Swiss Movement

Les McCann with Eddie Harris

album cover

Live Jazz Thrills, Made by Near-Strangers

For his slot on the final night of the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival, the pianist (and sometime singer) Les McCann invited two horn players he'd heard earlier in the festival, the saxophonist Eddie Harris and trumpeter Benny Bailey, to join him. According to the liner notes, the two had not played McCann's high-wattage, soul-influenced tunes before. There wasn't time for a proper rehearsal; Bailey recalled later that he asked Harris and McCann to call out chord changes as the songs went along.

Such impromptu cameo appearances, a fixture of jazz festivals, rarely yield consequential music—more often they become wandering ego-driven jam sessions. The live Swiss Movement is different. For nearly an hour, Harris and Bailey pretend they know the Les McCann songbook well, and follow the pianist through a set that attains a rare golden mean between jazz, rock, and soul. The grooves pulsate with a purposeful electricity, but the soloists maintain a jazz focus—Bailey spits out intricate bebop inventions over the blues vamp "The Generation Gap," while on the gospel-tinged "You Got It in Your Soulness," Harris pushes to the outer limits of the harmony, in much the way he did on his own experimental records of the period.

The tone is set from the first notes of the opening track, "Compared to What," which became the unlikeliest of hits. A showcase for McCann's gruff shouted vocals, it's a litany of complaints about decaying American society and the Vietnam war ("The President, he's got his war, / Folks don't know just what it's for / Nobody gives us rhyme or reason, / Have one doubt they call it treason"). McCann sustains a tone of fresh outrage throughout, and the musicians reinforce it by whipping through harsh, taunting inventions between verses. Inside this one extended seven-minute power surge is an essence of jazz, the notion that thrilling for-the-ages music can be created by near-strangers, on the fly, with very little advance preparation.

Genre: Jazz
Released: 1969, Atlantic (Reissued 1996, Rhino)
Key Tracks: "Compared to What," "Cold Duck Time," "You Got It in Your Soulness"
Catalog Choice: Les McCann: Much Les. Eddie Harris: The Electrifying Eddie Harris
Next Stop: Gene Ammons: Boss Tenors
After That: Ornette Coleman: In All Languages
Book Pages: 486–487