For much of his professional life, the jazz musician Les McCann was able to counter the barbs of critics by pointing to the enthusiasm with which his music was received by a large following. McCann, who has died aged 88, was an unabashed populist: he played the piano and occasionally sang in a way that made listeners feel good, particularly in the nightclubs where some of his most successful recordings were made during the 1960s.
Although he was a skilled modern jazz pianist, brought up in the bebop era, the defining characteristic of his music was a love of the blues and the gospel music he had absorbed during his childhood in the Baptist church.
His greatest success came in 1969, when a semi-impromptu performance at the Montreux jazz festival, co-leading a quintet with the saxophonist Eddie Harris, was recorded on the fly by the event’s sound engineers. After Atlantic Records released the set as an album under the title Swiss Movement, an eight-minute track called Compared to What was singled out for radio exposure.
Written by the singer Gene McDaniels, who had been a member of McCann’s groups several years earlier, it was a protest song with an irresistible groove and a powerful message that, like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, fitted the mood of growing opposition to the Vietnam war among the African American community, whose young men were providing a disproportionate number of the fighting forces.
McCann’s own singing had hitherto taken a distant second place to his keyboard work, but he delivered the powerful lyric with a combination of soulful passion and a sardonic edge: “The president, he’s got his war / Folks just don’t know what it’s for / Nobody gives us rhyme or reason / Have one doubt, they call it treason.” The song’s popularity propelled Swiss Movement to the top of the US jazz album chart, earning a Grammy nomination.
Born and brought up in Lexington, Kentucky, the son of James McCann, a water company engineer, and his wife Anna, the young McCann played sousaphone and drums in marching bands before taking up the piano, on which he received only a handful of lessons. In 1956, while he was serving in the US Navy, his success in a singing competition brought him an appearance on Ed Sullivan’s national TV show.
On his discharge he settled in Los Angeles, where he formed his own trio. Having declined an attractive offer to join the popular quintet of the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, in 1960 he signed a recording deal with Dick Bock, owner of the Pacific Jazz label, who was making a shift from the cool west coast sounds of Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, on which his company’s early success had been based, to a more fashionably funky idiom.
The pianist’s debut album, titled Les McCann Ltd Plays the Truth (1960), contained several gospel-tinged tunes. Its immediate popularity, and that of its successors, was not welcomed by the loftier critics. In the UK, a writer for the Melody Maker dismissed one of his early albums in three words: “Les McCann McCan’t.” But indeed he could, as could other piano-playing contemporaries, such as Ramsey Lewis, Bobby Timmons and Gene Harris, who received scant critical respect for similar reasons.
McCann’s albums in the 1960s included partnerships with the Jazz Crusaders, the Gerald Wilson orchestra and the saxophonists Teddy Edwards and Stanley Turrentine, and in 1962 his trio accompanied Lou Rawls on the singer’s blues-slanted debut album. Several albums for the Limelight label in the middle of the decade include one featuring an early version of Compared to What.
In 1969 he signed with Atlantic, where he remained through most of the following decade. While experimenting with electric keyboards and synthesisers, his albums included the adventurous, atmospheric Invitation to Openness (1972), where the exotic sounds of the saxophonist and flautist Yusef Lateef were added to grooves inspired by Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew.
McCann also introduced his producer at Atlantic, Joel Dorn, to Roberta Flack, a promising singer and pianist whom he had heard in a Washington DC nightclub. In 1969 the success of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, produced by Dorn, laid the foundations of Flack’s substantial career.
McCann’s own record sales went into a gradual decline before a stroke in the 1990s kept him away from the piano for several years. By that time some of his finest records were being sampled by dozens of rap artists, including Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, Notorious BIG and A Tribe Called Quest.
His photographs of musicians and other subjects were collected in a 2015 book named after Invitation to Openness. His last recording, released in 2018, was a collection of Christmas tunes.
• Les (Leslie Coleman) McCann, pianist, singer and composer, born 23 September 1935; died 29 December 2023
