A Mutual Admiration Society On View at the Copley Plaza in 1982
Dave McKenna was born 85 years ago, May 30, 1930. The Woonsocket, RI, native died on October 18, 2008. The Dave McKenna Appreciation Society recently launched this new website, Dave McKenna: Piano’s Most Valuable Player. Among its highlights is a 1982 performance by Dave and his special guest Tony Bennett at the Copley Plaza in Boston, where Dave played long residencies for many years.
Bennett arrives to the tune of “The Best Is Yet to Come,” and immediately displays his nonchalant mastery by entering the song mid-phrase, “Come the day you’re mine.” It’s followed by “Dancing in the Dark,” “When Joanna Loved Me,” “Love Scene,” “I Love You,” “The Very Thought of You,” “Just One of Those Things,” and an encore of “All the Things You Are,” complete with Tony singing the verse of the great standard by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. Note Bennett stealing a look at the sheet music atop the piano for the lyric of the rarely heard verse.
Ray Noble’s tender ballad opens with Bennett hailing trumpeter Bobby Hackett as “the finest melody musician who ever lived.” The singer and pianist both had significant associations with the Providence-born multi-instrumentalist; Hackett played ukulele behind Bennett on his 1965 recording of “Sweet Lorraine,” and the following year he made the album, Bobby Hackett Plays Tony Bennett’s Greatest Hits. (Click here to hear it.) McKenna spent over a decade in Hackett’s combo, and one of the most memorable afternoons I spent at The Columns in West Dennis was a Sunday in 1973 when Hackett, who lived nearby in Chatham, sat in with Dave. Two tunes before “The Very Thought of You,” Bennett declares, “You can’t do a good music show without Duke Ellington,” and sings “Love Scene,” which Duke composed for him in the mid-sixties. (Click here for a previous Bennett profile that explores the significance of Ellington to the singer.)
I’ve never been less than delighted with Bennett in the many times I’ve seen him in concert. (He’ll be in the area this summer with Lady Gaga for shows on June 29 at the Oakdale Theater in Wallingford, CT, and June 30 at Tanglewood.) But I’m especially grateful for the formative experience I had in seeing McKenna playing on Cape Cod when I was a kid and fairly new to the realization that jazz was my musical passion. Beginning in 1970, I heard him at The Columns, the Asa Bearse House, the Captain Linell House, Johnny Yee’s, Chatham Bars Inn, the Provincetown Heritage Museum, and a couple of outdoor events on town commons along the mid-Cape. Some of these were nightly gigs, others were the weekly kind he called “corned beef.” The pianist wasn’t just a summertime attraction for me either. I also saw him in such far flung locales as Boston, Belchertown, Brattleboro, Hopkinton, Hartford, Northampton, Portsmouth, and Paris. In New York, I caught up with him at Hanratty’s, Blue Chopsticks, Bradley’s, and St. Peter’s Church, and one or two more that I may have forgotten. Recalling these datelines reminds me that I don’t get around (that) much anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFGOsIMqqzA&list=PLx1wYMItfH_SpMovMt2C27rlYSDiNhHTA&index=3
Dave made manifest what is meant by a great left hand, turned me on to scores of tunes I’d never heard before, and gave me a different vantage point on the jazz life. I don’t think he ever called me by name, but when he spotted me in a room he’d say, “Worcester!” Like other players of his generation, he expressed puzzlement over why someone my age dug his music. When I first began seeing him I was mostly familiar with bebop and would request Bud Powell or Charlie Parker, which he’d usually oblige, though even in the seventies Bird and Bud were too heavy for some of the saloons he was working.
After awhile, when I’d become more oriented to the joys of the Songbook and the wonders of his work as an improviser (a straight reading through the verse and chorus of a song, followed by increasing levels of melodic variation with corresponding increases in tempo and the rumbling, left-hand basses that often gave the effect of a hurtling locomotive), I would listen for whatever he played next. Not that Dave minded requests; playing solo piano in bars made tune selection an ever-constant challenge, and it led him in the direction of creating what he called “word association” medleys. Dave was renowned for piecing together tunes based on their song titles or the works of a single composer. (In tonight’s Jazz a la Mode, I’ve got three sets of McKenna planned including a handful of tunes from what I like to call his celestial narrative, A Handful of Stars, which he recorded for Concord Jazz in 1993. “Stardust,” “Star Eyes,” “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star,” “Swinging on a Star,” “Stars Fell on Alabama,” and the rest of the show can be heard through June 5 by clicking on Friday’s Jazz a la Mode here at digital.nepr.net )
Finally, for the purposes of this post, here’s another gem from the new McKenna website, a medley of Jerome Kern songs played at the Dick Gibson Jazz Party in Colorado in 1981.