BLP 4262

Jackie McLean - New And Old Gospel

Released - January 1968

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, March 24, 1967
Ornette Coleman, trumpet; Jackie McLean, alto sax; Lamont Johnson, piano; Scott Holt, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.

1864 tk.6 Old Gospel
1865 tk.9 Strange As It Seems
1866 tk.10 Lifetime: Offspring / Midway / Vernzone / The Inevitable End

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Lifeline Medley: Offering/Midway/Vernzone/The Inevitable End	Jackie McLean	March 24 1967
Side Two
Old Gospel	Ornette Coleman	March 24 1967
Strange as It Seems	Ornette Coleman	March 24 1967

Liner Notes

"I felt it was inevitable I should record with Ornette Coleman some time," Jackie McLean was saying after this session was over. And of course, he was right. Jackie has recorded with practically all the key figures in modern jazz — Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, to just start the list. And Jackie, moreover, has kept growing, extending the range of his imagination. Unconcerned with labels, he has kept himself open and responsive to such innovators as Ornette Coleman while remaining persistently, incisively himself.

Ornette, on the other hand, was never as far out as he first appeared to be to some," Jackie emphasizes. As is now clear to everyone in retrospect, Ornette's roots in jazz go all the way back. The sound of the blues, for example, is as organic a part Of Ornette's music as it is of Jackie's. Both, moreover, play with immense authority and yet with the quality of flexibility that enables them to meet here in a series of strikingly integrated performances.

On all the tracks, Ornette is on trumpet. "Afterwards," says Jackie, '"when they heard about the date, a lot of trumpet players asked me why I used Ornette on that instrument. Actually he was willing to play any of his instruments, but it seemed to me, as we talked about the session, that we would best complement each other if Ornette focused on trumpet. Ifs amazing how far Ornette has gone on that horn in the last three years. I'm not about to compare him technically to anybody, because that isn't the point in Ornette's case. The point is how much he plays and the fact that what he plays is entirely him! If you put a record on of Ornette playing trumpet, I could tell immediately it's him. You know, we had never played together before, but once we got started, there were no problems in communication."

"NO, no problems," Ornette added when I talked to him. "I hadn't expected any. I love the way Jackie plays and the way he writes. He's such a beautiful musician. And so it was a very good, happy session."

The first side is a composition by Jackie, "Lifeline," divided into four parts. "It's an attempt," Jackie explains, "to parallel in one piece of music a complete life experience, from birth to death. 'Offspring' is the beginning. 'Midway' is the late-twenties or early-thirties. The third section, 'Vernzone,' doesn't follow the chronological design although its spirit is part of the life cycle. It's named after my son Vernon, who's seventeen. I've written music for practically every member of my family except him, and I thought now was the time. The last section, 'The Inevitable End,' is death."

Beyond that outline, Jackie prefers to avoid any more specific programmatic description because, after all, each listener will react to this distillation of every pilgrim's progress in his own way - depending on where he is in the cycle, where he's come from, what he's into now, where he hopes to go.

"Offspring" bursts forth — reaching out and into the world, into experience, into the very young's polymorphous pleasures in being, in learning through play, in playing through learning. These obviously are this listener's reactions. Yours may be quite different. In any case, the music is irrepressibly alive with energy. I would note, incidentally, the penetrating work of Lamont Johnson, both in solo and as an accompanist. A New Yorker, this young pianist had been with McLean for almost a year at the time of the recording. "Lamont," says Jackie, "is one of the last piano players seek out to play with these days because, by and large, I've had my fill of piano players. But Lamont doesn't get in the way, he doesn't try to force me into any areas I might not want to go into."

"Midway" is reflective, a time and a music of assessment, of looking back at loss and achievement, of speculating as to what's to come. Ornette's growing skill with a mute is impressively evident as he creates a statement of remarkable emotional precision in its use of space as well as its control of textures. The interweaving, moreover, between Ornette and Jackie is like two simultaneous monologues taking place in each man's mind and yet emerging as consonant dialogue.

"Vernzone" creates yet another ambience of searching, of digging into essences and the kinds of questions that may lead to essences. In this section and elsewhere, the drumming of Billy Higgins is characteristically attentive and resilient. As Jackie says of Higgins, "He's one of the most natural drummers I know. He can fit into almost any situation." And bassist Scotty Holt, originally from Chicago, is also alertly adaptable. "The thing about Scotty," says Jackie, "is that he's got the spirit. I mean not only his conception and his sound but his willingness to listen, to study, to be really part of a group." As for Jackie himself, here and throughout the session there are his further explorations Of the possibilities of time and textures and also his exploration of the very horn itself. He's into the full range of the instrument. He is, in sum, inside the instrument.

"The Inevitable End" speaks for itself — the last cries of what has been, of what might have been. These are sounds that might well be part of the climate of a Samuel Beckett novel or play. And the voice which emerges toward the very end is appropriately that of the composer.

The second side contains two originals by Ornette Coleman. Of the buoyant "Old Gospel," Jackie says, "This has a real old-time churchy feeling. Some may think it unique coming from Ornette but I knew it was there — deep down inside him — all the time." To Ornette, the song recalls "the type of rhythming sound that people responded to in the South. And not only in church. This is the kind of religious belief you can see in the streets. These are the sounds of people happy that they've had a blessing. The feeling we got in that piece made me feel happy about just growing up in America. There are a lot of good memories in that piece, and none of the bad ones. 'Old Gospel' is not about being good or being bad. It's about being."

