tell if his band was grooving with the audience by “watching the heads of the dancers bobbing in sync with the beat.” But the great trumpeter Fats Navarro described the restrictions on instrumentalists playing in a big band as similar to “being in prison.”
The glow of the be-bop revolution
Jackie came of age in the glow of the be-bop revolution and witnessed the music performed at its apotheosis. He even dwelled in the shadows of the icons, sat at their feet and stood beside them on the bandstand during his apprenticeship. And yet he emerged a new and better musical self: A virtuoso with an original voice. Strangely, all the alto players I liked best were originals, Crawford, Newman and Adderly, but they had all been nurtured on down home blues. That Jackie Mac, who literally grew up at the feet of Bird, found his own splendid voice on the same instrument shows a strong personality who insisted on being himself; to speak to the world unapologetically in his own voice.
It may not seem so now, in the fog of history that has dimmed Bird’s radiance, but this was an act of singular determination and self confidence. Personal style in any art is a function of mastery. Furthermore, as that 20th Century Afro-American Renaissance Man and Blues Philosopher Albert Murray points out: “An art style is an elaboration of a lifestyle.” Which explains why Jackie’s style was so different from the southern saxmiesters. It is a marvelous achievement by a marvelous man, one who’s like we may never see again. That was Jackie Mac: an American original, great artist, generous spirit, exemplary father, solid husband, and my Ace Boon Coon!
Listen to a Great interview with Jackie on National Public Radio
Jackie in Performances:
Appointment In Ghana
This tune shows the growing Afro-centric trend among Jazz Musicians. Jackie is accompanied by an all-star ensemble of younger musicians.
Woody Shaw – Trumpet
McCoy Tyner – Piano
Cecil McBee – Bass
Jack Dejonette – Drums
Dynasty
Jackie in concert with his son Renee on Tenor Sax and Flute
Ray Charles Presents David “Fathead” Newman
Newport Jazz Festival 1958
I was in the 11th grade in St. Augustine Florida, where Ray Charles learned to play music at the State School for the Deaf and Blind. The soulful southern blues “Fathead,” was my introduction to the alto sax on this record. Hank “Bennie” Crawford was also in Ray Charles Orchestra, but he played mostly baritone sax. However he was one of the southern masters on the alto. And Julian the great “Cannonball” Adderly, who was from Florida, completed the triumvirate of southern alto-masters. And then I heard “Bird,” Charlie Parker, who inspired them all, but Jackie McClean was his most devoted acolyte. I started really listening to Bird after hearing Jackie’s Harlem Sound. I paid close attention because Minton’s Playhouse was in Harlem, and Jackie knew Bird well.