Jackie McLean: a never-before-published interview

Plus a few personal stories about my mentor

Today we will feature a never-before-published interview with my teacher and mentor, Jackie McLean (1932-2006), the legendary saxophonist. There has been so much written on him already that I will just give a short preamble for those unfamiliar with this great man.

Jackie (or J Mac, as he is affectionately known) was born in Harlem and grew up in the famed Sugar Hill neighborhood where his neighbors included both Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, who befriended the young Jackie. In high school Jackie played in an ensemble with Sonny Rollins, Kenny Drew and Andy Kirk, Jr. At the age of 20 he was playing and recording with Miles Davis, later becoming a bandleader himself and recording prolifically, especially for Blue Note. In 1967 his contract was terminated and he began touring, but he and his wife Dollie wanted to settle down somewhere.

He was offered a job at the University of Hartford in 1968. They wanted him to teach music at the famed Hartt Conservatory of Music (now The Hartt School) but he was also hired to be a drug counselor, being that he had experienced the life of a heroin junkie and had successfully overcome the addiction.

When it was time for me to go to college, I auditioned at Hartt because I wanted to study with Jackie. But at that time (1977) there was no official jazz degree program there. The only saxophone major you could have was as a classical player, and they were already full with classical saxophone students.

My mother had told me "make sure you tell them you also play clarinet." So at the audition I said "my mother said I had to tell you I also play clarinet." They got all excited, because they needed clarinet players. The Director of Admissions later called me at home and asked if I would come as a clarinet major and I said okay. I just wanted to get there; I figured I could study with Jackie on the side.

The day of Orientation all the freshmen and faculty gathered in Bliss Auditorium. I didn't hear one word that was said, because I saw Jackie standing in the back and I was planning how I would approach him and ask for lessons.

Jackie was kind enough to mention me in the preface to his instruction book.

I studied with him for the whole five years I was there (it took me a little longer to graduate....that is a separate story) and while I also studied with Paul Jeffrey, Jaki Byard, Walter Bishop and Al Lepak at Hartt, I have always considered Jackie to be my main mentor. Of course I kept in touch with him for the rest of his life, and continued to maintain my relationship with the Artists Collective, one of the most successful urban arts education schools in the nation.

Just a few stories:

Jackie's jazz history class was famous. Everyone wanted to take it. You can see a couple clips of him teaching the class in the 1979 film Jackie McLean on Mars by Ken Levis, linked below. (It was filmed in 1976, unfortunately I arrived the following year so I didn't get a cameo!)

He was one of the kindest people I've ever met. Once he saw me riding my bicycle to his house with a hard case strapped to my back. He said I shouldn't be riding like that with a hard case, and he gave me a soft, handmade leather case with sheepskin lining that he wasn't using anymore. It's the case that he has on the album cover of New York Calling!

I have a little shrine to Jackie in my studio. We must never forget our mentors.

When I showed it to Paul Jeffrey he said incredulously "Jackie gave you a horn case?!!!"

Because I went to the house often for lessons, I knew the whole family: his wife Dollie, daughter Melonae, son Vernon and of course his son René McLean, also a world class saxophonist, who lives in South Africa. Jackie also hired me to teach at the school he founded in 1970 with Dollie (and bassist Paul Brown, artist Ionis Martin and dancer Cheryl Smith), the Artists Collective, still going strong in 2025.

Jackie loved animals. He had dogs, and once when I came over he showed me a bird that had crashed into the window (that used to happen often in Connecticut) that he was nursing back to health.

He told me lots of stories. My favorite is that he was walking down the street with Charlie Parker, and they passed a fish market with fish displayed in the window. Bird stopped suddenly and said "Look!"

Jackie said, "What? It's some fish."

Bird said, "No, look at the colors!"

Jackie said at that moment he suddenly realized that the fish scales were shining in the sun and reflecting a beautiful rainbow-like array. He said that was an example of how a real artist looks at the world, noticing beauty everywhere. I never forgot that.

When Jackie died in 2006, I lost a mentor, and also a father figure. My own father had died in 1992. So in 2015 when I decided to stop playing alto saxophone–the instrument on which my whole reputation and career rested–I turned to the man who had become a sort of substitute mentor for me: Phil Woods.

