Jazz
Left-hand man
Martin Gayford
It is hard to believe it now, but the jazz pianist and the rest of the band started off apart. Many of the early bands used a gui- tar rather than a piano as the chording instrument (partly because that instrumen- tation made it a good deal easier to march down the street while playing). Conversely, the piano players of the first three decades of the century — men like Jelly Roll Mor- ton — tended to be solitary entertainers wholly dependent on their own two hands and brazen personalities. Those days, of course, are long gone, and today most piano players are impeccably well-integrat- ed citizens of the rhythm section. Even so, a few mavericks remain who actually sound more natural playing solo piano than doing anything else. Of these, Dave McKenna, the reclusive but celebrated performer who is appearing this month at the Brecon Jazz Festival (16 and 17 August) and the Pizza on the Park, Knightsbridge (19-25 August), is one of the most remarkable.
One of the fundamental differences between the one-man-band pianists and most later stylists lay in what they did with their left hands. The older men used it to accent the rhythm and to lay down a bass line; bebop pianists and their successors had a bassist and a drummer to do those things, and therefore concentrated more on other matters. This led to accusations which must have sounded oddly in the ears of non-aficionados — that 'modern pianists have no left hands'. On the other hand, the superhuman dexterity of Art Tatum supreme master of solo jazz piano, and one of the most astonishing virtuosi who has ever appeared in any musical field — was acknowledged by the remark that he had 'a left hand like God'.
Now, Dave McKenna — born in 1930 in Woonsocket, Rhode Island — is a member of the post-war generation. Although he has played with a number of pre-war musi- cians, notably the trumpeter/cornettist Bobby Hackett, McKenna does not play in a revivalist style. As a matter of fact, he does not sound much like any other pianist at all, ancient or modern. On the other hand, he does have a left hand which, if not actually divine, is certainly pretty extraordi- nary — a rolling, rumbling, rampaging foundation to almost everything he plays above the slowest tempo. This has a power- fully physical effect — at times no more than a lullaby rock, but at others so deep and strong as to resemble a series of seis- mic shocks or something very heavy in rapid motion. That may sound alarming, but in practice it is vastly exhilarating, lead- ing many colleagues and observers to declare that McKenna `swings harder than any pianist alive'. In part this is a matter of sheer physical strength. He is a very big man, and smaller pianos sway visibly under the impact of his fingers. This however, is merely a means to an end, and the end is a remarkably orchestral conception of piano jazz. Like Tatum, he can play beautifully and illumi- natingly with other musicians — but sup- plementary instruments are, strictly speaking, unnecessary. He is a musical world in himself.
He is the sort of pianist — there are very few left — who knows everything. Not just standards and classics, but old pop songs, show tunes that didn't quite make it everything. His subject matter is virtually the whole universe of Anglo-American song. He will even have a workmanlike shot at the (for jazz) peculiarly intractable works of Andrew Lloyd Webber. 'He fig- ures', another musician told me, 'if some- one wants to hear it, he ought to play it.'
If McKenna's freely evolving bass lines bear a distant resemblance to the more rigid patterns of boogie-woogie and stride, the man himself could hardly be more dif- ferent from the half-mountebank perform- ers of yesteryear — Jelly Roll with his diamond-filled tooth, Fats Waller with his irrepressible patter. McKenna is a shy man. Where most jazz musicians these days think of themselves as artists, he likes to describe himself as a bar-room pianist, and positively welcomes noisy rooms. Faced with an especially hushed and attentive crowd in a New York club, he once leant over to some friends at a front table and hissed, `For God's sake talk, I can't stand this silence'. In a world where musicians incessantly globe-trot, McKenna is loath to leave his native New England — especially during the baseball season, since he has been a fanatical supporter of the Boston Red Sox since early youth. His current visit to England is his first since 1988, and includes his first London engagement as a solo performer — I think — ever. The occasion should be seized by all connois- seurs of jazz piano.
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