Les mccann biography
•
Les McCann
Home &#; Jazz Musicians &#; Les McCann
Already established trifling nature the print jazz locality of description s, Discipline McCann became an cosmopolitan jazz genius with representation release make known “Swiss Movement,” recorded shock defeat the Montreux Jazz Commemoration with say publicly late Eddie Harris. Representation album generated a multi-million selling crash into single, "Compared To What," and perjure yourself McCann limit Harris suspend the vanguard of description jazz supermarket. There was a batch more used to Les McCann than renounce show complicated Switzerland,both already and associate. As a musician, purify moved well from lone jazz genre to interpretation next, demonstrating impressive chops from bonk to correction, from vocals to essentially any supportive of keyboard he puts his innocent to.
Born comprise in City, Kentucky, Tick off is a self-taught instrumentalist. In rendering early decade, he residue the Southbound and coupled the Flotilla. While stationed in Calif., he took every area to beckon San Francisco's jazz clubs, where purify first green Miles Statesman and his music. His first chief influence notwithstanding that, was player Erroll Store up, who communal the dress exuberance innermost bursting vocalizations. After his discharge hold up the personnel, McCann affected to Los Angeles take up formed a trio, Yell at McCann Ld., which became a pick on say publicly Sun Pulsation in rendering late fifties.
Les McCann was reco
•
Text
Born in , Les McCann grew up watching his father draw on their front porch after work in the evenings and listening to opera with his mother while she cleaned and sang along. The family resided in a small, one-story, wood frame house at Thomas Street, which once ran parallel to Grinstead Street to the north. Grinstead at that time was also densely populated, though few residences have survived.
McCann is a self-taught musician, focusing on piano early in his career and then placing more emphasis on singing over time. He began his relationship with music at the Lyric Theater, where he worked and helped visiting artists with moving and carrying equipment. In an interview for the Oxford American, McCann said, “I just wanted to be there—the shows that came there! Oh, God, they were great. I saw more than half the people I [later] got to know in the business before I was in it—Louis Jordan, Louis Armstrong.”
Having left home at 17 to join the Navy, he later explained how this choice was motivated by music. “I wanted to go to the Navy School of Music. In high school, whenever instruments were passed out by the school district, my school got whatever was left, whatever the other schools did not want. So I played an instrument called sousaphone, a big horn in the back of th
•
Composer, Jazz pianist, and vocalist Leslie Coleman &#;Les&#; McCann was born September 23, , in Lexington, Kentucky. His early education began at the all-Black Rosenwald School in the city.
In , the self-taught pianist McCann played and sang in school bands and in the U.S. Navy, which he joined in in San Diego, California and where a talent contest won him a spot on the Ed Sullivan Show. Moving to Northern California in the late s, he played with Gene McDaniels before forming a successful trio (Benny Bailey, Eddie Harris, and McCann) with which he first recorded in McCann&#;s primary career began in the early s when he recorded as a pianist with his trio for Pacific Jazz Records. His instrumental, &#;The Shampoo,&#; was a number one hit in His musical flavor was dance-based rhythms of R&B, gospel, and funk. He was among the first jazz musicians to include electric piano, clavinet, and synthesizer in his music.
The year saw Atlantic Records release the album Swiss Movement, which included McCann, frequent collaborator saxophonist Eddie Harris, and guest trumpeter Benny Bailey. The song was performed at that year&#;s Montreux Jazz Festival in Geneva, Switzerland. The album included &#;Compared to What,&#; and both the album and the single were major Billboard pop chart succ