Dave McKenna Biography

Dave McKenna	Born: 1930-05-30 Died: 2008-10-18 Location of Death: Woonsocket, Rhode Island Cause of Death: Cancer - Lung Race: White Field: Jazz Musician, Pianist
Field: Jazz Musician

Dave McKenna was a jazz pianist. He was known for his "three-handed swing", and was the leading proponent of solo piano style.

Starting out at the age of 15, McKenna played with Boots Mussulli (1947), Charlie Ventura (1949) and Woody Herman's Orchestra (1950-51). He then spent two years in the military, and re-joined Ventura (1953-54).

He worked with a variety of top swing and Dixieland musicians including Gene Krupa, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Eddie Condon, Bobby Hackett but became primarily a soloist after 1967, especially in the Northeast United States. He also played with Bob Wilber in the late '70s.

He started to be recognised in his own right during the the 1970s, but chose to play in his local area rather than travel extensively. He preferred playing in clubs and hotels to getting center stage in major venues. He could be found playing in hotel piano bars in Massachusetts until his retirement around the turn of the millennium.

His musical presentation relies on two key elements relating to his choices of tunes and set selection, and the method of playing that has come to be known as "three-handed swing".

McKenna liked to make thematic medleys, usually based around a key word that appears in the titles, such as teach, love, women's names, dreams, night or day, street names, etc. There may be ballads and up-tempo songs blended together with standards, pop tunes, blues, and even TV themes or folk material.

McKenna's renditions usually began with a spare, open statement of the melody, or, on ballads, a freely played, richly harmonized one. He often stated the theme a second time, gradually bringing more harmony or a stronger pulse into play.

The improvisation then began in earnest on three levels simultaneously, namely a walking bass line, midrange chords and an improvised melody. The bass line, for which McKenna frequently employes the rarely-used lowest regions of the piano, is naturally being played in the left hand, often non-legato, to simulate an actual double bassist's phrasing, the melody in the right. The chords are interspersed using the thumb and forefinger of the right hand or of both hands combined, if the bass is not too low to make the stretch unfeasible. Sometimes he also adds a guide-tone line consisting of thirds and sevenths on top of the bass, played by the thumb of the left hand.

His famous four-to-the-bar "strum" is achieved by the left hand alone, playing a bass note (root/fifth/other interval) plus third and seventh, leading to frequent left-hand stretches of a tenth, which is why these voicings frequently appear arpeggiated, with the top two notes being played on the beat, the bass note slightly before. These voicings are often subtly altered every two beats, for variety. This playing style is frequently mistaken for a stride piano, which it is clearly not, as it is of a four-beat nature, as opposed to the two-beat "oom-pah" of true stride piano, as exemplified by Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, and the like. McKenna usually reserves all-out stride for sections where a bassist would play half notes, i.e. ballads and Dixieland-tinged material. The result is the sound of a three piece band under one person's creative control.

McKenna can weave a spontaneous melodic line, usually with lots of chromaticism and blues licks, over the bass line. The bass can be anything from single notes to repeated chords like a rhythm guitar to a full-blown stride piano, the latter often reserved for the height of a song's development.

However, the most astonishing feature of McKenna's playing was his infallible sense of time and tremendous swing. There is a highly constant, "objective" time in his left hand bass lines, and also his left-hand chords or chord fragments are very much on the beat. The right hand chords are often ahead of the beat, whereas the melody frequently lags slightly behind. This polyrhythmic tripartition gives rise to the compelling rhythmic drive of his playing.

Many players can play left-hand chords and right hand improvisation, or walk a bass line and improvise with the other hand. It was McKenna's ability to add the third element of the harmony in the middle that defines his original approach. The main difficulty is not so much a pianistic as conceptual one. If you can HEAR the three parts, you can play them. If the effect of the music isn't clear mentally, it won't appear easily at the keyboard.

His recordings on the Concord record label attest to both the excitement and tenderness of his playing. His contribution to the development of jazz piano as a solo voice will not be forgotten by musicians or the history books. Art Tatum, the greatest soloist in jazz piano history, praised McKenna as someone he considered a complete musician.