Lessons With Larry

On the Passing of a Low Key Legend

So much of music cannot be taught. Not in classes, or private lessons, or (help us all) the School of Rock.

Sure, it’s possible to break down the scales, the chord qualities, the building blocks of harmony and rhythm. Those are essential to just about any instrumental situation, and as a result are part of every college music program.

Up beyond that Level One, though, it gets trickier. Because so much of music revolves around training the ear – learning how to listen and then how to converse in sensitive, music-enhancing ways. It involves a student’s understanding of the physical organs involved in sound production, and then coordinating them to respond to other sounds. This takes more than book learning, more than “transcribe this solo by Tuesday.” It involves all the skills we take for granted in a mature musician — heart and vulnerability, patience and curiousity. To make music is to communicate something more than notes and phrases, activating the magic formulation Robert Frost used in that famous quote about writing: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”

Some music educators have a gift for fostering that awareness in their students, helping awaken them to the nuances waiting beyond the nuts and bolts of Theory class. The saxophonist and educator Larry McKenna, who died this week at age 86, was one of them. McKenna was a master of the tenor – full stop. He lived, taught and performed in Philadelphia for generations: As news of his passing spread on Facebook, his memory was celebrated by players in their ‘60s, who had him as their high school music teacher, and players in their early ‘20s who studied with him in college, many of them posting choruses he jotted down during lessons.

McKenna was the classic known unknown. He played with big names — Clark Terry, Tony Bennett, Shirley Scott — and appeared on records by such Philadelphia firebrands as pianist Orrin Evans. He didn’t release his first album as a leader, My Shining Hour, until he was 60. All of his records are worth the search – as I’m typing this, I’m realizing that under the recently-announced Spotify changes, he’s another one of the magnificent talents who just might not reach the (arbitrary) activity levels necessary to merit attention from the streaming service’s accounting department. Sigh. If this is the state of music stewardship at the moment, we’re doomed.

People who heard Larry McKenna play live revered him as a lowkey assassin, the kind of improvisor who could, in the most charming way possible, saunter in and take over a gig in a matter of a few choruses. McKenna’s tone was round and inviting, and warm in a superhuman way: The sound that spread from his horn and blanketed a room was a silky luminescence, a complex mix of light and texture. The beauty of it caused some listeners to assume he was stuck in the swing era – an errant assumption. McKenna had a distinctive way of transforming standard tunes (like “Pennies From Heaven”) into platforms for modern, often torrid bebop elaboration; using lines that never felt like stock “licks,” he made challenging chord sequences sound blithe and painless – and easy ones seem like meta math challenges. His ballads unfolded with intuitive grace, phrase by easygoing line. He moved around the horn with a floating, dancing-on-air animation; nothing he played (in clubs, on records) sounded like it took much effort. Nothing felt planned in advance.

McKenna’s final recording project, World On a String, shows his skillful balance of precision and carefree melodicism….

McKenna certainly deserved to be heard more widely; I’ve mentioned him to countless musicians and every single one has come back raving. Though he borrowed tactics from Stan Getz, whom he knew, and others, by the 1980s he pretty much owned his own lane. He was wistful and melodic in an era of weapons-race technicians. He was fiercely lyrical when the common currency was abstraction. He made sticking to the basics sound like a romantic ideal.

I covered McKenna while working at the Philadelphia Inquirer, but not as much as I wanted – or he wanted, probably, though he was always cordial and probably understood that I had a limited role in coverage decisions. Years later, when I returned to music-making after a long absence, I reached out to McKenna for lessons. He was fully booked, told me to check in a few months. I did that at regular intervals for a while, and eventually he found a slot in his studio on a semi-regular basis.

At McKenna’s suggestion, I made a list of areas I knew I needed to work on – ballad playing, his strategies for learning tunes, etc. One of my goals was to learn the “correct” chords to standards and jazz classics – because the Real Book versions are riddled with jazz-nerd reharmonizations. Larry was the absolute authority on tunes. Many (many!) musicians would reach out to him to get clarity on chord progressions – I remember texting him from a gig asking for advice on a tricky, often disputed four-measure section of Gershwin’s “I Could Write a Book.” He volleyed back with the changes.

Forgive this momentary digression, but here at EL we spotlight “nearly vanished sounds, spirits and ideas,” and this is one idea that gets very little airtime. The chord sequence that the composer specified for a tune is important. As a road map and vibe guide. Even if – especially if – a performer merely glances at them on the way to reharmonization heaven. Larry McKenna had an incredible database of tunes in his head, the jam session classics as well as many lovely obscure ones, and he was unfailingly generous sharing that knowledge. A year ago a friend and I kicked around an idea for a podcast series interviewing Larry about chord changes; it didn’t happen. His vast knowledge of this aspect of the art unfortunately dies with him.

At about my third lesson with McKenna, we spent an hour talking about the fine art of ending tunes, with him lighting up the room by demonstrating. He surveyed the stock conventional endings and how they’re cued, and covered ways to play over the tags that some improvisors, like the great Sonny Stitt, roar through for minutes on end. He wrote up a few lines of stock riffs he uses for tags, and then we traded a bit over the end of “Bye Bye Blackbird.” I walked out of there amazed at the ideas he pulled out of thin air.

Later that same week, by total coincidence, I found myself in a restaurant where McKenna was playing with a pianist. This was a cocktail jazz/ballads gig, and some time after he saw me walk in, McKenna called “Bye Bye Blackbird” at medium swing tempo. What followed was a continuation of our lesson. The duo played it nice and easy, and after the solos McKenna slid directly into what we’d worked on just days before.

It became a master class in the art of the tag – he outlined the changes then lunged away from the outline, implying other harmony. Starting with half notes sloshing lazily over the bar lines, he quoted bits from the famous Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt exchanges on the tune, and then interpolated them with the melody of “Laura.” He threaded through barnburner blues riffs I’d heard him use before, and wide-interval leaps that were startlingly new. As he was wrapping up, he looked at me as he played a very clear set of “closing time” triplets, one of his signals to finish the tag. It was the stuff we’d talked about in a little room with a piano, brought into the “real world” where people were ordering drinks and chatting over their chicken piccata on an ordinary evening. And listening distantly, if at all, to one of the most extraordinary musicians to ever do it.