BLP 4218

Jackie McLean - Action

Released - September 1967

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, September 16, 1964
Charles Tolliver, trumpet; Jackie McLean, alto sax; Bobby Hutcherson, vibes; Cecil McBee, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.

1438 tk.1 Action
1439 tk.3 Wrong Handle
1440 tk.15 I Hear A Rhapsody
1441 tk.19 Plight
1442 tk.20 Hootnan

Session Photos

Photos: © Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images 
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Action	Jackie McLean	September 16 1964
Plight	Charles Tolliver	September 16 1964
Side Two
Wrong Handle	Charles Tolliver	September 16 1964
I Hear a Rhapsody	Jack Baker, George Fragos, Dick Gasparre	September 16 1964
Hootnan	Jackie McLean	September 16 1964

Liner Notes

ONE of the consistently intriguing characteristics of Jackie McLean’s jazz is that while he continues to explore new directions, he is also clearly rooted in the fundamentals of modern jazz. Or, as he would put it, “I never want to go ‘outside’ for too long a time without coming back ‘inside’ again.”

This album reveals Jackie both “outside” and “inside” and is an absorbing illustration of how the past, present and future intersect in his composing and improvising.

Jackie’s Action received its title from the way it sounds. “The way the melody moves,” Jackie explains, “is the sound of something happening.” The composed parts do not follow usual harmonic patterns except for the building passages where you hear long tones that are harmonically based in the traditional sense. But as for its basic structure, Jackie — who composes in his head, never with instruments — built the harmonics from note to note. “I mentally selected four saxophone notes.” he points out, “and those are the first four notes of the melody. Then, I thought chromatically of the best possible notes for Charles Tolliver, and that became the rest of the melody. Another thing to listen for is that if I were to play my part separately, you’d hear a separate tune. And the same is true of Charles’ part."

“Furthermore,” adds Jackie, “once the solo improvisations start, there are no chord changes and no scales to follow. The soloist has to listen therefore, to Bobby Hutcherson for leads to where to go. That’s why Bobby lays out a lot. Every once in a while, he comes in and points a new direction, and then he cuts the soloist loose again.”

From the start, the piece crackles with the challenge of the unexpected. Jackie's solo is marked by its scaring intensity, blistering beat and the cuttingly clear logic of his ideas. Twenty-four-year-old Tolliver (who can be heard on Jackie’s It’s Time, BLUE NOTE 4179) is crisp, intense but disciplined in the shaping of his emotions and possessed of a flaring brass tone. And the rhythm section cooks with steaming zeal.

Plight is by Tolliver who, Jackie emphasizes, has “made remarkable strides as a composer in a very short period of time.” The piece was first tried out by Jackie and Charles on a bandstand in Boston. “He told me,” Jackie recalls, “to picture someone with a huge boulder on his back. Now, having played it a number of times, I also see a dirt road along which a lot of people are struggling along with burdens.”

Jackie is characteristically forceful and incisively assertive — despite the burden on the back. Tolliver discloses his capacity for yearning lyricism. Bobby Hutcherson, who built a seizing mobile of tension in Action, turns reflective in his flowing improvisation in this piece.

Wrong Handle is also by Tolliver. Originally it was written for a young lady. The relationship, however, didn’t work out, and so Tolliver changed the title from her name to the presently appropriate Wrong Handle. “Listen,” counsels Jackie, “to the very definite style Tolliver is getting as a ballad writer. The way I hear it. for example, there are dark colors in my mind when I listen to one of his ballads — purples, blacks, dark blues. No light greens or yellows.”

I hear A Rhapsody is one of the tunes Jackie plays when he wants to come back “inside.” He remembers bearing Charlie Parker play it in the early 1950’s. “For years after that, I never could get inside the song. I kept trying, putting it in different keys and things, and still I couldn’t play it. I guess it was the effect of having heard Bird with it. He had played it so completely, as if there were no more rhapsodies to listen for after that experience. He really tore it up. But one night a couple of years ago at the Coronet in Brooklyn, someone requested it, and I went up to the mike and stated the melody. I played that melody over and over again until finally it came to me and I got inside the song.” How far inside Jackie got is revealed in his passionately plunging solo on this track.

The folk-like Hootnan is described by Jackie as “a blues without being a blues. I mean its in a b flat minor mode with twelve-bar phraseology but without actual blues changes. The blues feeling is there, however.” Its line is infectiously kinetic, or what used to be called toe-tapping music. Again Jackie’s playing brings to ear and feeling the word that was once a major accolade in jazz — “hot.” No one can ever charge Jackie with sounding detached or abstract. And the absorbing fact is that the older and more experimental he gets, the hotter he plays. Tolliver also is far from “cool,” and Hutcherson, as throughout the date, is a distinctive combination of clarity, grace, freshness — and heat.

