Dave McKenna was a jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

 pianist

Pianist

A pianist is a musician who plays the piano. A professional pianist can perform solo pieces, play with an ensemble or orchestra, or accompany one or more singers, solo instrumentalists, or other performers.-Choice of genres:...

. He was known for his "three-handed swing" and was a leading proponent of solo piano style.

Biography

Starting out at the age of 15, McKenna played with Boots Mussulli

Boots Mussulli

Boots Mussulli was an American jazz saxophonist, based chiefly out of Boston....

 (1947), Charlie Ventura

Charlie Ventura

Charlie Ventura was a tenor saxophonist and bandleader.Ventura was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He had his first successes working with Gene Krupa. In 1945 he won the Down Beat readers' poll in the tenor saxophone division...

 (1949) and Woody Herman's Orchestra

Woody Herman

Woodrow Charles Herman , known as Woody Herman, was an American jazz clarinetist, alto and soprano saxophonist, singer, and big band leader. Leading various groups called "The Herd," Herman was one of the most popular of the 1930s and '40s bandleaders...

 (1950-51). He then spent two years in the military, and re-joined Ventura (1953-54).

He worked with a variety of top swing and Dixieland musicians including Gene Krupa

Gene Krupa

Gene Krupa was an American jazz and big band drummer and composer, known for his highly energetic and flamboyant style.-Biography:...

, Joe Venuti, Stan Getz

Stan Getz

Stanley Getz was an American jazz saxophone player. Getz was known as "The Sound" because of his warm, lyrical tone, his prime influence being the wispy, mellow timbre of his idol, Lester Young. Coming to prominence in the late 1940s with Woody Herman's big band, Getz is described by critic Scott...

, Zoot Sims

Zoot Sims

John Haley "Zoot" Sims was an American jazz saxophonist, playing mainly tenor and soprano.-Biography:He was born in Inglewood, California, the son of vaudeville performers Kate Haley and John Sims. Growing up in a performing family, Sims learned to play both drums and clarinet at an early age...

, Al Cohn

Al Cohn

Al Cohn was an American jazz saxophonist and arranger and composer.-Biography:Alvin Gilbert Cohn was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was initially known in the 1940s for playing in Woody Herman's Second Herd as one of the Four Brothers, along with Zoot Sims, Stan Getz, and Serge Chaloff...

, Bob Wilbur, Eddie Condon

Eddie Condon

Albert Edwin Condon , better known as Eddie Condon, was a jazz banjoist, guitarist, and bandleader. A leading figure in the so-called "Chicago school" of early Dixieland, he also played piano and sang on occasion....

, and Bobby Hackett

Bobby Hackett

Robert Leo "Bobby" Hackett was an US jazz musician who played trumpet, cornet and guitar with the bands of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman in the late thirties and early forties.-Biography:...

 but became primarily a soloist after 1967, especially in the Northeast United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. McKenna performed with Louis Armstrong at the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival.

He started to be recognized in his own right during the 1970s, but chose to play in his local area rather than travel extensively. He preferred playing in clubs and hotels to getting center stage in major venues. He could be found playing in hotel piano bar

Piano bar

A piano bar consists of a piano or electronic keyboard played by a professional musician, located in a cocktail lounge, bar, hotel lobby, office building lobby, restaurant, or on a cruise ship. Usually the pianist receives a small salary plus tips in a jar or basket on or near the piano,...

s in Massachusetts

Massachusetts

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...

, including a decade-long run at the Copley Plaza in Boston, until his retirement around the turn of the millennium. A loyal Boston Red Sox fan, he was known to listen to games on his transistor radio while performing.

McKenna was also known as a wonderful accompanist, recording with such singers as Rosemary Clooney, Teddi King and Donna Byrne and recording a PBS special with Tony Bennett.

McKenna died in 2008 from lung cancer.

Musical style

His musical presentation relies on two key elements relating to his choices of tunes and set selection, and the method of playing that has come to be known as "three-handed swing".

