Music of Jackie McLean

In a musical career spanning nearly sixty years,
the alto saxophonist and composer Jackie McLean
(1931-2006) developed a model of collaborative and
socially engaged pedagogy that was to prove
enormously fruitful both for his own career and
that of the younger musicians who came into his
sphere of activities. Based on a rigorous
musicianship essential to Afrological forms of
improvisation, an uncommon depth and breadth of
experience, professional ties to seminal artists
like Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Miles Davis,
Charles Mingus, and Ornette Coleman, and a
personal self-confidence which allowed for a
radical openness, McLean was able to integrate
performance, pedagogy and social and cultural
advocacy into a uniquely coherent whole which was
much greater than the sum of its parts.


In looking at McLean's work, this course will draw
from a wide variety of sources including scholarly
literature from the emerging field of jazz
studies, as well as older and less formal jazz
histories and criticism, archival materials such
as McLean's commercial recordings and their
associated liner notes, formal interviews which I
conducted with McLean in 2000 and many informal
conversations that took place from 1996-2000,
during which time I audited several of McLean's
undergraduate courses at the University of
Hartford. Special attention will also be devoted
to Ken Levis's 1976 documentary Jackie McLean On
Mars, which provides particularly valuable
insights into the nature of McLean's early work as
a community activist and an educator.