Howard McGhee: Maggie's Back In Town!!

A picture (a video, in fact) is worth a thousand words. Consider one of Howard McGhee around 1966. It is at the Newport Jazz Festival All Stars, and an unlikely group of trumpeters is doing a bop tune at metronome-busting speed. The group includes Bobby Hackett and Ruby Braff (unlikely, no?). Hackett is delightedly laughing. Braff walks off into the wings sulking. Young Jimmy Owens has just upstaged Howard McGhee, to put it mildly. The guy selected to teach Owens a lesson on the second chorus is Dizzy Gillespie. McGhee, in the late 1940s known to be a Top Gun of the trumpet, does not even bother to play. He does enjoy Gillespie, for they are old friends. And Gillespie played, well, like Gillespie. By the 1970s, some music writers will refer to Howard McGhee as "forgotten." Sic transit Gloria Mundi. From Downbeat Poll winner (1949) to comeback player (early 1960s) to forgotten (1970s). The jazz life was never easy, and McGhee, a brilliant player, was at Ground Zero when it all blew up, fueled by race, drugs and a little too much time around Charlie Parker. It is another of those dreadful stories. It does not exactly have a happy ending, but it turned out better than McGhee would have thought possible in the early 1950s. This recording is an artefact of McGhee's hard-won rehabilitation. And it is a very good one. Mostly, it swings like mad.

McGhee started on clarinet and saxophone. Dazzled by Louis Armstrong, he made, by his own account, an inept transition to trumpet. Well, by the time he was playing with Andy Kirk in the 1940s, his soaring version of "McGhee Special" (1942) showed just how much he had learned. He had amazing chops. He could play high and fast—or pretty when he wanted to. Exposed to Gillespie, McGhee thought, "I can do that." He sure could. Pretty soon reviewers wondered if they were hearing Gillespie or McGhee, although their styles and harmonic sensibilities were quite different. A lot of people noticed, especially in Southern California, where McGhee, with a few periods of self-imposed exile, settled after hitting New York. The LAPD took exception to his marriage to a white University of California graduate, Dorothy Schnell, in 1946. McGhee was black. Los Angeles was not the place for an interracial marriage in those times. Technically under state anti-miscegenation law, the marriage was still illegal. He ultimately ended up in New York City, but people think of McGhee as a quintessential West Coast player, because that is where he made his pioneering bop reputation.

McGhee's star was on the rise in the 1940s. In 2024 many of his recording from 1946-1948 are considered bop classics ("Dialated Pupils," "Midnight at Minton's" "Dorothy," "Night Mist," "Coolie-Rini," "Night Music, " "Trumpet at Tempo"). He did some recording in the 1950s, especially with Bethlehem, but after 1957 and through 1961, virtually nothing. His recordings with Contemporary were his return after a decade of heroin addiction that monopolized his life. Heroin did that, until an addict kicked or died.

Maggie's Back in Town (Contemporary, 1961) is distinctly McGhee. He sounds like himself, but different from the McGhee of a decade or so earlier. For one thing, his rhythm section, with Shelly Manne, Leroy Vinnegar, and Phineas Newborn, Jr is a considerable upgrade from what he had typically utilized, although pianist Jimmy Bunn (then unavailable because of a sojourn in San Quentin) was no slouch. Anyone who has heard earlier McGhee may say that the sheer ferocity of some of his earlier playing was absent. Yet it is replaced by a thoughtfulness and swing, not to mention a vastly better tone and articulation, than his earlier work, at least to judge by the high standards of a Roy duNann recording, of which this is yet another outstanding example. McGhee does not try to sound like anyone else—and that must have been a temptation, with Miles Davis' success in the 1950s. He has evolved along the lines that his earlier playing would have suggested, but he also plays "Brownie Speaks" in tribute to Clifford Brown, whom he openly admired. "Brownie Speaks" is a remarkable job, a flurry of notes, and clean and hard swinging. But it is McGhee on Brown, and not just some rehash. He has a different take on "Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise Too," a tune too seldom heard once bop took over. If there was any doubt about McGhee's blues roots, they are everywhere here. And there is original writing, as in "Demon Chase," which refers not to finding a drug connection, but to Teddy Edwards's son—who had, McGhee said, more energy than any kid he knew. All told, there is nearly an hour's worth of music on this vinyl, and for someone unfamiliar with McGhee, it is a great place to start.

Craft Recordings' audiophile vinyl series, remastered by Bernie Grundman, has another one of McGhee's recordings from this period on tap. It is a great move. While trumpet players like Brian Lynch have called McGhee an "unsung hero," it is not too much to say that this guy was an original on a lot of levels. It is high time that younger musicians got a taste of Howard McGhee, unsung or no.

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