Les McCann
Invitation To Openness

LA RECENSIONE

Between the second half of the '60s and the first of the following decade, black music experienced an incredible diffusion that made internationally known eclectic figures like Miles Davis or James Brown, who until then were exclusively confined to a niche audience and a few willing enthusiasts. Les McCann is part of that wave of jazzists and soul singers who reached peak success precisely during the so-called "Blaxploitation" period, releasing avant-garde and unconventional works that helped change the face of African American music forever. Les signed a contract with the glorious Atlantic Records in 1968 and soon gained fame and acclaim for "Swiss Movement", a live recording made at the Montreaux festival with Eddie Harris, another "atypical" musician devoted, at that time, to suggestive and highly successful crossovers of Jazz and Funk. But it was the '70s that made Les McCann an artist appreciated in the studio as well, thanks to experimental and refined works such as "Layers" and, precisely, this "Invitation To Openness", dated 1972.

"Invitation To Openness" is undoubtedly the most psychedelic album of the composer and musician from Kentucky, and it is structured as a single infinite suite, divided into three parts (a: "The Lovers"; b: "Beaux J. Poo Poo"; c: "Poo Pye McGoochie (And His Friends)"), where the prevalent characteristic of Jazz is fully exploited: improvisation. The album is in fact recorded live, without any agreement with the musicians (about twenty in total) on what would be played, leaving ample room for each one's creativity and inventiveness.

It would be simply reductive to talk about the individual tracks, "Invitation To Openness" flows in a unique, frenetic stream, between sustained funk drumming, delusions of a vaguely lysergic flavor, and massive use of Moog and synthesizers (a prevalent characteristic of "McCann-sound", almost unique in the history of Jazz...), all elements that favor its full success, a whole that you want to listen to over and over again, until you grasp the most imperceptible transition between the worn grooves of the vinyl. Certainly, the most attentive ears will notice similarities with Miles Davis's "A Silent Way", but perhaps this was precisely the great merit of a character like Les McCann: taking up that concept of "electric and modal" Jazz, leading it towards other directions closer to Funk, in any case unexplored. Did he succeed? The words of Davis himself sound eloquent after listening to the album: Les, you're a bad motherfucker... And if he's the one saying it, how can you not trust him?