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Bernie McGann 1937-2013

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Larry Kart Proficient

Larry Kart

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I was surprised at his age too.

Seems about the right age for someone who heard Ornette and others of that vintage and before with sufficient freshness and was able to build that into his own powerful, personal music.

You must understand I am surprised by my age too.

Me by mine too, but I'm being forced by reality to get over that.

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John Litweiler Newbie

John Litweiler

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For some reason I can no longer link to my article on Bernie McGann's 70th birthday, so will post the whole thing below:

http://www.sima.org.au/2007/06/11/bernie-mcgann-on-cd Bernie McGann on CD

author:

John Litweiler

date:

Monday 11 June 2007

section:

(music)culture

In honour of Bernie McGann’s 70th birthday, SIMA commissioned Chicago-based music writer John Litweiler to survey the celebrated saxophonist’s recorded output.

The earliest Bernie McGann CD, Kindred Spirits was recorded in 1987—50 years after his birth, four years after his first LP, and around three decades after he began his career as a jazz artist. Alto saxophonist McGann has led just six other CDs since then, the most recent coming in 2005, and in the CD era he’s been a featured sideman on a handful of other recordings. Like a few others, such as our Chicago-based tenor saxophonists Von Freeman and Fred Anderson, the Sydney-based McGann is apparently a late bloomer who did not emerge on records as a brilliantly original modern jazz figure until well into middle age.

Like the two Chicagoans, McGann is a catalyst. He not only obviously lends creative energy to the bands he plays in, he also seems to stimulate others’ creativity. Also like the two Chicagoans, McGann’s value to jazz extends far beyond his own city, and beyond his nation. But McGann’s discography is apparently less than half as long as theirs. Are opportunities to record limited by the size of the jazz marketplace in Australia, which has 1/15th the population of America? Also, Bernie McGann is apparently not well known over here. Though some of his albums are distributed in North America, as far as I know he’s only journeyed to play in the western hemisphere six times.

Especially since McGann is such a vital lyric artist, his lack of recognition might seem remarkable. During his early career, was modern jazz in Sydney the music of just a few artists and a small audience, like New Orleans modern jazz (Blackwell, Batiste, Marsalis, a few others) in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s? Or was McGann simply too original to be assimilated into the mainstream of Australian jazz for much of his career? His periods of playing in non-jazz settings, of working non-musical day jobs, even of not playing gigs are not unusual. In America, for a comparison, since the early 1960s most of the best jazz musicians have been supporting themselves by teaching, playing in pop and classical music groups, and working in service jobs, offices, etc. Heaven knows, a life of art is a hard one, and we listeners should be especially grateful for Bernie McGann’s devotion.

Most of all, his devotion is to pure jazz. While he’s played fusion music and rock, with this own groups he’s been true to modern jazz—the real thing, unadorned, undiluted. Despite all the alternatives that have emerged since his career began, the hard core of the idiom is so rich with possibilities that he quite stands out from the rest of the bop-era stylistic generations. Who, from Lee Konitz to Frank Morgan, is there to compare to him in a blindfold test?

It’s interesting that McGann chose the Johnny Hodges showpiece The Jeep is Jumping for his Live at Side On CD and that he plays in an ABC performance of Sandy Evans’ and Yusuf Komunyakaa’s grand Charlie Parker tribute Testimony. In Evans’ Addie’s Boy and her settings of Moose the Mooch and Koko McGann plays Parker phrases that stand out precisely because McGann’s contexts—his other phrases, his ways of shaping solos—are so un-Birdlike (and his Addie’s Boy solo is especially lovely). As for The Jeep, if his vibrato is narrow and fast like Hodges’ was, the low register ideas that begin McGann’s improvisation and his concluding quote from Miles Davis’ Compulsion are a generation or two after Hodges. (And he plays a bop solo in another Hodges showpiece, Day Dream [ugly Beauty]).

All right, just what is so personal, so singular about Bernie McGann’s music?

