Dave McKenna: “Button Up Your Overcoat / Let It Snow”
We celebrated Jeremy’s 21st birthday late. He was still in New Haven and we were in California so we waited –not that long though– until we took a trip east to stay with Ruth in Manhattan. One bright sunny Saturday, the summer heat not yet oppressive and a breeze blowing, we met early in the day at Ruth’s and took a subway up to the Bronx. There were the five of us –Esther, Jeremy and I, Ruth and her boyfriend Ned.
We started the day at the Bronx Zoo which had always struck me as the perfect place to start a party. I remember in 1966 when Esther and I went there after Bill and Aida Price’s wedding. (Esther sang at the wedding and I escorted Aida’s mother down the aisle.) We hit an open air market, stopped for coffee and food somewhere and ended up at the zoo standing by the gorilla enclosure, watching the gorillas move around slowly with no apparent objective for fifteen minutes or so before moving on to I don’t remember what else. That zoo had always fascinated me. But then, animals, who our Others, have always fascinated me.
That day, the five of us visited the bat habitat, which had only recently opened. It was awesome! They had illuminated it with low intensity red lights so we could see into the gloom to where the bats were roosting. They were everywhere! It reminded me of the feeling I had gotten watching manta rays at the Monterey Aquarium. The rays swam around in lazy circles and you could reach over the rim of the pool and –gently, ever so gently– stroke their backs as they swam past. I had the same feeling with the bats: we lived on the same earth but we were alien to each other’s senses, thought processes and life goals.
You could interact with a bat but you’d never have a conversation with one. (Here, obviously, is where I have to refer to philosopher Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” [reprinted in Mortal Questions, 1979], a piece which isn’t so much about being a bat as a critique of reductionist theories of the mind but still it’s nice to introduce it here.
Notice how smoothly I inserted that? Also how irrelevant it is to what I’m writing about?
We stayed at the zoo for several hours. After we left, we stopped at a deli to pick up food and beverages and took a Circle Line tour around Manhattan Island. The guide –if he wasn’t Irish, he gave a good imitation of it– spouted his spiel, pointing out the landmarks along the river banks. We sat back in our seats, enjoying the sun and air, and chatted, drank and ate. It was fun and oh, so civilized, the perfect afternoon: beautiful setting, engaging activity and good friends and family to share them with.
I had promised Jeremy a run at a jazz club, like we’d done for his eighteenth birthday when we saw Tommy Flanagan and Ron Carter and then Harold Ashby and a quartet. We had dinner –quite good– at a Chinese restaurant that doubled as a jazz club. Dave McKenna was playing there.
I owned a couple solo albums by McKenna, his Maybeck Hall concert and a duet album (also Maybeck) with McKenna and guitarist Gray Sargent. McKenna was a giant, but an accessible one, a phenomenal ballad player. I thought we’d all enjoy hearing him, even the non-jazz lovers in our group (by which I mean Ruth and Ned). The meal was first rate and McKenna was as good as I had expected him to be. I stopped by his piano on the way out and told him how excited I was to finally hear him live.
Afterwards, we went back to Ruth’s. I don’t know where Jeremy slept that night –as small as Ruth’s place is, he’d have had to sleep on top of me to fit in that apartment. The next day, we had breakfast together. Jeremy got back on the train to New Haven and we, that day or the day after, caught a plane back to California.
It had been a magical day.
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Here is how an event can look different in different people’s’ eyes. When Jeremy read this entry, he wrote:
What doesn’t make it into this description is how half-there I was there the whole day, due to Christine. If you remember, my girlfriend of over half year, who had said she “loved” me had decided she wouldn’t celebrate my birthday with my family. Why? Oh who knows. Christine was unreliable in relationships. It sucked, and I was ghosted most of the day you mention. For me, it was not a magical day, but not because of anything you folks did. You were trying.
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McKenna sits oddly in the pantheon of jazz pianists. His musical affiliations are hard to nail down. He doesn’t really fit with pianists like Jess Stacy or Teddy Wilson although much of what he plays comes from the Swing Era and has a rhythmic regularity that fits well with swing. His piano playing isn’t as stripped down as Nat ‘King’ Cole’s was. He could rip off a beautiful stride line but wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a stride pianist. Compare him with Fats Waller, say, a superb example of stride modified by swing, and you notice that Waller’s stride is heavily and regularly accented. McKenna’s is more flexible beat wise. As to harmonies and his ability to run the changes, he was definitely, though idiosyncratically, a product of the bop era.
In these and other respects, he’s a lot like Tatum, the best jazz pianist to play ever. McKenna was a phenomenally gifted piano technician with a superior sense of harmony, rhythm and song, and when he played, he played whatever the hell he wanted without worrying what bag it fit into.
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Could he play bop? Listen to him here, a three-minute version of Bud Powell’s fast, felt gem, “Bud’s Bubble.” The man has definite chops.
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Here’s what Wikipedia says about McKenna:
McKenna’s musical style relied on two key elements relating to his choices of tunes and set selection, and the method of playing that has come to be known as “three-handed swing”.
His renditions usually began with a spare, open statement of the melody; or, on ballads, a freely played, richly harmonized one. He then often stated the theme a second time, gradually bringing in more harmony or a stronger pulse.
His improvisation then began in earnest on three simultaneous levels: a walking bassline, mid-range chords, and an improvised melody. The bassline, for which McKenna frequently employed the rarely used lowest regions of the piano, was often played non-legato to simulate a double bassist’s phrasing. The chords were played with the thumb and forefinger of the right hand or of both hands combined, if the bass was not too low to make the stretch unfeasible. Sometimes he also added a guide-tone line consisting of thirds and sevenths on top of the bass, played by the thumb of the left hand. With his right hand’s remaining fingers, he then played the melody, weaving it into improvised lines featuring colorful chromaticism, blues licks and mainstream-jazz ideas. The result was the sound of a three-piece band under one person’s creative control.
McKenna often used his left hand to emulate the sound of a rhythm jazz guitarist, playing a four-to-the-bar “strum” consisting of a bass note (root/fifth/other interval), third and seventh. This pattern often took the form of intervals of a tenth, which is why the voicings were frequently “broken” arpeggiated, with the top two notes being played on the beat and the bass note slightly before. He often subtly altered these voicings every two beats for variety.
His “broken tenth” sound was frequently mistaken for stride piano. However, it was a more modern four-beat style, as opposed to stride’s two-beat “oom-pah” rhythm (ala Fats Waller). McKenna was also quite capable of playing full stride piano, and occasionally broke into stride choruses, especially on songs associated with traditional jazz or at the height of an up-tempo song’s development.
The characteristic that perhaps most distinguishes McKenna’s playing is his sense of time. One of the biggest challenges of solo jazz piano is the need to provide a compelling time feel, in part by emulating the rhythmic landscape normally provided by three or four players in a small group. By conceiving multiple “parts” and playing them with distinct volume levels and time feels (often with right hand chords ahead of the beat and the melody behind the beat), McKenna had a unique ability to reproduce, on his own, the sound of a small group.
Despite his complex, multi-tiered approach, McKenna’s playing was always a model of clarity, taste, beauty and swing. Art Tatum, often considered the greatest soloist in jazz piano history, praised McKenna as “a complete musician”.
McKenna liked to create medleys around a common word or theme in song titles He often combined ballads and up-tempo songs with standards, pop tunes, blues, and TV themes and folk songs.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Dave McKenna: “I Never Knew,” from Live at Maybeck (1989)
MUSIC & ME 