Listening to Now

“Hip Strut” is the first cut on Jackie McLean’s 1959 album New Soil, on the Blue Note label. Personnel are Jackie McLean (alto sax), Donald Byrd (Trumpet), Walter Davis Jr. (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), Pete LaRoca (drums).

As Steve Huey writes at AllMusic, “New Soil wasn’t the first session Jackie McLean recorded for Blue Note, but it was the first one released, and as the title suggests, the first glimmerings of McLean’s desire to push beyond the limits of bop are already apparent.” The implication here is that McLean’s early recordings as leader were in hard bop, though he later moved in the direction of modal jazz “without abandoning his foundation in hard bop.”

McLean created a lot of high quality music with the biggest names in jazz of his era. But what I find perhaps most interesting about the arc of his career is that, like so many of his contemporaries, he struggled with drug addiction early on but by the mid-1960s was touring internationally and then became a music teacher and drug counselor, and

In 1970 McLean joined the Hartt School of Music (now Hartt School) at the University of Hartford. He helped found the school’s department of African American music in 1980 and served as its first director; the department was renamed the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz in 2000.

Britannica

In addition, in 1970, he and his wife, Dollie McLean, along with jazz bassist Paul Brown, founded the Artists Collective, Inc. of Hartford, with the mandate of preserving the art and culture of the African Diaspora.

McLean received an American Jazz Masters fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2001 and numerous other national and international awards. In 2006, he was elected to the Down Beat Hall of Fame via the International Critics Poll. Most impressive, though, may be that McLean was the only American jazz musician to found a department of studies at a university and a community-based organization almost simultaneously, each still in existence. Impressive.