His sound
Bud Freeman claimed a jazz musician’s sound was the only enduring element of his/her music. McGann plays his alto sax with a hard, true sound in his middle and upper registers and a growly rasp in his lowest tones. In every solo he also strains up to the very top of the alto’s range, but he doesn’t dwell up high.

That’s his sound most of the time. While his vibrato is usually fast and narrow, in the slow Deep Shallow (**Blues for Pablo Too**) his vibrato slows and, at least for a time, he achieves an Ornete Coleman-ish sound. In some other slower pieces his sound acquires a Lee Konitz-like limpidity.

His attack and his swing
In his first CD, Kindred Spirits, he loved to play atop the beat or a micro fraction ahead—a powerful attack. This eagerness especially suggests a kinship with Warne Marsh, but by his latest CD Blues for Pablo Too every solo, virtually every chorus includes phrases that lay behind the beat, or start on the beat and drop behind. No doubt some of this sly swing is to contrast with his trumpeter, Warwick Alder. More importantly, he’s had the great advantage of having so often played with drummer John Pochee since the beginning and with bassist Lloyd Swanton since the 1980s. The swing generated by these two seems to inspire McGann and to free his rhythmic trickery.

His phrasing
He’s a modernist, so of course his ideas often resemble Parker’s. Now and then passing reflections of other modernists appear, for instance of Lee Konitz (**Big Moon** in Bundeena). He reportedly (by Andrew Bisset) began as a Paul Desmond devotee. Desmond had been influenced by Pete Brown and Lee Konitz, and each of these three may have also influenced McGann’s lyricism. His phrasing is typically broken; his solos are full of vari-length phrases and dispersed accents; the rests between his phrases are, even at fast tempos, usually no more than six beats. He doesn’t riff much or play sheets of sound or fast, Coltrane-ish arpeggios. In fact, even on the rare occasions when he double-times, it’s only for a bar or two—that’s extremely rare among post-Parker saxists. His phrasing is as fluid and versatile as ‘60s Hank Mobley, but eclectic, he ain’t.

His solo forms
Swanton’s tune Blues on the Prairie (in Bundeena) is a takeoff on Sonny Rollins’ classic Blues for Philly Joe; McGann’s improvisation, first over a bass ostinato, then swinging, is shaped like a Rollins set-up. One of the most vivid, even violent, is another fast blues, Salaam (in Kindred Spirits), with eight-bar calls and four-bar replies. After six choruses of staccato lines, the piano enters and McGann suddenly plays a long note for a change. Long tones continue to appear and, beginning in the ninth chorus, several choruses of down-turning ideas—one of his most dramatic solos.

McGann will structure solos with contrasts, like the alternation of stuttering and melodic ideas in Playground (**Playground**). He’ll build, from strain to strain or from chorus to chorus, from short to longer phrases (**Southerly Buster**, also in Playground), or from growly low beginnings to his middle register. While he’s usually as uninterested in dynamics as most other bop-era soloists, in the moody samba Malanbar (Bundeena) a very slow, incremental rise in volume level to piano is the main element of form.

He’s certainly a sophisticated craftsman, but this lyric artist’s main interest is in shaping flowing melodic lines, and he generally conceives of overall solo forms only in the broadest designs. Every solo of his has a rise to his highest register—usually a leap up, often an octave leap—in the first strain of his climactic choruses.

Pochee has always been the drummer on McGann’s CDs, beginning with Kindred Spirits. Swanton has been McGann’s bassist since his second CD, Ugly Beauty. From the fierce pace of that disc’s start, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, it’s clear that this is a trio, and Bluebird of Happiness has especially stimulating interaction, with McGann’s hard-bitten phrases, Swanton’s unforced drive, and Pochee’s Roach-like complexity lending the piece a classic Blue Note or Prestige feeling. Over the years the interplay between these three becomes more subtle, while it has become, if anything, more intense.

