Stanley Meets Les McCann

One of the pleasures of listening to jazz music is that if you listen long and hard enough, you'll discover that eventually everybody seemingly plays with everyone else at some point or another.

Case in point: in December 1961 and January 1962, Stanley's Turrentine's path crossed that of pianist and singer Les McCann.  McCann had gotten his start by winning a Navy singing contest, leading to an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.  Although he rose to fame in the late 1960s when he recorded the song Compared To What? protesting the Viet Nam War, his main career began in the early 1960s as a pianist with his trio, the Les McCann Ltd., for the Pacific Jazz label.  One of those early records, Les McCann Ltd. in New York, featured trumpeter Blue Mitchel and the tenor saxophones of Frank Haynes and Stanley Turrentine.

The Les McCann Ltd. in New York album was recorded live at The Village Gate on December 28, 1961 and releaseed on McCann's PAcific Jazz label.  The pairing of McCann and Turrentine worked so well that they followed up the gig with a studio session for Blue Note Records at Van Gelder Studio on January 2, 1962, resulting in Turrentine's LP, That's Where It's At. 

The Village Gate was a legendary nightclub at the corner of Thompson and Bleecker Streets in Greenwich Village that operated between 1958 and 1994.  It was one of the "go to" spots for hearing jazz and up-and-coming comedians, as well as occasional folk and rock music.  Innumerable live albums have been recorded there.  I know that I was there for some shows in the mid-1970s, but for the life of me, I can't recall who I saw there (probably Rahsaan Roland Kirk, but I can't recall for sure who I saw where some 40 years ago).  Now, a CVS store occupies the once-storied performance space.

160 Bleeker Street in June 2019

Les McCann Ltd. in New York opens with the McCann composition Chip Monck, named for the man who would eventually go on to become the master of ceremonies at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 (it's Monck who requests the fans to "stay off the towers" and warns about the brown acid in the Woodstock movie).  Monck began working at The Village Gate in 1959, lighting comedians and jazz and folk artists, and living under the club in the basement apartment where Bob Dylan eventually wrote A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall on Monck's IBM Selectric typewriter. Apparently, the lighting guy at the Gate impressed McCann enough that he named the opening song of his New York gig for him.

The live, almost-but-not-quite New Years Eve atmosphere of the In New York set obviously energized the performers, and you can hear Mitchell, Haynes and Turrentine all spur one another on to ever greater heights, even while being driven by the boogie-woogie piano playing of Les McCann.  It sounds at times like all hell's about to break loose, like in some of the best Charles Mingus songs of this period, before they settle into a bluesy semblance of order.   

The recording also offers the rare chance to hear Frank Haynes.  Haynes moved to New York in 1959 and performed at several jazz clubs, including Birdland, the Five Spot, the Village Vanguard, and the Village Gate. In addition to Les McCann, he recorded with Kenny Dorham, Walter Bishop, T-Bone Walker, Grant Green and Randy Weston, and even cut an album of his own, Frankly Speaking, that never got released.  Haynes died at the age of 37 in 1965, and his memorial service was attended by John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, and others.

For the studio session, Turrentine was the lone horn, backed by McCann on piano, Herbie Lewis of Les McCann Ltd. on bass, and Otis Finch of the Shirley Scott Trio on drums.  Typically, a studio session doesn't have the fire and excitement of a live set, but the quartet really cooks on That's Where It's At. To my ears, these sessions, both live and in studio, represent a further progression of the "opening up" of Turrentine's sound. McCann was as much an R&B as a jazz musician, and it seems his presence goaded Stanley into playing more soulfully and with more excitement than heard before.  On That's Where It's At, Stanley swings hard and seems to really be pouring himself into every note, fully marking the transition from his earlier hard-bop style to soul-jazz.  All of the compositions of the album were written either by McCann or Turrentine - there are no corny show-tune covers to endure.  It's easily the most exciting Turrentine record yet in his discography.

As well as the Stanley/LEs pairing went, it's unfortunate that their paths went different ways and they didn't play together very much after these sessions.  Stanley contributed a short bit titled Unidentified Blues to a medley of tunes that appeared on McCann's 1967 LP, Les Is More, and then years later, LEs performed on Stanley's 1984 LP, Straight Ahead, and that was it. The witty and inventive saxophonist Eddie Harris turned out to be an excellent foil for Les in the 70s, while Stanley remained a fixture in first the Blue Note and then later the CTI roster of performers.  It would, however, have been interesting to hear what would have happened if the two had collaborated some more.