I had known Phil since the late 80s, when I started to make trips out to the Poconos (where Phil lived) to play various venues there, including the famed Deer Head Inn. Over the years I got to know him and respect him more and more, especially when my late husband Gil and I bought a house out there and eventually made it our full time home.

I had made my decision. The alto went into its case and would never come out again. I went from Eb to Bb, and never looked back. But our traditions and our lineage in music–it’s almost a religious thing. I needed a blessing. In the jazz world, the decision to give up alto and only play soprano and clarinet was sacriligious. Indeed, it was heresy!

Related article:

Jackie was gone, so I couldn't make my confession to him. But one night at the Deer Head, Phil was at the bar. I went and sat next to him. "Phil, I have to tell you something."

"What is it Su?" he said.

"I'm giving up alto. I'm going to focus exclusively on soprano and clarinet now."

After a slight pause while it sank in, he said "Do what you feel, baby."

That was enough of a blessing for me!

3 generations of alto, from the photo book Hangin’ at the Deer Head by Bud Nealy

Here is the short film Jackie McLean on Mars. Listen to Jackie's comments on Coltrane, on teaching, on the government, on the music business.

When a student complains about having seen Sun Ra strutting on stage "like a king" Jackie says, "Can't he be a god and a king?" I thought that was very good advice, because when I let people be who they want to be, they let me be who I want to be.

INTERVIEW WITH JACKIE McLEAN, APRIL 1, 1979.

Jackie had just made a funk album called Monuments, and all of us bebop-oriented students were curious. It seemed like bowing to commercialism, and we, in our naive, bebop-obsessed, parent-subsidized youth, didn't know what to make of it. Hence my first question in this interview.

Q: Jackie, why did you decide to do a funk album, how did you first become interested in this music?

A: What it actually is, it's not anything that's new for me, it's just coming to an understanding with myself that I want to make a commercial record, and then realizing that I'm at a place again where everything repeats itself. That music has come around again full circle to a music that I can relate to, that people can dance to. Now, when I played the real traditional music that they called bebop in the early 50s, people stopped dancing to that. There was some dancing but it wasn't huge community dancing like it is now, I mean with the discos–that kind of faded away. But I caught the tail end of that dance period, because at the very beginning of my music career I played a lot of dances, so that was part of my early musical career that kind of disappeared. I played rock and roll in the early 50s. When I went to school in North Carolina, I played in a rhythm and blues band, so the blues and the roots of the music are not foreign to me at all. It was in the church when I went there as a kid, and I always play the blues because it's part of my expression. I didn't want to cross over into a commercial field earlier because I wasn't that interested in the material that was there, it wasn't that stimulating to me. But with musicians like Eddie Harris, and Miles, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, all of those that crossed over, that music began to become more palatable to me, and so I don't find it hard at all to express myself that way.

Now, as far as Dr. Jackyll and Mr. Funk is concerned, which is the only piece on that album that really is constructed just for dancing–it's a disco beat with dancing in mind–I just tried to play the saxophone in another way. It's almost like an actor: if the musical role calls for you to be percussive, to play for dancing, to play the blues and be funky, then that should be one of the musical roles that you can play as a musician. It is an attitude that I can have in expressing myself, the blues, and funky, and being very percussive. So that's what happened. And I enjoyed it, the album is not a tongue in cheek effort, it's something that's as serious as anything I've ever done. The material on there is beautiful, that Mitch Farber wrote. So I think, to make the answer short, that Mitch Farber's music that he wrote and offered me, was palatable to me. It was a great experience for me.

Q: Everybody thinks you've got to go to New York to play, if you want to make it in jazz. How do you feel about that attitude?