Among the more enthusiastic admirers of Hootnan are some of the youngsters in the HARYOU youth band in Harlem — a band that is part of Jackie’s current responsibilities as supervisor of HARYOU’s music department. He not only oversees the 18-piece jazz band of that community action program but is also developing classes in music theory, a choral workshop, a percussion division, a Latin band and a concert band.

“Working with these kids,” Jackie notes, “is a gas. And it helps me in my own music. Hearing them I’m able to sec the whole cycle of jazz — from the beginnings to the ‘outside’ we’re now exploring. And there’s a great deal of satisfaction in watching the kids develop. A while ago, in a club on Long Island, there was a Charlie Parker memorial session. A number of very good professional alto saxophonists were there, but do you know who turned the place out? A sixteen-year old youngster from HARYOU. These kids are something else.” And so are McLean’s own youngsters. His son, René, is in the HARYOU band and another son, Vernon, will join it on trumpet. So there is now a Jackie McLean family tradition in jazz while the head of the family continues to grow in his work — both “inside” and “outside,” as is invigoratingly evident in this durable album.

—NAT HENTOFF

Cover Design by REID MILES
Cover Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT ACTION

Few musicians gave broader meaning to the notion of contemporary jazz in the early and mid-1960's, or functioned within a more diverse circle of individual talents and ensemble options than Jackie McLean. To no small degree this was a product of the saxophonist's circumstances, because his history as a drug offender placed him in the position of attempting to survive in New York City without the cabaret license that made extended employment for musicians possible. No doubt McLean would have preferred to organize a band with stable personnel that could explore his music more single-mindedly, and his inability to do so has impeded a proper acknowledgement of his value and his contributions. Making the best of the situation, McLean did seize on an uncommon range of instrumentations, idioms, and partners to create some of the decade's most lasting music.

Action might best be appreciated in this light as a confluence of several valued McLean associates. Charles Tolliver, who also straddled the more the established and up-to-date jazz camps of the period, had launched his recording career a month earlier on McLean's It's Time! The trumpeter would also participate in McLean's unusual September '65 date, where Lee Morgan was also featured, as well as an intervening session by the saxophonist with the present instrumentation that produced two unissued performances. Tolliver's value lay in both his solo powers and his compositions, eight of which were recorded by McLean. Of his contributions here, "Wrong Handle" is a ballad of substance that offers an excellent opportunity to appreciate the bass work of Cecil McBee, while the waltz "Plight" became a central piece in the composer's discography. With virtually the identical quintet (James Spaulding in place of McLean), Tolliver had performed the piece at the 1965 Village Gate in benefit that produced the Impulse! album The New Wave in Jazz, and that version ultimately appeared in the '70s. "Plight" was also revisited by a Tolliver quartet in 1969, and as a big band arrangement in 1975 for an expanded version of the Music Inc. cooperative that also featured pianist Stanley Cowell and, on occasion, McBee. While the melody has an edge, it is also grounded by its blues-like form. With tenor sax and piano in place of the alto and vibes heard here, one can even imagine "Plight" passing as a Horace Silver opus.

The ability of Bobby Hutcherson's vibes to function in the ensemble space traditionally assumed by piano opened even further possibilities for McLean the bandleader, and the unit with Hutcherson and trombonist Grachan Moncur III that recorded three times in 1963 under both McLean's and Moncur's names created one of the signature sounds of the period. This was the final collaboration of McLean and Hutcherson to yield issued music, and it finds the vibist equally convincing outlining the scalar terrain of McLean's title track and leading over the swing-and-changes turf of "I Hear a Rhapsody."

Cecil McBee's studio relationship with McLean spanned a mere six weeks. He was also a part of It's Time!, and with the present band save Steve Ellington on drums had produced unissued versions of "Plight" and "Wrong Handle" a week prior to the issued masters The limited evidence reveals the bassist's thorough understanding of McLean's muse and methods. Similar affinity was displayed by Billy Higgins over a more generous span of years and recordings, who made his first appearance with McLean on A Fickle Sonance in 1961, and helped the saxophonist turn the inside/outside corner on Let Freedom Ring in 1962. The medium modal atmosphere of "Melody for Melonae" from the latter historic session is recalled on "Hootnan," which has a pithy, hypnotic groove that anticipates such minimalist creations of McLean's boyhood friend Sonny Rollins as "Alfie"s Theme" and "Blessing in Disguise."

Nat Hentoff's original liner notes end with an uncommonly prescient reference to the importance of education and family in McLean's later career. In Hartfcrd, his home base since 1971, McLean has become a leading jazz educator at Hart College, while his wife Dolly spearheads the city's Artist Collective; and son René became a presence on the U.S. scene before relocating to South Africa, where he pursues his own efforts in the cause of jazz education.

- Bob Blumenthal, 2003