Jackie McLean - Let Freedom Ring (2024 Blue Note Tone Poet Series Gatefold LP)

Jackie McLean - Let Freedom Ring | Vinyl LP - 2024 Blue Note Tone Poet Series 180g Gatefold (602448644343, Kevin Gray/RTI)

Jackie McLean had been recording for Blue Note since 1959 and playing hard bop since the early 1950s. By March 1962, when he walked into Van Gelder Studio with Walter Davis Jr. on piano, Herbie Lewis on bass and Billy Higgins on drums, he had been listening to Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane for two years and wanted to bring what he heard into his own language without abandoning it. The result was four pieces that moved between hard bop structure and something more open, the boundaries crossed mid-phrase rather than mid-track.

"Melody for Melonae" opens with McLean's alto at the top of its register, holding a long note that bends upward into a shriek. It was the first time he had used this technique on record, and it changed the sound of the rest of his Blue Note career. The composition is slow, the rhythm section floating rather than driving, the blues feeling held in the harmony while the solo moves above and around it. "I'll Keep Loving You" is Bud Powell's ballad, the one standard on the album, McLean's reading restrained and interior.

Side B opens with "Rene," a twelve-bar blues with conventional changes that McLean plays as if the form were a suggestion. "Omega" closes the album as the most abstract piece, more modal than blues, Higgins and Lewis pushing the tempo while Davis's piano stabs percussively. Higgins had been the original drummer in Ornette Coleman's quartet and had recorded The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959. What he brought from that experience into this rhythm section is audible throughout: a looseness with the beat that gives McLean room to stretch without the floor disappearing.

This is the 2024 Blue Note Tone Poet Series pressing, mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio from the original analog tapes, pressed on 180g vinyl at RTI.