During the 1980s, I’d leave the kitchen after a busy summer night at my family’s restaurant, The Captain Linnell House on Cape Cod, to catch piano jazz great Dave McKenna’s last set of the evening in the lounge. I’d be coming down from having adrenaline pumping through my veins to keep up with the demands of preparing food to order for 200-plus customers on our busier nights. You don’t just turn off the switch at the end of the night in a restaurant kitchen, so having a drink and listening to Dave was just the antidote.
For those unfamiliar with Dave’s playing, I highly suggest seeking out his recordings. The man was a true genius who could knock you out with gorgeous and sensitive ballads, dazzle you with blazing swing numbers, and have you swearing you were listening to two pianos with his rumbling bass lines. Live, he was famous for choosing a theme and playing songs related to it, whether it be a season or a word from the encyclopedic music catalog he kept in his head. Art Tatum was one of Dave’s influences, but I can listen to Dave any time, whereas Tatum’s flourishes, flashy technique, and sheer volume of notes can be overwhelming.
My favorite live recording of Dave’s from that era is “The Maybeck Recital Series, Vol. 2,” recorded in Berkley, California in November of 1989. It’s how I remember Dave playing solo in our lounge. The full recording is on Spotify and one of his medleys from that concert is on YouTube.
I’m neither a musician nor a musicologist, so I’ll leave the technical aspects of Dave’s playing to those with more knowledge. I do my part by being an enthusiastic audience member of live jazz.
Listening to Dave was very personal for me. He changed the music I listened to and how I listened to it. I was in my late twenties and thoroughly disgusted by the drivel pop music was turning out in the 1980s when I first heard Dave. I’d had an immersion course in jazz almost a decade earlier by my college roommate, who was a jazz drummer and huge fan of John Coltrane. Being a big fan of the early Allman Brothers Band and particularly Duane Allman, with some of his jazzy inclinations, it only took a little convincing and a little hashish before I became a big Coltrane fan, too. None of this helped my studies, by the way.
For many jazz fans, it can be incongruous to be a fan of both Coltrane and McKenna, as Coltrane became identified with unstructured free jazz and McKenna’s chops were developed during the swing era and he was more of a traditionalist who embraced The Great American Songbook from the mid-20th century and earlier. All the jazz musicians I came to know when Dave played in our lounge scorned Coltrane mightily. My weak attempts to defend Coltrane were to point to albums he did with Ellington and Johnny Hartman and to some of his beautiful ballads. They’d have nothing of it, though. Defending Coltrane to those guys was like trying to defend Satan to a nun.
One of my earlier memories of Dave in our lounge was when he played with a group from the Concord Jazz label who called themselves The Concord All Stars. Besides Dave, the group included Scott Hamilton on tenor, either Chuck Riggs or Jake Hanna on drums, Warren Vache on trumpet, Phil Flanigan on bass, and Cal Collins on guitar. Forgive me if I confused some of the members of the lineup from that early version of the All Stars, as my memories may have become jumbled with subsequent gigs. The point is, I remember when a 24- or 25-year-old guitarist named Gray Sargent sat in with them. Gray had been playing with Illinois Jacquet for a time and had played in our lounge with his good friend Marshall Wood on bass and Jack Bumer on piano, but had never played with those guys before. When Gray stepped up, he began trading licks with Cal Collins, who was the premier guitarist on the Concord label at the time. I remember Cal looking a little surprised, a little challenged, and very impressed by Gray’s playing.
Gray and Marshall ended up playing many gigs with Dave, some of which were recorded, before Gray joined Tony Bennett’s backing group, The Ralph Sharon Quartet, in 1997. Gray was joined by his friend and bassist Marshall Wood in 2006, accompanying Tony in what became known as The Quartet after Ralph Sharon retired in 2002. It was only last year, when Tony retired at age 94, that Gray and Marshall stopped playing with him.
It was my dad, Dave Luhmann, who took care of the music bookings at our restaurant, and he spent many hours in conversation with Dave McKenna. My dad ended up developing a warm relationship with him and many of the other musicians who played in our lounge. A year before we sold the restaurant in 1988, to a couple of infidels who discontinued live jazz, my dad passed away after a short and difficult battle with cancer. His passing was, of course, devastating to us, but Gray and Marshall will always hold a special place in my heart for volunteering to play graveside for us as we laid my dad to rest.
Dave McKenna was a humble, private man from the blue-collar city of Woonsocket, Rhode Island who generally kept a low profile, which helps explain his lack of celebrity with the general public, but he was revered by other musicians. He was a musician’s musician, if you will. Dave was a prodigy born in 1930, and began playing professionally when he was 17, performing with the big bands of Charlie Ventura and Woody Herman’s Orchestra. As his career progressed, he played with Al Cohn, Stan Getz, Gene Krupa, Zoot Sims, and Joe Venuti, just to name a handful. It was after he played with Louis Armstrong at The Newport Jazz Festival in 1970 that his recognition increased within the jazz world. Besides playing with Gray and Marshall later in his career, he played with Ruby Braff, Dick Johnson, Scott Hamilton, and Bob Wilber, all of whom played regularly with Dave in our lounge.
Dave often described himself as a saloon player, even as he played his regular winter gig at the elegant Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston and venues such as Carnegie Hall. He claimed he was much more comfortable when there was conversation going on in the room and only became nervous when the audience was silently listening. This is exemplified in his appearance at Carnegie Hall, on the same bill with other piano greats, in 1972, where he finishes his brilliant short set with an impressive, yet frenetic version of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” I can almost feel his desire to get off the stage at that point.
I’ll never forget the first of many special New Year’s celebrations we had that Dave played. It was during the after-hours party, and a group of us were gathered around Dave playing the piano, when things get a little vague. Any description of Dave would include his prominent proboscis, which took part in what happened next. Dave suddenly looked up and exclaimed, “Hey! How about my wild Irish nose?” whereupon he started playing “My Wild Irish Rose” with his nose!
Dave was more my parent’s generation, and I was too intimidated to talk to him about music, although I listened intently whenever he and other musicians would talk music. Dave and I could talk about two things we both loved — food and the Boston Red Sox. As far as food is concerned, I just read one of his quotes on social media from Bill Crow, which made me laugh because it was so Dave: “I suppose if I do what the doctors say and lay off the booze and the rich food, I’ll live a little longer. But how will I know for SURE?” Dave cut back dramatically on his alcohol consumption in his fifties, after Zoot Sims died at 59 from liver cancer brought on by excessive alcohol consumption. Dave even warned a young, brilliant saxophonist at the time, Scott Hamilton, who was headed down the same path, not to end up like Zoot. It was a warning which stuck with Scott, who now enjoys a sober, successful career from his adopted home base of London.
One of my last memories of Dave happened during one of the few times I could leave the kitchen during dinner service and eat with him. I made his favorite, linguine carbonara, and our conversation stuck to food and the Red Sox. He was such a nice, sweet man, and was rarely given to saying anything negative about anyone, except this time when we were sitting with the other musicians. One of Dave’s favorite musicians was a horn player whose wife was generally considered to be a mediocre vocalist at best and a pain in the ass at worst. It was a package deal when they showed up together, but the other musicians barely tolerated her. She grated on Dave, both musically and personally. After the husband-and-wife team left the table, Dave said, “I knew love was blind, but I didn’t know it was deaf, too!”
