A late night drive with Van Dyke Parks...


I remember buying a copy of Van Dyke Parks' 1968 album SONG CYCLE at a flea market when I was in high school (late 70s-early 80s)... it was still sealed, a dollar. I listened to it and obviously didn't "get it" when I heard it way back then, and I don't even think I still have that copy of the album anymore. It may be in a box in one of my two storage spaces... I'm not sure.

Anyway, recently a friend on a Beach Boys' message board asked me if I'd like a copy of the CD reissue, and a few days later, in my mailbox, was a free copy of SONG CYCLE.

Like I said, I obviously didn't get this album in 1980... but I sure get it now. Brian Wilson may have abandoned SMILE in 1967, but Van Dyke Parks picked the ideas right up and ran with them. Wow. The almost classical voicings of the instruments... the interpolation of folk songs and standards... minimal use of traditional (for rock and roll, anyway) percussion. Either Van Dyke learned a lot from Brian, or the two of them were on the same musical plane. Probably a little bit of both.

Strangely, given its title, SONG CYCLE is less of a "song cycle" than SMILE. Unlike Brian's magnum opus, SONG CYCLE doesn't really feature any recurring musical motifs or themes that pop up thoughout the set.

Again, I'm amazed that I didn't get it when I got it.

Listening to this album was a bizarre experience. As I wrote this same friend who sent me the CD...

"I got up this morning VERY early (before 2 am) and just felt like taking a drive... a lot of people I know like to go into the city... I got in the car and drove out into the country, in the dark, out to this little market about 40 miles west that has 24 hour gas and coffee... anyway, on the way out I listened to Radio Canada (there's something I like about hearing music on the radio that I've never heard before, will never hear again, and sung in a language I don't understand... there's nothing in the experience but the music, the realization that the moment will not last, and the expectation that I will probably be surprised) and on the way back, after a handful of French-Canadian pop, I put SONG CYCLE in the CD player...

"It was very cool... the music seemed to be synchronized to the drive, to the bends in the road... at one point, I was approaching a pair of flashing traffic lights and the lights were almost dancing to the rhythm of the music... tempos seemed to accelerate and decelerate as I did, the music swelling and modulating with the curves and bends of the road. Finally, as I pulled back into town near home, that last track played, so quiet I almost couldn't hear it.

"It was musical synchronicity.

"I didn't really get to hear many (make that ANY) of the lyrics... I was mainly absorbed in the drive and the night and the FEEL of the music, which is very sweeping, evocative... it's very clear to me that he took the ideas Brian had with SMILE (short pieces woven together into an integrated whole, with snippets of standards interpolated and interspersed... unusual arrangements where non-percussion instruments or sections of instruments keep the rhythm and the pulse going) and put them to work in his own way... although as a unified whole I think SMILE works better because it's more cyclical, the thematic elements of it tied together more wholly.

"I sort of remember listening to it back then and not liking Van Dyke's voice, and thinking it was a little too cutesy. I couldn't get behind it back then... I wasn't ready for it, I suppose. Tonight, though, I was ready for it, and there it was.

"It reminds me in a way of Charlie Chaplin's film music in his movies like MODERN TIMES."

It would be sweet if Van Dyke and Brian could get together to do another collaboration. That having failed, though, I have SONG CYCLE, plus JUMP and CLANG OF THE YANKEE REAPER and the rest of Parks' solo discography to keep me busy on future late night drives.

Revisionist album cover art:

With the release of the Beatles' CAPITOL ALBUMS VOLUME TWO boxed set, I thought you'd like this disheartening news, from the WASHINGTON POST online edition's excellent CELEBRITOLOGY blog.

Peruse the comments for MY comment on this little story. It was #19 last time I checked.

Addendum (4-18-06): Capitol used this same picture on the cover of the group's "Real Love" 45-CD5 a few years back... on that cover, Ringo's cigarette was ALSO airbrushed out. On that cover, though, the airbrushing was a little more careful and didn't amputate two of his fingers.

If you look at that cover really closely, you can see the shadow of the cigarette on his fingers, even though the cigarette itself is missing. I'll try to post a scan sometime.

Jackie McLean 1931-2006

Another great passes on.

Ironically, on Monday before I'd heard the news, I had one of Jackie McLean's CDs with me at the radio station and considered playing a cut, but didn't.

I'd really recommend the recent PRESTIGE PROFILES compilation of his stuff; I also liked his work with George Wallington on a CD entitled LIVE AT CAFE BOHEMIA.