A: I'm going to be prejudiced about it, because I come from New York. Being born and raised there, I don't get the same feeling that other musicians get that migrate there, because I came up in the midst of this environment. When I left New York and started traveling with bands, I met great musicians in every city. But it seems as though you have to come to a place like New York, or maybe Los Angeles now. And it's changed–in the beginning it was New Orleans, then when the red light district closed, everybody went to Chicago. Then it went to New York and other places. The ragtime music of the late 1800s was out in St. Louis. The scene moves around. But New York is such a powerful city, it draws the money and the business and therefore there are so many options there. You have the theater, Broadway, you have all the recording that goes on, you have the jazz scene, and you have the opera scene and the Western classical scene. It's a city rich with a variety of musical expressions. It's great to go there. I think that yes, any musician who wants to make a world statement about his music has to make it from New York. He can't make it from Hartford, Connecticut and really get the world. He's going to have to make it here in Hartford, and people will say, hey this guy is great, then he's still going to have to go to New York. The facilities are there, all the big record companies. And there's a vibe in New York that's unbeatable; like when I lived in New York, all these musicians lived within a five block radius: Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Any Kirk, Don Redman, Arnette Cobb, Joe Thomas, Illinois Jacquet, Russell Jacquet, Bud Powell lived about 20 blocks down. Sonny Rollins, Andy Kirk Jr., all these people lived right around this neighborhood. I think I have absorbed a certain vibration that was in that community. I didn't know who Don Redman was. I used to see him pass and there was something about him that I was attracted to. I looked at him, stared at him, I knew he was a musician but I didn't realize how great a man he was.

Q: You've done a lot of work in Japan, and many other musicians–Dexter Gordon for instance–lived and played in Europe for many years. Some musicians were received so well that they stayed there. What about this jazz scene in Europe and Japan?

A: I think that Japan is always glad to bring over these musical greats. I love to go there and play. I don't think I could go there and stay there, and I'll tell you wny. They've got fifty alto players in Tokyo, and a thousand in another town. They love to see you, it's great to come through, but they have great jazz musicians there. I think it may have been a novelty in the 50s or 60s to have somebody there, and the same thing in Europe. Dexter's home is in Denmark, but when he migrated there, there weren't really that many great European jazz musicians. But I'm sure today that there are strong, strong jazz musicians in those countries that are native to that country. It's just not as easy for an American to go there, and work and play and make a livelihood.

Q: How do you like the way your own career has developed since you've come to the University of Hartford?

A: What has happened to me in my career is almost perfect for me. I'm able to work in the community at the University as an educator, and at the same time I play the jobs that come along that I feel I want to play. It gives me the option of choosing my work. I like it very much. I find the one thing I like most about working at the University is that they don't get in the way of my musical career. In fact they tend to motivate me towards concertizing and recording. I think it's good for the school when faculty is involved with the real world of music. I mean I could come into a classroom every week for the rest of my life and talk about the world of music, but I think I can talk about it better if I'm taking part in it.

With all of the greats that have come to this school, and I'm the person that is sort of coordinating activities there, I think that with the help of students and other parts of the faculty and administration I'm sure we could come up with some even greater things than we have. I'm doing just about all that I can possibly do, teaching my classes and coordinating, in a very loose way, my department. My department doesn't take hours of office work, myself poring over papers and things at a desk, it doesn't work like that. I happen to have a small department and it runs pretty easily, without my having to be a hard-nosed administrator. We have a lot of things: I have film, recordings, I have contacts in the business with the people we want to be in contact with. If I don't have a personal contact, I have someone I can go through, so it seems that we could do so many fantastic things at the University. And of course money is always at the root of our situation.

With the school bringing Walter Bishop in September, I'm glad. I think we're moving towards a larger and better department. Students that have been attracted to Hartt through this department have been a big help. The students are more interested in knowing about world music today. Those musicians that have come to Hartt that are interested in Western classical music, before their four years are up, a lot of them come through my courses. They stay for a couple of semesters of [jazz] history, maybe go through a couple of the workshops. I think that it's going to be more available and I think that the school is going to benefit from its newest addition of Walter Bishop. I'm not saying we have the greatest program in the world. I think we have the greatest potential in the world, I know we do.

Q: Can you give an example of this potential?

A: I've said this to Mr. Duke–Nick Duke, one of our administrators here at the University–that the potential of the Afro-American music department is fantastic. For instance, can you imagine the kind of return we could pull in at Lincoln Theatre if we offered a concert that would consist of two bands and a Hartt ensemble like Mr. Lepak's orchestra. A huge evening, starting at maybe ten at night and going till four in the morning, if the school would allow something that odd. The students would love this. We could have Woody Shaw, and Al Lepak's band, and Sun Ra. Now that kind of show would draw students from all over the area, and we have that capability. I can get in touch with Woody, I can talk to Sun Ra about coming. And we have the money to do it.

A remembrance from one Master about another. Film by Bret Primack, “Jazz Video Guy.”

P.S. I received the very first degree from Hartt’s Afro-American Music Dept., now called the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz.