Everyone Ought to Get Hip to Larry McKenna

I found out about Larry McKenna several years ago just before our annual trip to the Jersey shore. The local cultural foundation was sponsoring a jazz concert right after our schedule arrival and, even though I didn’t know anything about the leaders, Larry McKenna (tenor) and Tony Miceli (vibes), I bought tickets in advance. When we got there, most of the attendees in front of the venue were dressed in slightly swanky beach attire except for us and four slightly disheveled guys whom my sons immediately and correctly tagged as the band.

All of the members of the quartet were excellent, but I was most impressed by McKenna. Like Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Brew Moore, and Allen Eager, he played with the relaxed sense of swing I associate with those Lester Young disciples. To me, his staying in the Philly area instead of heading for New York is the only reason he’s not as well known. His recordings have been for small labels, and I’ve managed to get a couple over time. I’ve been meaning to do a post about him, but the death of his Fellow Philadelphian Bootsie Barnes the other day made me buckle down. For one thing, McKenna and Barnes did an album together a couple of years ago; for another, they’re both in a group disproportionately vulnerable to COVID-19, which made things a bit more urgent.

Larry McKenna Plays Harold Arlen: My Shining Hour includes great songs like the title track (a favorite of mine), Let’s Fall in Love, Get Happy, and many other Arlen classics, all played with an incomparable sense of swing and melodic inventiveness. He’s ably backed by Bill Shilling on piano and guitar), Dom Mancini on bass, and Butch Reed on drums. It’s a rare opportunity to hear an exemplar of a kind of jazz that’s seldom practiced my contemporary artists, who often can’t see back past John Coltrane.  Do yourself a favor in these parlous times, and check out Larry McKenna—there are lots of great examples of his playing on YouTube, and his recordings aren’t that hard to find.

Here’s Out of this World, with a very different than the Coltrane version with which I was more familiar.