Brother Jack McDuff 1926-2001
Jack was a superb arranger, a literate musician who read and wrote manuscript. Of course he's famous as a hard swinger, but musicians hold his arranging skill in awe. Great taste and the sound of surprise were his thing. That will be very well illustrated by these clips.On this week-long visit to Seattle in July of 1982, Jack McDuff brought his own B-3, a well-used early seventies model.
It featured a warning sign on the back, in red and black, that said "DANGER" and sported scary lightning bolts.
A wise warning. Jack was playing his ass off on these dates! He also brought his Leslie 147, which featured a ripped woofer. The thing sounded fine until he would step on a pedal. "Buzzzzz," it said. He ignored it and played the hell out of the pedals anyway. You should ignore it too. It's funky.
We have so far not been able to identify the other musicians who played that week. Jack couldn't remember. There's much suspicion that the superb alto player could be a very young Andrew Beals. The guitarist and drummer are also great, whoever they may be.
Ignore the goofy tape numbering system. It's part of a larger collection of tapes that includes the Groove Holmes tapes. This is the entire collection of the McDuff tapes, representing roughly two night's worth of material.
Please scroll down the page, below the picture, to view the list of MP3s.
Don't forget, since some of these files contain two songs strung-together, some of them can be quite large. You can get an idea of the size by looking at the clip length; figure roughly 1 MB per minute. I refuse to cut them in two! There is some breakup on some of Tape #8 (on the original), but it's not too bad.