Anybody who’s accustomed to Jackie McLean’s basic Blue Observe album Let Freedom Ring will know that the alto saxophonist had one of the distinctive sounds in jazz. His instrument’s intonation was all the time deliberately barely sharp, which resulted in an acerbic tone that gave his music a leading edge. It wasn’t to everybody’s style, after all, and for some listeners, it was a sound as jarring as fingernails clawing a chalkboard. However for McLean, who as soon as proudly declared, “I’m a sugar-free saxophonist,” his divisive sound mirrored his private circumstances: “My life has been sweet and sour, bittersweet, and I’m interpreting my experience.”
On the face of it, Let Freedom Ring seemed to be simply one other document date in an extended line of classes that the younger alto saxophonist had recorded for Blue Observe after becoming a member of the corporate in 1959. Earlier than that, he had recorded a number of LPs for Status within the wake of his recording debut as a 20-year-old wunderkind on Miles Davis’ 1951 album Dig. Influenced by Davis together with Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, and Thelonious Monk, McLean step by step developed his personal sound and have become a dedicated disciple of exhausting bop, an earthy, blues and gospel-stained offshoot of bebop that had develop into jazz’s hottest foreign money within the Nineteen Fifties. However like his early mentor, Miles Davis, McLean was a restlessly curious musician who grew averse to repeating himself. You may hear this loud and clear in Let Freedom Ring, a landmark album that marked a decisive inflection level within the saxophonist’s profession.
Take heed to Jackie McLean’s Let Freedom Ring now.
Like many jazz musicians working within the late 50s and early 60s, McLean had been deeply affected by the revolutionary method of Ornette Coleman, who had thrown the musical equal of a hand grenade into the jazz world together with his explosive 1959 album The Form Of Jazz To Come. Jettisoning orthodox ideas of melody, concord, construction, and rhythm, Coleman divided the jazz group. Some, like McLean, had been massively excited. McLean noticed potential options to musical points that he was grappling with across the similar time.
Certainly, in his liner notes to Let Freedom Ring, McLean confesses that “getting away from the conventional and much-overused chord changes was my personal dilemma.” In different phrases, he was starting to search out that onerous bop had develop into a musical cul-de-sac and was each limiting his creativity and taxing his creativeness. However Coleman’s improvements supplied a approach out. “(He) has made me stop and think,” wrote McLean in Let Freedom Ring’s liner notes. “He has stood up under much criticism, yet he never gives up his cause, freedom of expression.”
Given his emotions on the time, it was no shock to see McLean recruit Ornette Coleman’s drummer Billy Higgins to play on the recording session taped at Rudy Van Gelder’s well-known studio in New Jersey. “I sure dig the groove Billy gets,” McLean stated of the 26-year-old Los Angeles sticks man, who had appeared on The Form Of Jazz To Come and several other of the contentious saxophonist’s different groundbreaking late 50s/early 60s information. On bass, McLean introduced in 21-year-old Herbie Lewis, who had performed on a number of classes by soul-jazz pianist Les McCann, and occupying the piano stool was 29-year-old Walter Davis Jr, who had reduce his tooth with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Lewis and Bishop, with their receptive soul jazz and exhausting bop backgrounds, hardly appeared revolutionaries or musicians intent on pushing the jazz envelope however with their presence, McLean appeared to discover a sense of musical steadiness – between exhausting bop and ultra-modernism – that formed the distinctive character of Let Freedom Ring.
The truth is, the album bore little resemblance to the sonic extremism of Ornette Coleman. By turns haunting and hard-swinging, “Melody for Melonae” – written for and devoted to McLean’s then six-year-old daughter, Melonae – used the scale-based modal buildings that Miles Davis helped pioneer on Variety Of Blue whereas “I’ll Keep Loving You,” was a canopy of a Bud Powell ballad remodeled by McLean’s eerie, high-pitched squeals. And the language of the blues was distinguished in each “Rene,” named after McLean’s son, and “Omega,” written for his mom, Alpha Omega McLean.
Sonically, the music walked a tightrope between the standard and unorthodox; a high quality that might be additional mirrored in McLean’s work because the Nineteen Sixties unfurled. Let Freedom Ring, nevertheless, is the place it began. With out Freedom’s emancipation from the jaded vocabulary of bebop, there could be no One Step Past and Vacation spot…Out!, albums which firmly positioned McLean firmly within the vanguard of improvised avant-garde music.
Take heed to Jackie McLean’s Let Freedom Ring now.