The true, unamplified sound of Swanton’s bass, the sensitivity of his note choices, his straightforward, on-the-beat lines, and the melodic directness of his soloing make him sound like—this is, I think, the highest possible compliment—a Chicago bassist, in the tradition of Milt Hinton, Israel Crosby, Wilbur Ware. Again and again Pochee’s interplay motivates the trio. An especially striking example is in the terrific Live at Side On version of Brownsville, in which the varying levels of drum interplay are mainly what shapes McGann’s solo.

Obviously McGann is not hampered by the pianists in his first CD and his recordings as a sideman. His own trios and later quartets are not piano-less to encourage his harmonic freedom—on the contrary, he improvises on chord changes throughout his albums with these groups. The bop era, especially hard bop, added detail and intrigue to the interaction of soloists and rhythm sections, and the highly refined interplay of himself, Swanton, and Pochee that makes his groups work so well.

Probably every listener will have their own favorites among McGann’s recordings. To take them in chronological order, I enjoy first the hard-bop spirit of Kindred Spirits (1987). His pianist Bobby Gebert’s Dolphy’s Dance is a pure Blue Note-1960s tune, with both chord changes and one-chord strains and an especially dramatic McGann solo. The optimism of McGann’s Mr. Harris theme and solo is a recurring, perhaps inherent quality that you can hear again and again over the years.

The trio’s debut, Ugly Beauty (1991), includes McGann’s very laid-back alto, in deliberate contrast with Pochee’s exuberant calypso drumming, in Barbados. Note also the characteristic McGann up-sweeps in his Lady’s Choice theme, as well as his sweet-singing lines in Bluebird of Happiness. In 1993 Pochee’s daring ensemble Ten Part Invention recorded Tall Stories; McGann creates three excellent solos in this CD.

A top trombonist, James Greening, joins the trio and makes wonderful contrasts in McGann McGann (1994). After the broken, post-Parker alto phrases, Greening offers long lines, more dramatic forms, and a rich sound. After another swaggering alto solo in Mail, Greening offers big, slashing lines, and Birthday Blues rises to a ferocious alto-trombone chase. Greening emotes most of all in the modal Lazy Days, especially at the unusual slow-to-fast-tempo turnarounds. McGann is at his most lyrical throughout the album, and this version of Brownsville is a priceless quartet performance.

In fact, I think McGann McGann and Playground (1996) are his two most essential albums. McGann’s other horn in Playground is tenorist Sandy Evans (who like Greening plays in both Ten Part Invention and Swanton’s Afro-Carib-jazz combo The catholics). Here her mid-Coltrane harmonic sophistication and brilliant technique meets McGann’s more classic sensibility, and she also composed some sparkling themes. Her spacey tune Snap lifts the altoist into inspired harmonic obliqueness. In her Eulogy for a Friend McGann’s feathery sound and his melodic purity are full of feeling, yet without sentimentality or blues phrasing. Her Skedaddleology really is free jazz, and there’s good humor among the two saxes: he breaks through his usual four- and eight-bar moulds, she plays multiphonics and sheets of sound.

In the year between those two McGann quartets he played in soul singer Margie Evans’ Drowning in the Sea of Love, with a playful obligato to her unhappy Another Blue Day and a bar-walking solo in Evil Gal Blues. In the same winter composer-pianist Cathy Harley was more challenging in her quintet CD Tuesday’s Tune. Her songs are modal, or they have unusual chord changes (such as her fast, twisted New Blues) or unusual key changes (a modulation that drops instead of rises in Cross Criss). Her most distinctive settings yield her and McGann’s most clever solos, especially the title tune, with a raw, raspy edge now extending through his entire alto range, Pete Brown-like. It’s a late-hard-bop disc that encourages the altoist’s aggression, including a Jackie McLean-like intensity in Never Too Much.

