Les McCann, Pianist, Singer and Soul Jazz Pioneer, Dies at 88

Alan Abrahams confirmed his death on Monday at a hospital in which he was admitted for pneumonia. Abrahams has been his manager and producer of many of his albums. McCann lived in a Van Nuys nursing home for the last four years.

McCann was raised in a religious family, which explains his earthy and uplifting music. His albums from 1960-2018, which emphasized his singing and electric keyboards more, influenced R&B and funk artists and provided a rich source of inspiration for hip-hop.

The greatest commercial success of his career came by pure chance in June 1969 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

McCann, a veteran recording artist with albums released on Pacific Jazz and Limelight, as well as Atlantic’s most recent album, was attending the festival for the very first time. He and Eddie Harris, a tenor-saxophonist who is also an Atlantic artist, performed separate sets. Then, Mr. Harris, as well as the explanatory trumpeter Benny Bailey, joined Mr. McCann’s trio for an unscheduled concert.

There was no rehearsal time, as neither had ever played with McCann. The performance would be recorded and filmed for broadcast.

As Mr. McCann recalls in the liner note of the 1996 CD reissue of the 1969 concert album “Swiss Movement,” he smoked hash for the first time before going onstage.

He wrote: “I had no idea where I was when I got to the bandstand. I was completely disoriented. The other guys told me, “OK, man, play!” “I got myself together, and then everything took off.”

Eugene McDaniels’s protest song, “Compared to What,” was the highlight of this concert. The song “Compared to What,” which lasted more than eight minutes, featured the churchy vocals of Mr. McCann. It was released as a solo single and reached No. Billboard R&B chart, number 35. The song “Swiss Movement,” which was nominated for a Grammy Award, sold half a million copies.

Montreux, 1988. They performed “Compared to What” as an obligatory encore.

Leslie Coleman McCann, son of James and Anna McCann, was born in Lexington, Ky., on September 23, 1935. His father was an engineer in water maintenance.

He, his four brothers, and his sister sang together in the Shiloh Baptist Church Choir. Mr. McCann started playing the piano at age 3, and then a few more years later, he had a teacher who charged 35 cents per lesson. The lessons were short-lived: she died six weeks after McCann began to study with her. He played the drums and the sousaphone while attending Dunbar High School, Lexington.

He was 17 years old when he joined the Navy.

After winning a talent competition, he performed on “The Ed Sullivan Show”. He would spend his free time at the Black Hawk in San Francisco, a jazz club.

After leaving the Navy, Mr. McCann moved from Los Angeles to Los Angeles City College, where he studied journalism and music. He also hosted a jam session every Monday night at the Hillcrest Club. It was at this time that Mr. McDaniels first came into contact with him.

In a 2017 interview for the magazine Oxford American, Mr. McCann was asked about Mr. McDaniels’s composition “Compared to What.” “When I heard him,” he said, “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 clubs when a representative of Pacific Jazz Records heard him and asked if he had a record contract. When told no, the representative pulled one from his pocket and offered it to him.

Mr. McCann recorded more than a dozen albums for the label from 1960 to 1964, usually leading a trio under the businesslike moniker Les McCann Ltd., but sometimes adding guest horns or orchestral accompaniment and sometimes collaborating with the guitarist Joe Pass. He also took part in Pacific Jazz sessions 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,” released by Capitol in 1962.

Mr. McCann then moved to Limelight, a subsidiary of Mercury Records 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 section.

He would make 11 albums for Atlantic. On two of them, “Invitation to Openness” (1971) and “Layers” (1972), he played a host of keyboards and synthesizers, an avenue he had been inspired to explore after hearing the keyboardist Joe Zawinul’s work with Miles Davis. Those albums have been cited as seminal in popularizing electric keyboards.

Later in his Atlantic years, Mr. McCann was featured more as a singer in a slicker, more pop-oriented context. This continued through the 1970s and ’80s on albums for the Impulse!, A&M and Jam labels. But he also remained committed to the piano. In 1989, when he was a guest on the NPR show “Piano Jazz,” hosted by his fellow pianist Marian McPartland, he was both a singer and a player. The two closed the broadcast with a duet on “Compared to What.”

Mr. McCann had returned to emphasizing his piano playing by 1994, when he released “On the Soul Side,” the first of three albums for the MusicMasters label, which reunited him with Eddie Harris and Lou Rawls. But a stroke later that year forced him to once again focus on singing, which he did through the end of the decade.

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

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

Information about his survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. McCann’s music has been sampled by nearly 300 hip-hop artists, including Eric B. & Rakim, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, Nas, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, the Notorious B.I.G., and Sean Combs.

Image

Mr. McCann performed at the 40th Montreux Jazz Festival in 2006. He also painted and was a photographer. Credit…Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto Agency

In 1975, Mr. McCann became the first artist in residence at Harvard University’s Learning From Performers program. He was also a devoted painter and photographer of jazz culture and Black history, and his images have been included in some of his albums. His work was collected in 2015 in the book “Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980.”

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

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