McLean was always compared to Charlie Parker (or at least called a "Charlie Parker disciple," for the reasons enumerated in the New York TIMES obit below), but from the little I heard of him, he transcended that label and came up with his own style. He was one of my favorite alto sax players... and a musician who, through his work in education (and his appearance in the Ken Burns series), really made a difference and did his part to keep the music alive and moving forward.

Here's the New York Times obituary (4-3-06):

Jackie McLean, Jazz Saxophonist and Mentor, Dies at 74

By PETER KEEPNEWS

Jackie McLean, an acclaimed saxophonist who took a midcareer detour to become a prominent jazz educator, died on Friday at his home in Hartford. He was 74.

His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the University of Hartford, where Mr. McLean had taught since 1970. No cause was given.

Mr. McLean was one of many gifted young musicians who burst onto the New York scene after World War II in the wake of the musical revolution known as bebop. He worked with Bud Powell and Miles Davis before he was out of his teens, and later he gained valuable seasoning in the bands of Art Blakey and Charles Mingus before he began leading his own groups.

Also a prolific composer, Mr. McLean was one of the first alto saxophonists to absorb the pervasive influence of Charlie Parker and shape it into a distinctive personal style. While the influence was clear, especially in his approach to harmony, Mr. McLean's astringent tone and impassioned phrasing marked him as more than just another Parker disciple.

His career had a second act as well. In the late 1960's he put performing aside to concentrate on teaching.

On his arrival at the University of Hartford in 1970, he was a music instructor at the Hartt School. Ten years later he was named director of the university's newly formed African-American music program, one of the first degree programs in the field. In 2000, a year before he received a Jazz Masters grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the university renamed the program the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz.

For more than two decades he performed and recorded only occasionally. He devoted most of his energy to teaching, both at the university and at the Artists Collective, a community cultural center in Hartford that offered classes in music, theater, dance and the visual arts to local young people, which he founded and ran with his wife, Dollie. She survives him, along with his son Rene, of New York, a saxophonist who frequently performed with him; another son, Vernone, and a daughter, Melonae, both of Hartford; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In the early 1990's Mr. McLean shifted some of his focus back to performing. "I've always wanted to be remembered for being more than a saxophone player," he told Peter Watrous of The New York Times in 1990, when he returned to New York to perform at the Village Vanguard. "It's been important to put aside my horn and help people, act on what I believe. But the building for Artists Collective will be going up in the next two years, and the music department is now a full-degree program, so it's time to get back to playing."

John Lenwood McLean was born in Harlem on May 17, 1931. (Many sources give his year of birth as 1932, but The Grove Dictionary of Jazz and other authoritative reference works say he was born a year earlier.) The son of a jazz guitarist, he began studying saxophone at 14, starting on soprano but switching to alto after a few months.

Bud Powell, a neighbor who was the leading pianist of the bebop movement and a neighbor, took Mr. McLean under his wing. He also worked with the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, another neighbor, and soon caught the attention of Miles Davis, who was just beginning his career as a bandleader. Davis used both Mr. McLean and Mr. Rollins as sidemen on one of his first recordings, in 1951.

Mr. McLean began recording his own albums in 1955. He also had a brief but memorable stage and screen career, appearing in the 1959 Off Broadway production of "The Connection," Jack Gelber's play about drug addiction, and in the 1961 film version, directed by Shirley Clarke.

Mr. McLean was in a sense playing himself. His character was a member of a jazz combo, which provided the music as well as taking part in the action. His character was also a heroin addict — as, he later acknowledged, was Mr. McLean himself. He eventually kicked the habit, and when he became a teacher he often spoke to his students about the dangers of drugs.

In his younger days Mr. McLean was identified with the aggressive, rhythmically charged offshoot of bebop known as hard bop. But in the early and middle 1960's he surprised his listeners (and alienated some critics) by embracing the avant-garde movement then known simply as "the new thing" and later called free jazz, on a series of daring albums for Blue Note with names like "Destination Out" and "One Step Beyond." He even enlisted Ornette Coleman, one of the fathers of the new music, as a sideman on "New and Old Gospel." Although Mr. Coleman's main instrument, like Mr. McLean's, was alto sax, he played trumpet on that album.

But Mr. McLean preferred not to talk about his music in terms of categories. "I've grown out of being just a bebop saxophone player, or being a free saxophone player," he told Jon Pareles of The Times in 1983. "I don't know where I am now. I guess I'm somewhere mixed up between all the saxophonists who ever played."


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company