Bernie McGann
Bernie McGann ( born June 22, 1937 in Granville, today Parramatta, New South Wales, † September 17, 2013 ) was an Australian saxophonist and composer of modern jazz. He was regarded as the most original voice of Australian jazz.
Life and work
McGann began his musical career in the late 1950s as a drummer with the musicians who played in King Cross in El Rocco Jazz Cellar. In the 1960s and early 1970s McGann also played with rock and pop bands and as a session musician; In 1970 he was a member of the soul-rock band Southern Comfort from Sydney.
In 1974 he was one of the founding members of the Jazz Band Last Straw, with whom he recorded several albums. Next he played in the 1980s by traveling with U.S. musicians such as Freddie Hubbard, Lester Bowie, Dave Liebman, Sonny Stitt; In 1983, he studied in New York. In 1986 he accompanied with his trio saxophonist Dewey Redman on his Australian tour in 1987, he created his first two albums under his own name on the label Emanem. In 1988, he toured with the Australian Jazz Orchestra by Australia and the United States. In the same year he performed with his trio at London's Ronnie Scott 's Jazz Club in 1989 as a soloist in the Auckland Jazz & Blues Festival, the band, The Last Straw at the Montreal Jazz Festival in Canada.
In the 1990s, a series of albums followed on the Rufus label, he also continued to work with his own trio and quartet formations, most recently with drummer John Pochee and bassist Lloyd Swanton, supplemented in the quartet to the trumpeter Warwick Alder. 1996 McGann appeared at the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Munich Piano Summer Festival. In 1998 he played with the formation wanderlust to the trumpeter Miroslav Bukovsky and the trombonist James Greening. In the same year he was the first jazz musician to the Don Banks Music Award was to be honored with the musicians who have made a long and lasting impact on the Australian music scene.
The authors Richard Cook and Brian Morton say that there McGann's internationally low levels of awareness of its isolated location in Sidney follows; nevertheless McGann was a musician of rank and stylistically similar to Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman; this applies particularly to his last two albums Live at Side On ( 2003) and Blues for Pablo Too ( 2005). He died in September 2013 after complications from heart surgery.
Disco Graphical Notes
- Kindred Spirits ( Emanem, re-released on Rufus, 1987)
- Ugly Beauty ( Rufus, 1991)
- McGann McGann ( Rufus, 1994)
- Playground ( Rufus, n.d. )
- Bundeena ( Rufus, 2000)
- Blues for Pablo Too ( Rufus, 2005)