McKenna liked to make thematic

Theme (music)

In music, a theme is the material, usually a recognizable melody, upon which part or all of a composition is based.-Characteristics:A theme may be perceivable as a complete musical expression in itself, separate from the work in which it is found . In contrast to an idea or motif, a theme is...

 medleys, usually based around a key word that appears in the titles, such as teach, love, women's names, dreams, night or day, street names, etc. There may be ballads and up-tempo songs blended together with standards, pop tunes, blues

Blues

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

, and even TV themes or folk material.

McKenna's renditions usually began with a spare, open statement of the melody, or, on ballads, a freely played, richly harmonized one. He often stated the theme a second time, gradually bringing more harmony or a stronger pulse into play.

The improvisation

Improvisation

Improvisation is the practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment and inner feelings. This can result in the invention of new thought patterns, new practices, new structures or symbols, and/or...

 then began in earnest on three levels simultaneously, namely a walking bass line, midrange chords and an improvised melody. The bass line, for which McKenna frequently employes the rarely-used lowest regions of the piano, is naturally being played in the left hand, often non-legato

Legato

In musical notation the Italian word legato indicates that musical notes are played or sung smoothly and connected. That is, in transitioning from note to note, there should be no intervening silence...

, to simulate an actual double bassist's

Double bass

The double bass, also called the string bass, upright bass, standup bass or contrabass, is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra, with strings usually tuned to E1, A1, D2 and G2...

 phrasing, the melody in the right. The chords are interspersed using the thumb and forefinger of the right hand or of both hands combined, if the bass is not too low to make the stretch unfeasible. Sometimes he also adds a guide-tone line consisting of thirds and sevenths on top of the bass, played by the thumb of the left hand.

His famous four-to-the-bar "strum" is achieved by the left hand alone, playing a bass note

Bass note

In music theory, the bass note of a chord or sonority is the lowest note played or notated. If there are multiple voices it is the note played or notated in the lowest voice. While the bass note is often the root or fundamental of the chord, it does not have to be, and sometimes one of the other...

 (root/fifth/other interval) plus third and seventh, leading to frequent left-hand stretches of a tenth, which is why these voicings frequently appear arpeggiated

Arpeggio

An arpeggio is a musical technique where notes in a chord are played or sung in sequence, one after the other, rather than ringing out simultaneously...

, with the top two notes being played on the beat, the bass note slightly before. These voicings are often subtly altered every two beats, for variety. This playing style is frequently mistaken for a stride piano

Stride piano

Harlem Stride Piano, Stride Piano, or just Stride, is a jazz piano style that was developed in the large cities of the East Coast, mainly in the New York, during 1920s and 1930s. The left hand may play a four-beat pulse with a single bass note, octave, seventh or tenth interval on the first and...

, which it is clearly not, as it is of a four-beat nature, as opposed to the two-beat "oom-pah" of true stride piano, as exemplified by Fats Waller

Fats Waller

Fats Waller , born Thomas Wright Waller, was a jazz pianist, organist, composer, singer, and comedic entertainer...

, James P. Johnson

James P. Johnson

James P. Johnson was an American pianist and composer...

, and the like. McKenna usually reserves all-out stride for sections where a bassist would play half notes, i.e. ballad

Ballad

A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...

s and Dixieland

Dixieland

Dixieland music, sometimes referred to as Hot jazz, Early Jazz or New Orleans jazz, is a style of jazz music which developed in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century, and was spread to Chicago and New York City by New Orleans bands in the 1910s.Well-known jazz standard songs from the...

-tinged material. The result is the sound of a three piece band under one person's creative control.

McKenna can weave a spontaneous melodic line, usually with lots of chromaticism and blues licks, over the bass line. The bass can be anything from single notes to repeated chords like a rhythm guitar to a full-blown stride piano, the latter often reserved for the height of a song's development.

The characteristic that perhaps most distinguishes McKenna's playing is his sense of time. One of the most commonly cited difficulties of solo jazz piano is the need to provide a compelling time feel, in part by emulating the rhythmic landscape normally provided by three or four players in a small group. By conceiving of multiple "parts" and playing them with distinct volume levels and time feels (often with right hand chords ahead of the beat and the melody behind the beat), McKenna showed a unique ability to reproduce the small group sound on the piano.

