Cryin’ Blues

Jackie McLean and John Handy (alto sax), Booker Ervin (tenor sax), Pepper Adams (baritone sax), Jimmy Knepper and Willie Dennis (trombone), Horace Parlan (piano), Charles Mingus (bass) and Dannie Richmond (drums). From the album Blues & Roots (1960).

Jackie McClean was an American jazz alto saxophonist, composer and professor of music. The first album in which he appeared was Miles Davis’s Dig in 1951 and for the rest of the 1950s he played with Gene Ammons, George Wallington, Charles Mingus and the Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. In his first recordings as a leader he played in the hard bop style, but later he also played modal jazz. In 1962 he recorded Let Freedom Ring, in which he tried to solve the harmonic problems of jazz by incorporating elements of free jazz. From then on he started to play with avant-garde musicians.

In his albums One Step Beyond and Destination Out, recorded in 1963, he challenges himself by making original and intense music. During the 1960s he played with many musicians and toured extensively, and then dedicated himself to teaching. During the 1970s he hardly practiced as a musician, except for a few recordings, although in the 1980s he returned to playing more actively. He died in 2006 at the age of 74.

This is a very short blues after which Mingus begins to make his solo in which he seems to be angry. His well marked notes form a melodic line in which he seems to be maintaining a dialogue with another person. Parlan follows with a very serene and bluesy solo. Then the group starts doing a collective improvisation until they leave Mingus and Adams alone playing some very basic phrases and then they come back to finish the composition with another brief collective improvisation.