In Rent Party (1998) singer Susan Gai Dowling is joined for standards by pianist Dave Levy and the McGann Trio. While Dowling sounds rather light-hearted in It Had to be You and Fine and Mellow, her quartet, especially soloist McGann, discover more complex emotions. He again took the free jazz dare as a guest of Wanderlust in two short collective improvisations in Song and Dance (1998). Again with Ten Part Invention in Unidentified Spaces (2000), McGann and Greening offer especially expressive solos in a fine Evans piece, North Pole. The alto solo in the far-out setting of Folk Song emphasizes his ease playing outside as well as inside.

Bundeena (2000) returns to the McGann Trio, and besides the tracks noted above, note the unperturbed optimism of his alto over the bass-drum threats of Let’s Tangle. Trumpeter Warwick Alder joins them to make another quartet in Live at Side On (2003). An eclectic, he favors the Clifford Brown lineage, with tips of the hat to Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan. He’s legato, McGann is staccato; he conceives of full strains, full choruses as he structures his solos, while McGann’s form are more romantic; he includes decorative flourishes and fanfares, McGann doesn’t. Good contrasts of Alder and McGann here and in the last McGann album, Blues for Pablo Too (2005).

But I’ve raved on long enough. True, he’s only led seven CDs and been featured on just a few others. Has any other alto saxophonist, anywhere in the world, produced as many consistently first-rate albums as in the last 20 years? In a period when jazz artists are expected to be versatile just to survive, does anyone else thrive in varied settings as much as McGann thrives? Of course, McGann is lucky to be part of such a gifted community of jazz musicians in Sydney. I sure hope Sydney folks realize how lucky they are to have him in their midst, and that they celebrate his 70th birthday with great delight this month.

John Litweiler is the author of Ornette Coleman: A Hamolodic Life and The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958.

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romualdo Community Regular

romualdo

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The below article was published in the Australian mag "The Monthly" last year

THE MASTER Happy birthday, Bernie McGann
John Clare

October, 2012

Medium length read1100 words
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Illustration by Jeff Fisher.
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Heading west by train out of Sydney, two stops before Parramatta, that railway voice comes crashing through tinny speakers, “Next stop: GrAAAnville!” The ‘A’ is as harsh as garbage being crushed outside your house. The industrial flatlands of Granville, between Sydney and the Blue Mountains, are where Bernie McGann grew up. Who he? McGann – whose 75th birthday was marked this July by two sensational nights at the Sound Lounge in Sydney – is possibly the most original voice in Australian jazz. In recent decades, his reputation has become international. Although he is not a household name anywhere, a number of his fans are – in Australia, America and Europe. McGann stands in relation to his famous fans much as Captain Beefheart did to Frank Zappa.

McGann’s ‘voice’ is the alto saxophone, which can be as clear as water, golden as sunshine, or harsh and strange as the cries of certain Australian birds. Often McGann convincingly integrates the whole panoply in the one solo.

In person, McGann exudes last-century laconicism and rolls his own cigarettes. The praise heaped on McGann on the nights of his tribute was then received with some diffidence. There were little shrugs in his voice – “Yeah, yeah yeah yeah,” he said rapidly, grimacing slightly. “It was good tonight. The boys played great. Yeah ...” The “boys” were Paul Grabowsky at the piano, Jonathan Zwartz on the double bass and a brilliant young drummer, Tim Firth, who’d told me the experience had been like a glimpse of heaven. Grabowsky stood up from the piano stool, swept his hand around the band and shook his head in admiration. “There he is: the master! Bernie McGann!”

McGann’s actual voice is quite soft, his Australian accent light. His face, in contrast, is almost as craggily singular as Klaus Kinski’s, and partly inspired the producer of McGann’s first digital recording to call the disc Ugly Beauty. (It’s also the title of a tune by Thelonious Monk, which is played on the album, but McGann was noticeably peeved. Well, friends noticed. It is doubtful that he would have said anything to the producer, who also owned the independent label.)

McGann went to a small brick Catholic school with an asphalt playground. After school, he trained to be a fitter and turner, like his father, while playing the drums in local dance bands. “My father couldn’t believe it when I took up the alto,” he said. “I was already getting paid work on the drums! Not only that, I decided that fitting and turning wasn’t for me the day I finished my apprenticeship.”

