Live At Montreux

Four years after Swiss Movement made stars out of Les McCann and Eddie Harris, McCann returned to the Montreux Jazz Festival for a performance that showed the evolution of the times, and his personal growth as a musician. Live At Montreux shows McCann in his leanest form, fronting a band with no horns and no guitars — only the bone-solid rhythms of drummer Donald Dean, bassist Jimmy Rowser and percussionist Buck Clarke. It is testament McCann’s magic touch that even in this bare-bones arrangement his songs sound warm and lush. Much of this is to do with his special relationship with the Fender Rhodes keyboard. This man was made for this instrument. Where other players from the era made the Rhodes a signifier of stoned atmospherics, McCann gives it all the soul of a congregational organ (with some stoned atmospherics thrown in for good measure, of course). Producer Joel Dorn made sure all of McCann’s albums from this era had a deep, naturalistic sound, but in this live setting the keyboardist and his band are even more at ease, yet tighter.