by Les McCann, jazz pianist and vocalist who was an early progenitor of the blues, a popular style that came to be known as soul jazz, and who, although he released more than 50 albums, was best known for a chance hit in 1969. He died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 88 years old.
His death, in a hospital where he had been admitted with pneumonia, was confirmed on Monday by Alan Abrahams, his former manager and producer of several of his albums. McCann had lived for the past four years in a skilled nursing facility in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles.
McCann’s earthy, uplifting approach to music was a product of his upbringing in a church-going family. As he began to emphasize more his singing and playing electric keyboards, his albums, released between 1960 and 2018, influenced funk and R&B artists and became a rich vein for hip artists. -hop.
His greatest commercial success, however, came by pure chance, in June 1969 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.
By then a recording veteran, with albums on Pacific Jazz, Limelight and, most recently, Atlantic, McCann was appearing at the festival for the first time. After he and tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris, also an Atlantic artist, played separate sets, they gave an unscheduled performance together, with Mr. Harris and expatriate trumpeter Benny Bailey joining Mr. McCann’s trio.
Neither of them had played with Mr McCann before and there was no time to rehearse. But the performance was going to be recorded and filmed for broadcast.
Despite the pressure, or perhaps because of it, as McCann recalled in the liner notes to the 1996 CD reissue of the concert album, which was released in 1969 as “Swiss Movement,” “Just before going on stage, and for the first time in my life I smoked hashish.”
When he got to the kiosk, he wrote: “I didn’t know where the hell I was. He was totally disoriented. The other guys were like, ‘Okay, play, man!’ “Somehow I recovered and after that everything took off.”
The highlight of the concert was Eugene McDaniels’ protest song “Compared to What.” Running eight minutes and featuring Mr. McCann’s ecclesiastical vocals, “Compared to What” would be released as a single and peak at No. 35 on Billboard’s R&B chart. “Swiss Movement” was nominated for a Grammy Award and sold half a million copies.
McCann and Harris reunited in 1971 for the Atlantic studio album “Second Movement.” They also returned to Montreux for the 1988 festival, where they performed an obligatory encore of “Compared to What.”
Leslie Coleman McCann was born on September 23, 1935 in Lexington, Kentucky, the daughter of James and Anna McCann. Her father was a water maintenance engineer.
His family was musical; He, his four younger brothers, and his sister sang in the Shiloh Baptist Church choir. McCann began playing the piano at age 3 and a few years later he had a music teacher, who charged 35 cents per lesson. (Those lessons didn’t last long: she died just six weeks after he began studying with her.) While attending Dunbar High School in Lexington, he played drums and sousaphone in the marching band.
He left Kentucky at age 17 when he enlisted in the Navy and was stationed in the San Francisco area.
While in the Navy, he sang on “The Ed Sullivan Show” after winning a talent show. On her nights off, she spent time at the Black Hawk, a San Francisco jazz nightclub.
After leaving the Navy, McCann moved to Los Angeles, where he studied music and journalism at Los Angeles City College and hosted a Monday night jam session at the Hillcrest Club. It was during that time that he first connected with Mr. McDaniels.
In a 2017 interview for Oxford American magazine, McCann was asked about McDaniels’ composition “Compared to What.” “When I heard him,” he said, “I hired him for my band, one of the best singers I’ve ever heard. And I discovered that he was also a writer. We stayed in touch for years after that and he always sent me songs. I can’t tell you how many songs he sent me, but that one stuck with me.”
McCann was performing in clubs in Los Angeles when a representative from Pacific Jazz Records overheard him and asked if he had a record deal. When he was told no, the representative took one out of his pocket and offered it to him.
McCann recorded more than a dozen albums for the label between 1960 and 1964, usually leading a trio under the professional pseudonym Les McCann Ltd., but sometimes adding guest trumpets or orchestral accompaniment and sometimes collaborating with guitarist Joe Pass. He also participated in Pacific Jazz sessions led by saxophonist Teddy Edwards, the Jazz Crusaders and others. Les McCann Ltd. backed singer Lou Rawls on his debut album, “Stormy Monday,” released by Capitol in 1962.
McCann then moved to Limelight, a subsidiary of Mercury Records run by Quincy Jones, for which he made six albums from 1964 to 1966. He signed with Atlantic in 1968; On his first album for the label, “Much Les,” he was accompanied by a string section.
He would make 11 albums for Atlantic. On two of them, “Invitation to Openness” (1971) and “Layers” (1972), he played a lot of keyboards and synthesizers, an avenue he had been inspired to explore after hearing keyboardist Joe Zawinul’s work with Miles Davis. Those albums have been cited as instrumental in the popularization of electric keyboards.
Later, in her Atlantic years, McCann appeared more as a singer in a more elegant and pop-oriented context. This continued through the 1970s and 1980s on albums for the Impulse!, A&M, and Jam labels. But he also remained committed to the piano. In 1989, when he was a guest on the NPR program “Piano Jazz,” hosted by fellow pianist Marian McPartland, he performed as both a singer and a performer. The two closed the broadcast with a duet on “Compared to What.”
McCann had re-emphasized his piano playing in 1994, when he released “On the Soul Side,” the first of three albums for the MusicMasters label, which reunited him with Eddie Harris and Lou Rawls. But a stroke that same year forced him to concentrate again on singing, which he did until the end of the decade.
He later made a full recovery and resumed recording. She released albums on a German label in 2002 and on a Japanese label two years later. His last recording was the Christmas-themed “A Time Les Christmas,” which he released in 2018.
In December, Resonance Records released the archival album “Les McCann – Never a Dull Moment! Live From Coast to Coast (1966-1967)”, which includes concert recordings from Seattle and New York.
Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. McCann’s music has been sampled by nearly 300 hip-hop artists, including Eric B. & Rakim, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, Nas, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, the Notorious BIG and Sean Combs.
In 1975, McCann became the first artist-in-residence at Harvard University’s Learning From Performers program. He was also a painter and photographer devoted to jazz culture and black history, and images of him have been included in some of his albums. His work was collected in 2015 in the book “Invitation to Opening: The Jazz and Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980.”
In an interview for the preface to that book, Mr. McCann was asked how he achieved intimacy with his photographic subjects. He replied, “I trust my intuition, you see,” and added, “I’m at my best when I’m doing what I do on the piano: playing.”
Rebeca Carballo and Michael Levenson contributed reports.
