Les McCann, a Jazz Pianist and Singer, Dies at 88

Les McCann, a jazz pianist and vocalist who was an early progenitor of the bluesy, crowd-pleasing type that got here to be often known as soul jazz, and who, though he launched greater than 50 albums, was finest identified for a happenstance hit from 1969, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 88.

His loss of life, at a hospital the place he had been admitted with pneumonia, was confirmed on Monday by Alan Abrahams, his longtime supervisor and a producer of a number of of his albums. Mr. McCann had lived for the previous 4 years at a talented nursing facility within the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Mr. McCann’s earthy, uplifting method to music was a product of his upbringing in a churchgoing household. As he got here to emphasise his singing extra and play electrical keyboards, his albums, launched from 1960 to 2018, influenced funk and R&B artists and have become a wealthy vein for hip-hop artists to mine.

His best business success, although, got here purely by likelihood, in June 1969 on the Montreux Jazz Pageant in Switzerland.

Already a recording veteran by then, with albums on Pacific Jazz, Limelight and, most lately, Atlantic, Mr. McCann was showing on the pageant for the primary time. After he and the tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris, additionally an Atlantic artist, performed separate units, they gave an unscheduled efficiency collectively, with Mr. Harris in addition to the expatriate trumpeter Benny Bailey becoming a member of Mr. McCann’s trio.

Neither had performed with Mr. McCann earlier than, and there was no time for rehearsal. However the efficiency was to be recorded and filmed for broadcast.

Regardless of the stress, or maybe due to it, as Mr. McCann recalled within the liner notes for the 1996 CD reissue of the live performance album, which was launched in 1969 as “Swiss Movement,” “Just before we went onstage, and for the first time in my life, I smoked some hash.”

When he bought to the bandstand, he wrote, “I didn’t know where the hell I was. I was totally disoriented. The other guys said, ‘OK, play, man!’ Somehow I got myself together, and after that, everything just took off.”

The spotlight of the live performance was Eugene McDaniels’s protest music “Compared to What.” Stretching previous eight minutes and that includes Mr. McCann’s churchy vocals, “Compared to What” can be launched as a single and peak at No. 35 on the Billboard R&B chart. “Swiss Movement” was nominated for a Grammy Award and went on to promote a half-million copies.

Mr. McCann and Mr. Harris reconvened in 1971 for the Atlantic studio album “Second Movement.” Additionally they returned to Montreux for the 1988 pageant, the place they carried out an compulsory reprise of “Compared to What.”

Leslie Coleman McCann was born on Sept. 23, 1935, in Lexington, Ky., to James and Anna McCann. His father was a water upkeep engineer.

His household was a musical one; he, his 4 youthful brothers and his sister all sang within the Shiloh Baptist Church choir. Mr. McCann started enjoying piano at age 3 and some years later had a music instructor, who charged 35 cents a lesson. (These classes didn’t final lengthy: She died solely six weeks after he started finding out together with her.) Whereas attending Dunbar Excessive College in Lexington, he performed drums and sousaphone within the marching band.

He left Kentucky at 17 when he enlisted within the Navy and was posted to the San Francisco space.

Throughout his time within the Navy, he sang on “The Ed Sullivan Show” after successful a expertise contest. On his nights off, he would spend time on the Black Hawk, a San Francisco jazz nightclub.

After leaving the Navy, Mr. McCann moved to Los Angeles, the place he studied music and journalism at Los Angeles Metropolis Faculty and hosted a Monday evening jam session on the Hillcrest Membership. It was throughout that point that he first related with Mr. McDaniels.

In a 2017 interview for the journal Oxford American, Mr. McCann was requested about Mr. McDaniels’s composition “Compared to What.” “When I heard him,” he stated, “I hired him in my band — one of the best singers I’ve ever heard. And I found out he was also a writer. We stayed in touch for years after that, and he would always send me songs. I can’t tell you how many songs he sent me, but that one stuck with me.”

Mr. McCann was performing in Los Angeles golf equipment when a consultant of Pacific Jazz Data heard him and requested if he had a report contract. When informed no, the consultant pulled one from his pocket and supplied it to him.

Mr. McCann recorded greater than a dozen albums for the label from 1960 to 1964, normally main a trio below the businesslike moniker Les McCann Ltd., however generally including visitor horns or orchestral accompaniment and generally collaborating with the guitarist Joe Pass. He additionally took half in Pacific Jazz classes led by the saxophonist Teddy Edwards, the Jazz Crusaders and others. Les McCann Ltd. backed the singer Lou Rawls on his debut album, “Stormy Monday,” launched by Capitol in 1962.

Mr. McCann then moved to Limelight, a subsidiary of Mercury Data 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 part.

He would make 11 albums for Atlantic. On two of them, “Invitation to Openness” (1971) and “Layers” (1972), he performed a number of keyboards and synthesizers, an avenue he had been impressed to discover after listening to the keyboardist Joe Zawinul’s work with Miles Davis. These albums have been cited as seminal in popularizing electrical keyboards.

Later in his Atlantic years, Mr. McCann was featured extra as a singer in a slicker, extra pop-oriented context. This continued by way of the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s on albums for the Impulse!, A&M and Jam labels. However he additionally remained dedicated to the piano. In 1989, when he was a visitor on the NPR present “Piano Jazz,” hosted by his fellow pianist Marian McPartland, it was as each a singer and a participant. The 2 closed the published with a duet on “Compared to What.”

Mr. McCann had returned to emphasizing his piano enjoying by 1994, when he launched “On the Soul Side,” the primary of three albums for the MusicMasters label, which reunited him with Eddie Harris and Lou Rawls. However a stroke later that 12 months pressured him to as soon as once more deal with singing, which he did by way of the top of the last decade.

He later recovered totally and resumed recording. He launched albums on a German label in 2002 and on a Japanese label two years later. His final recording was the holiday-themed “A Time Les Christmas,” which he launched himself in 2018.

In December, Resonance Data launched the archival album “Les McCann — Never a Dull Moment! Live From Coast to Coast (1966-1967),” comprising live performance recordings from Seattle and New York.

Details about his survivors was not instantly accessible.

Mr. McCann’s music has been sampled by almost 300 hip-hop artists, together with Eric B. & Rakim, A Tribe Known as Quest, Cypress Hill, Nas, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, the Infamous B.I.G. and Sean Combs.

In 1975, Mr. McCann turned the primary artist in residence at Harvard College’s Studying From Performers program. He was additionally a loyal painter and photographer of jazz tradition and Black historical past, and his photos have been included with a few of his albums. His work was collected in 2015 within the ebook “Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980.”

In an interview for the preface to that ebook, Mr. McCann was requested how he had achieved intimacy along with his photographic topics. He responded: “I trust my intuition, you see,” including, “I’m better off when I just do what I do on the piano: play.”

Rebecca Carballo and Michael Levenson contributed reporting.