Dave McKenna is the most reluctant great jazz artist I ever encountered and I doubt if there’s any other pianist I’ve enjoyed as much, in person or in recordings, solo, or in a small ensemble.

I first encountered Dave live, at the Roosevelt Grill in April 1970. I didn’t have any recordings by him, and there was good reason. He hadn’t made any for years. Discounting a 1963 recording on the genuinely obscure label, Realm, he hadn’t made a record since the 1950s and the two had made had been out of print for at least a decade. Bobby Hackett’s Quintet was in residence, and I was in the process of doing my first live recording on my own. I asked Bobby about Dave, the only member of his band I didn’t know and, in his deep voice, he said simply, “You’re gonna love this guy.” And he was right. Dave was the anchor of the quintet, and for the next three weeks I paid special attention to him.

When Dave took a solo it was clear he was an utterly unique pianist. No one sounded like him. In those days, the older guys who had emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, the ragtimers, striders and mainstreamers, all had their own style and played with two hands, within set guidelines. The beboppers had a hand and a half, dazzling right, a little in the left. But Dave had the dazzling right hand of the best of the boppers, and as strong a left hand as anyone I’d ever heard, except maybe Earl Hines. I wanted to hear some solo recordings, but there weren’t any to be had, and it took me until February 1973 to do anything about it. As I said, Dave McKenna is a reluctant artist. 

In early 1973, Dave was playing at Michael’s Pub in a small band. It wasn’t his own, and I don’t remember the leader, maybe it was Zoot Sims, but I went as often as possible and nagged him about making a solo recording. He always said the same thing, “I don’t know any tunes.” Which was nonsense, but that’s what he said. The last night of the engagement was Saturday; I went down and asked one more time. Dave was non-committal, but since he didn’t say no, I took it for a yes, and I promised to come and pick him up the next day at noon.

Many musicians stayed at The Wellington in those days. It was available, inexpensive, centrally located and Dave was in residence. It’s still there and I hope it’s better now than it was then. In any event, I went up to Dave’s room and knocked on the door. He opened it reluctantly. I told him there were five $100 bills sitting on the fall board of my Steinway. If he wanted them, he could have them. He decided he did, we headed south, and worked all afternoon to record what would turn out to be his first domestic release under his own name for a decade. If you don’t count the incredibly rare, presumably lost (or somebody would have reissued it) Lullabies In Jazz release, it was the first in fifteen years. The record turned out pretty well; a friend who ran one of the labels at CBS told me it was the best jazz record he’d heard all year.

The next year Dave was at Michael’s Pub again, in the company of Zoot Sims, Major Holley and Ray Mosca. I recall it was Zoot’s band, but he had signed with Norman Granz’, so when we made the record, it was called The Dave McKenna Quartet, and to prove it was his date, Dave contributed two solo selections. It was the first time he released an album as a leader, other than a trio date on Epic, twenty years earlier.

This was a wonderfully relaxed recording session. Since Louise Sims was on hand, Zoot’s customary bottle of refreshment was not on the floor by his chair. We had also invited Phyllis Condon to come by; Dave was camping out in Eddie’s old bedroom at the time, but she didn’t want to make the long trek to the studio. When the quartet recorded Ed’s tune, Wherever There’s Love, we kept Phyllis informed by telephone in real time. She listened to it live and loved it.

Dave contributed another exceptional solo recording in 1977. He wanted to do saloon songs and songs for losers. This was the first of the thematic records he did so well for the next twenty years. We worked out the details of the album at baseball games, primarily at Shea Stadium. Not that Dave liked the Mets; he didn’t, but that year the Yankees played some of their games there because of work being done at Yankee Stadium. Dave didn’t like the Yankees either, he only has eyes for the Red Sox, but he likes to see anyone beat the Yankees, so we went to the ball game to see what would happen.

The album was recorded in early June and by the end of the month John DeVries had designed what may have been the best cover he ever did for me. He turned Dave into a baseball player in a Red Sox uniform, in the guise of a circa-1940 bubble gum card. The album was called Dave “Fingers” McKenna, and it was my favorite of the albums we did together. Despite the moral support the cover may have given the then hapless Red Sox, they still finished 2 1/2 games out.

