• Home
  • About
    • Doug Ramsey
    • Rifftides
    • Contact
  • Purchase Doug’s Books
    • Poodie James
    • Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond
    • Jazz Matters
    • Other Works
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal
  • rss

Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Dave McKenna

May 30, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

Today is Dave McKenna’s 78th Birthday. He plays the piano.

 

Happy Birthday.

Related

Filed Under: Main

Comments

  1. alexander says

    May 30, 2008 at 1:55 pm

    I saw Dave McKenna in what I think was the last (or one of the last) live performance he had. (In talking to Dick Johnson last summer, I’m told Dave McKenna almost never leaves his home, even.)
    It was in December of 2000. It was in the basement of a church in Needham, MA. I’d seen him a few years earlier on Cape Cod, and he did almost 2 hours of solo piano. In 2000, he played maybe 15 total minutes solo. It was mostly with a quartet: Marshall Wood (b), Jim Gwin (d), and Donna Byrne (v). It was a fantastic show, despite the fact that I really wanted to see him play and not listen to Donna sing.
    Years earlier, when I’d seen him, he walked up with a cane on one side and a person on the other. He got up to the piano, and threw his cane across the stage. It looked like he was going to keel over and faint on the keyboard, but he stayed in that position for two nearly one-hour sets and played as well as ever.
    Truly one of the greats who was never known as well as he should have been — except in New England, where he was known for playing a hotel lobby while listening to baseball. Lou Columbo and Dick Johnson always have fantastic stories to tell if you ever get them both together and say the words, “How’s Dave McKenna doing?”

  2. Russ Neff says

    May 31, 2008 at 6:20 am

    I featured Dave on my blog “My Favorite Things” several weeks ago and wondered aloud about what happened to him, A reader contacted me to report that Dave is in State College, PA in poor health. However, I have not been able to confirm the accuracy of this.
    Back in the 1980’s I produced several solo concerts by Dave. They were wonderful musical experiences.

  3. Bill Crow says

    May 31, 2008 at 9:51 am

    Thanks, Doug, for this sweet gift of Dave’s lovely piano playing. Brought a tear to my eye, remembering all the wonderful times, both playing with him and just listening to him, that brought me so much joy.
    Bill Crow

  4. Jon Foley says

    May 31, 2008 at 6:31 pm

    Being a New Englander for most of my life, I got quite a few chances to hear Dave over the years (as well as to meet him and spend some time talking with him – what a nice, humble guy he is). He’s one of the few with a unique piano sound – as soon as you hear him, you know immediately who it is.
    He has often referred to himself as “just a saloon piano player.” After watching that clip, does anyone agree with that self-deprecating assessment?

  5. Bruce Tater says

    June 1, 2008 at 10:20 am

    Thank you so much for the nice bit on Dave’s 78th and bringing even this little piece of his work to an audience who may not be familiar with him or his genius.
    I spoke with Dave(telephone) on Wednesday (May 29th) and his spirits are still quite up. We have been friends for many,many years. He is in very poor health and gets out rarely but on occasion he does. Talk is mainly of baseball–and the Red Sox.
    He is truly one of those ONE OF A KIND musicians and draws an audience of pianists and others in great numbers when he did perform–particularly in solo settings.
    His CDs and vinyls go on my Desert Island list no matter how many times I list and delist.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

Subscribe to RiffTides by Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

Archives

Recent Comments

  • Rob D on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • W. Royal Stokes on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Larry on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Lucille Dolab on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Donna Birchard on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

Doug’s Picks

We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

As Rifftides readers have undoubtedly noticed, it has been a long time since we posted. We are creating a new post in hopes  that it will open the way to resumption of frequent reports as part of the artsjournal.com mission to keep you up to date on jazz and other matters. Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s stunning new trio album […]

Recent Listening: The New David Friesen Trio CD

David Friesen Circle 3 Trio: Interaction (Origin) Among the dozens of recent releases that deserve serious attention, a few will get it. Among those those receiving it here is bassist David Friesen’s new album.  From the Portland, Oregon, sinecure in which he thrives when he’s not touring the world, bassist Friesen has been performing at […]

Monday Recommendation: Dominic Miller

Dominic Miller Absinthe (ECM) Guitarist and composer Miller delivers power and subtlety in equal measure. Abetted by producer Manfred Eicher’s canny guidance and ECM’s flawless sound and studio presence, Miller draws on inspiration from painters of France’s impressionist period. His liner essay emphasizes the importance to his musical conception of works by Cezanne, Renoir, Lautrec, […]

Recent Listening: Dave Young And Friends

Dave Young, Lotus Blossom (Modica Music) Young, the bassist praised by Oscar Peterson for his “harmonic simpatico and unerring sense of time” when he was a member of Peterson’s trio, leads seven gifted fellow Canadians. His beautifully recorded bass is the underpinning of a relaxed session in which his swing is a force even during […]

Recent Listening: Jazz Is Of The World

Paolo Fresu, Richard Galliano, Jan Lundgren, Mare Nostrum III (ACT) This third outing by Mare Nostrum continues the international trio’s close collaboration in a series of albums that has enjoyed considerable success. With three exceptions, the compositions in this installment are by the members of Mare Nostrum. It opens with one the French accordionist Galliano […]

Monday Recommendation: Thelonious Monk’s Works In Full

Kimbrough, Robinson, Reid, Drummond: Monk’s Dreams(Sunnyside) The subtitle of this invaluable 6-CD set is The Complete Compositions Of Thelonious Sphere Monk. By complete, Sunnyside means that the box contains six CDs with 70 tunes that Monk wrote beginning in the early years when his music was generally assumed to be an eccentric offshoot of bebop, […]

More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

Related

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in