His recordings on the Concord

Concord Records

Concord Records is a U.S. record label now based in Beverly Hills, California. Originally known as Concord Jazz, it was established in 1972 as an off-shoot of the Concord Jazz Festival in Concord, California by festival founder Carl Jefferson, a local automobile dealer and jazz fan who sold his...

 record label attest to both the excitement and tenderness of his playing. His contribution to the development of jazz piano as a solo voice will not be forgotten by musicians or the history books. Art Tatum

Art Tatum

Arthur "Art" Tatum, Jr. was an American jazz pianist and virtuoso who played with phenomenal facility despite being nearly blind.Tatum is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time...

, often considered the greatest soloist in jazz piano history, praised McKenna as someone he considered a complete musician.

McKenna has had an extensive recording career from 1958 to 2002, and recorded for ABC-Paramount Records (1956), Epic

Epic Records

Epic Records is an American record label, owned by Sony Music Entertainment. Though it was originally conceived as a jazz imprint, it has since expanded to represent various genres. L.A...

 (1958), Bethlehem

Bethlehem Records

Bethlehem Records was a record label based in New York and Hollywood founded by Gus Wildi in 1953. It was bought by King Records in the early 1960s....

 (1960) and Realm (1963). McKenna made several recordings for Chiaroscuro Records in the 1970s, including his comeback album "Solo Piano". McKenna debuted with Concord in 1979, where the majority of his catalogue rests, including one volume of Concord's 42-disc series recorded live inside Maybeck Recital Hall

Maybeck Recital Hall

Maybeck Recital Hall, also known as Maybeck Studio for Performing Arts, is located inside the Kennedy-Nixon House in Berkeley, California, USA. It was built in 1914 by Bernard Maybeck. The hall seats up to 50 people and was designed upon commission for the Nixon family, local arts patrons who...

. McKenna's last recording, "An Intimate Evening With Dave McKenna" was released on Arbors Records in 2002.

Selected Discography

• Giant Strides, 1979, Concord Records
  Concord Records
  Concord Records is a U.S. record label now based in Beverly Hills, California. Originally known as Concord Jazz, it was established in 1972 as an off-shoot of the Concord Jazz Festival in Concord, California by festival founder Carl Jefferson, a local automobile dealer and jazz fan who sold his...
  
  
• Bill Evans: A Tribute, 1982, Palo Alto Records
  Palo Alto Records
  Palo Alto Records was a jazz record label that released most of its discography in the 1980s. The label was founded in 1981 by Jim Benham, who was a Palo Alto, California resident. The artistic director was Herb Wong. In 1985 the company ceased its activities...
  
  
• A Celebration of Hoagy Carmichael, 1983 Concord Records
  Concord Records
  Concord Records is a U.S. record label now based in Beverly Hills, California. Originally known as Concord Jazz, it was established in 1972 as an off-shoot of the Concord Jazz Festival in Concord, California by festival founder Carl Jefferson, a local automobile dealer and jazz fan who sold his...
  
  
• No More Ouzo for Puzo, 1989 Concord Jazz
  Concord Jazz
  Concord Jazz is a subsidiary of Concord Records, owned by Concord Music Group.-Dozens of albums:*Charlie Byrd*Ruby Braff*Dave McKenna*Marian McPartland*Rosemary Clooney*Scott Hamilton*Tito Puente*George Shearing*Gene Harris*Mel Tormé*Monty Alexander...
  
  
• Christmas Ivory, 1997 Concord Jazz
  Concord Jazz
  Concord Jazz is a subsidiary of Concord Records, owned by Concord Music Group.-Dozens of albums:*Charlie Byrd*Ruby Braff*Dave McKenna*Marian McPartland*Rosemary Clooney*Scott Hamilton*Tito Puente*George Shearing*Gene Harris*Mel Tormé*Monty Alexander...
  
  
• An Intimate Evening With Dave McKenna, 2002 Arbors Records
  Arbors Records
  Arbors Records is an independent American jazz record label based in Clearwater, Florida. It was founded by the family team of Mat and Rachel Domber in 1989, initially devoted to the recordings of their friend Rick Fay.-History:...
  
  

External links

• [ All Music]
• Fansite
• http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97485041
• http://www.concordmusicgroup.com/artists/Dave-McKenna/
• New England Jazz History Database - Dave McKenna Search