Les McCann, a jazz titan best known for his performance with musical partner Eddie Harris of the protest song “Compared to What,” has died at age 88, his manager said Sunday.
The cause and manner of death were unavailable. Manager Alan Abrahams said McCann, a piano player and singer, died Friday at a Los Angeles-area hospital after he developed pneumonia roughly one week ago.
McCann was an architect of the soul-jazz sound, helped jazz connect with the counterculture’s protest music and provided a wellspring of material for sample-crazed hip-hop stars, including Notorious B.I.G., Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth, Warren G., Slick Rick, Dr. Dre and A Tribe Called Quest.
“He brought something from the Black church to jazz,” said Abrahams, a prolific producer of gospel albums.
For the September release of “Never A Dull Moment! – Live from Coast to Coast (1966-1967),” a vinyl collection of live performances and accompanying essays, super-producer Quincy Jones said, “Les McCann has been a musical force of nature since he burst on the scene in the early 60’s. Whenever I heard him live or on record, he always did the unexpected.”
Born in Lexington, Kentucky, McCann listened to opera with his mother and taught himself how to play piano, according to his biography on a website run by the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation.
He joined the Navy in San Diego at age 17 and ultimately landed in Los Angeles, where he attended Los Angeles City College, which he later said was crucial to his music career and its multicultural influences, according to the Blue Grass bio.
McCann won a talent contest and appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” before Miles Davis saw him perform and recommended him to other top musicians, the bio said. “I couldn’t even speak,” McCann is quoted as saying in describing the first time he met Davis.
His popular breakthrough came in June 1968, when he was joined by tenor saxophone player Eddie Harris onstage at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland to perform…
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