Ruth Leon recommends…. Compared to What – Les McCann  

Compared to What – Les McCann  

My old friend Les McCann died this week. One of the jazz masters, a pioneer of what became known as ‘soul jazz’, McCann was equally lauded as a singer but he was a truly great pianist. His biggest success came by accident, at the Montreux Jazz Festival of 1969. It was his performance of Eugene McDaniels’ protest song, Compared To What? which, he said, “just happened.” There had been no rehearsal, and the great sax player Eddie Harris, who had his own separate gig that night, just came by unannounced and sat in with McCann. The magic that they collectively generated has echoed down the decades since.

There does exist a video of that 1969 performance and you can find it on YouTube but neither the visual nor the aural quality is good enough to recommend it to you. Instead, here are the two of them, Les McCann and Eddie Harris, in a later version of the same great song at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1988. By this time the entire audience knew the song and sang its famous tagline, “Try to make it real, Compared to What”.

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