And Alfred Lion, who produced the session, says of "Old Gospel": "It's one of the most inspired pieces I've recorded in years. There seems to be no end to the exuberance."

From the unabashed joy of "Old Gospel," Ornette turns to the subtleties and ambiguities of "'Strange As It Seems." "It starts," Ornette points out, "with Jackie playing the melody very slowly. Meanwhile I'm playing the trumpet in a different tempo — a free tempo. The title came from my feeling about the song — it's a combination of elements which are quite different from each other but at the same time are involved in a deep relationship. It's like a love affair with someone who might not care about your philosophy but who loves you a great deal." For this listener, it's an unusually provocative piece, and I expect that each listening will reveal more of what it has to say and more of the intersecting opposites within each of those who hear it.

The album as a whole reminded me of what Ornette has told columnist Ralph Gleason: "Why I like music is that it's like walking down the street naked." Part of the unnecessary clothes that get in the way of music, Ornette has always felt, are the labels which are put on the different ways different people feel and express the music inside them. Jackie McLean agrees. "I don't want to hear any more," he says, "about bebop or hard bop or this or that category. Titles hang things up. The music is just good or bad." To which Ornette adds: "There's no bad music, only bad musicians."

Here, without worrying as to what niche it fits into, just become part of what's happening. And what's happening, in Ornette's term, is what always happens with the best of music — it "gets the present to exist."

— NAT HENTOFF

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT NEW AND OLD GOSPEL

In the spring of 1968, shortly after this collaboration by two Blue Note Records leaders was released, I witnessed a third label mate, Cecil Taylor, perform a magnificent solo piano concert. Afterwards, Taylor mentioned that he had been asked to participate in New and Old Gospel but declined. He had nothing but admiration for Jackie McLean's work, Taylor explained, but could not endorse public performance on an instrument without years of preparation, as Ornette Coleman does here (and elsewhere, on violin as well as trumpet).

Think what they might about how this quintet would sound with Taylor on piano, most listeners who are familiar with the album share his misgivings about Coleman's instrumental choice. Why did he confine himself to trumpet, a horn even many of his supporters consider a change of pace? Why, more precisely, did Coleman not meet one of the most glorious alto saxophonists in jazz history with his own, equally momentous primary horn, to which he had devoted the work that Taylor demanded and from which he had summoned sounds that transformed jazz in general and McLean in particular? Coleman, after all, paired his alto with another reed in 1960 on Free Jazz (albeit Double Quartet member Eric Dolphy was on bass clarinet) and would introduce his most sustained saxophone partnership with Dewey Redman on Blue Note sessions taped 13 months after the present music. In the '90s, Coleman formed a two-alto team with Lee Konitz on a few occasions. Yet when Coleman joined what was Jackie McLean's working quartet in 1967, he played trumpet all the way.

Perhaps this is less surprising than Coleman's role here, which is as close to a classic sideman turn as any recorded appearance of his career. Set aside his appearances on projects by his own inner circle of players and family, where the Coleman ethos always dominates, and his co-star/guest-star projects can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Gospel predates encounters with Yoko Ono, William Burroughs, and Pat Metheny, and is preceded only by the Third Stream titles "Jazz Abstraction" and "Variations on a Theme by Thelonious Monk" under the direction of composer Gunther Schuller in 1960. Coleman bends to tradition and convention far more here than in those other settings, and on one of his recently acquired instruments at that, and a fresh listen to this music confirms that his success is both genuine and more valuable than is often acknowledged.

Nat Hentoff's original liner notes indicate many of the reasons that McLean and Coleman work so well together here, although a few additional points are worth making. An odd omission from McLean's list of credits in the opening paragraph, especially given Hentoff as the compiler, is the saxophonist's work with Charles Mingus, documented on the Atlantic classics Pithecanthropus Erectus and Blues and Roots. By McLean's own testimony, Mingus provided a push toward greater individuality well before Coleman 's example was available. A bit of background also explains why Billy Higgins was the perfect drummer for this encounter. Higgins was on Coleman's first California recording in 1958 and in the quartet that Coleman brought east a year later; had the distinction of working under the leadership of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane as well as Coleman during 1960; made the first of numerous albums with McLean, A Fickle Sonance, in 1961; and together with fellow Coleman alum Don Cherry joined a historic Sonny Rollins quartet in 1962.

For several months in 1966—67, Higgins, pianist Lamont Johnson, and bassist Scotty Holt formed McLean's rhythm section. Johnson remained through the end of 1967, then relocated to southern California, where he lived and occasionally recorded until his death in 1999. Holt was a McLean sideman into 1968 and toured Europe with Art Blakey a year later, then was not heard from again on record.

New and Old Gospel ultimately works so well because it finds a middle ground that is comfortable for both masters. McLean's "Lifeline" is in his most open compositional frame of mind, with state of the art alto in the "Offering" section and a different kind of vulnerability than usual at "The Inevitable End. " As a suite of related parts designed to fill one side of a 12-inch LP, "Lifeline" deserves consideration alongside much of the aforementioned Don Cherry's Blue Note output of the time. Coleman, whose muted work on "Midway" answers any qualms about his instrumental choice here, keeps the rhythmic and harmonic climate steadier than usual in his own written contributions while still allowing adequate emotional license, and McLean and his rhythm section respond expansively. Coleman's alto is still missed, but what is present makes New and Old Gospel a classic album.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2006