In the 1970s, McGann lived at Bundeena, on the edge of the Royal National Park, south of Sydney, where he worked as a postman. By that time he was a controversial alto saxophonist on the city’s jazz scene. After his postal rounds he’d practise in the bush, developing the huge sound that would go on to be heard clearly, without amplification, over the loudest, most polyrhythmic drumming of his long-term collaborator, John Pochée.

At the height of McGann’s passion, and when no more momentum could be squeezed from orthodox time, he would sometimes slip the tracks and enter a realm where time was susceptible to free manipulation. His whole body would begin to judder and he’d broadcast strange congested barking patterns that seemed beyond rhythmic analysis – except by Pochée, who’d punctuate uncannily. Yells and even screams would rise from the audience. These peaks of excitement have scarcely been equalled in Australian jazz. Something akin to speaking in tongues was in the air.

McGann still sometimes goes into this area. Not so loudly now but with great effect nevertheless. Initially, he was accused of imitating ‘free jazz’ pioneer Ornette Coleman. “When I heard him,” McGann told me, “I was surprised that there were some similarities, though I didn’t think I sounded much like him. We were heading in some of the same directions. He is like a backwoodsman, a folk musician. [Whereas] Charlie Parker was the complete hipster. I love them both.”

Through the 1970s and ’80s, McGann played his luminous and utterly distinctive compositions with his own piano-less trio – which included bassist Lloyd Swanton, now known internationally as a member of The Necks – as well as with Pochée’s band, The Last Straw. During a spell at The Basement in Sydney, a band of hippies dressed in white would come down from the Blue Mountains to hear them, bringing home-baked bread for the band. One of the most memorable compositions from that era – ‘Mex’ – is on Wending, the Rufus Records release commemorating McGann’s 75th birthday.

Curiously, both McGann and Pochée had earlier played in the understated and then-popular ‘cool jazz’ style, which was associated with college-boy haircuts, moleskin trousers and Ivy League shirts. It was thought that mainly young advertising men listened to it.

McGann’s big influence (before he’d heard Charlie Parker), was the pellucid sound of Paul Desmond, of Dave Brubeck Quartet fame. The Desmond influence has become more obvious now that McGann plays more softly. Still, even when McGann’s raw power was his most striking trait, there were delicate elements, including needles and whimpers of sound in the highest register. McGann usually plays a little behind the beat, and some of his solos begin with gliding, ruminative tones that seem to turn time momentarily backwards. Musicians and fans at these moments lean forwards, enthralled. The solo might build with revolving patterns that invoke some dervishing folk dance, and when everything is churning and flying, sustained soft high notes might float above it all, and figures and patterns will appear that are purely original.

McGann tries not think of anything when he is improvising. “You know, it’s just letting it flow naturally without cluttering your head with too much stuff. It doesn’t always happen, but sometimes you can surprise yourself. If you can surprise yourself that’s a good thing.”

John Clare
John Clare is a journalist, reviewer and the author of Bodgie Dada, a history of Australian jazz.
More by John Clare
Published in The Monthly, October 2012, No. 83
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AllenLowe Rising Star

AllenLowe

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yes I am feeling fine, thanks for the concern Chuck; spent a few hours listening to McGann yesterday, don't know how I missed him before. Obviously a terrific saxophonist, but I question his methods - as I question Brubeck's as well - and Stan Tracey's, as a matter of fact; they all have a tendency to confuse mannerism with style; and they all are great musicians; but it's hard for me to listen, as I always find myself waiting for them to begin the solo. It's as though they have misunderstood the used of of fragments, have not really grasped (to my ears) the the idea of how to truly separate and then unify diverse expressive elements: these elements are all aspects of consciousness, maybe, but they exist, ideally, in a complicated line of thought that is evasive, yet expressively linear.

that's the way I feel.

Edited by AllenLowe
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