That year, Dave was back in New York with some regularity, usually at Bradley’s, where he played solo, better than anyone in New York. He was in town when Flip Phillips and Kenny Davern arrived to record the first John and Joe album, and Dave got the call to fill out their remarkable quintet. It was so good George Duvivier broke all his self-imposed but always followed rules and listened to a playback of the entire date before he packed up his bass.

The musicians and various guests eventually departed, leaving Dave and myself alone in the studio. It was a Sunday, the Red Sox had made their run at the Yankees, but came up short, he didn’t want to go back to Chez Condon that early, so we went to The Blue Mill, a modest but popular restaurant on Commerce Street. At some point during dinner I asked Dave what he’d think about coming back to the studio for another recording session. He looked at me kind of funny and asked what I had in mind, that he really didn’t know any tunes and didn’t have anything prepared. I said I didn’t care; all I wanted him to do was give me a couple of Bradley sets. Just play like he was playing solo in the club. No takes, no producer interference, but no background noise. I’d turn on the tape recorder, tell him it was on, and then he had half an hour to do anything he wanted. Play anything that came to his mind. He was game.

We went back to the studio and that’s just what he did. I think we filled up five or six reels of tape. It was spontaneous and brilliant and he did it all in a darkened studio, with scarcely a break. It had been a busy day, and quite a heroic effort on his part. It was the jazz equivalent of the day in May 1945, when Arthur Rubenstein’s did a broadcast of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concero with Toscanini in the afternoon and an all Chopin recital at Carnegie Hall in the evening. Except in Dave’s case, all his work was for a recording.

Later, we picked out our ten favorites, Dave Young contributed a brilliant cover and the package was complete. I didn’t know it when it was happening, but this turned out to be the last record I ever did with Dave, and it was the last 1970s Chiaroscuro recording released. A couple of years later, when Chiaroscuro was on hiatus, Concord began recording Dave. There were no more informal recordings and while many of the records were “themed”, each was terrific. 

In the early 1980s, when I began to produce jazz festivals at sea, Dave showed up about half a dozen times, but was always a reluctant participant, with the same excuse. The Red Sox might win and he didn’t want to be away, just in case they did, so he couldn’t commit to an October date so far in advance. Of course, they rarely won. I don’t know how much work he turned down, hoping the Red Sox wouldn’t fold, but my guess is he gave up a lot. It wasn’t a good gamble; his team got to the World Series once, in 1986, and made the playoffs a couple of times. But the Red Sox were mostly a lost cause; these guys were not worth giving up work.

I tried to convince Dave to leave Concord in the early 1990s, but he stuck with them until they dropped him a few years later. They had as many recordings as they needed. As far as I was concerned, with an artist like Dave there was never enough, and I asked him to think about a new solo project. He demurred, saying he was having problems with his hands. A year or so later, in May 2000, we organized a concert at The New School, and Dave was part of the band. It didn’t seem as if was having any trouble; he was as exciting as ever. When he died of lung cancer in 2008, he hadn’t touched a piano in years. He officially “retired” about 2002 and the last time I spoke with him, he’d pretty much given up on the Red Sox. Even so, when I learned that he was on his way out at the nursing home where he’d been living, I took an old picture from 1940 that showed six Bosox aiming bats like rifles from the dugout and Photoshopped Dave’s face on that of Tom Daley. He was lined up on the dugout steps with Ted Williams, Jimmy Fox, Jim Tabor, Joe Cronin and Doc Cramer. It might have made him smile, but maybe not.

There are, however, over 100 CDs and LPs listed on Amazon; a pretty good recorded legacy for a guy who always claimed he didn’t know any tunes and all of them will make anybody smile. There will probably be more to come. Dave’s sister has released some fine live performances and I may as well, from the Roosevelt Grill. One thing few people are alive to remember is that on each set the band played on those wonderful nights in 1970 is that Bobby usually gave Dave a solo turn. Just a trio, with Jack Lesburg and Cliff Leeman, once or twice a night. I recorded a lot of sets in April and May, and the fourteen trio performances I recorded offer a different glimpse of Dave as a soloist, from a time when no recordings exist. A few more selections from one of the most original jazz artists of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

Dave McKenna, May1995