How Minneapolis helped jazz legend Jack McDuff turn over a new leaf

Brother Jack McDuff hit the nightclub circuit like a whirlwind throughout the early ‘60s, blending the bite of hard bop (itself imbued with the jump-swing of Count Basie) with the fatback, marinating blues of the organ-jazz craze that his quartet helped extend. 

There was tenor saxophonist Red Hollway, a big barrel of a man with a tone to match. The hotshot teenager on guitar was none other than George Benson, stoking a seemingly unending series of tasty, agile licks that bulged the pocket set by the grooving rhythm section; drummer Joe Dukes, and, of course, the organist and bandleader himself. 

McDuff wrote or arranged nearly everything on the setlist and wasn’t afraid to solo last after Holloway and Benson had wowed the crowd. Dressed to the nines, his white-tipped hair combed up in a tight flip over his dark brown skin and a pencil-thin mustache, his swagger was musical and physical both — living large in his mid-20s. 

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Kenny Horst saw that band at a hall on Ford Parkway in St. Paul in the mid-’60s and was properly blown away. A longtime drummer on the local scene, Horst remembered McDuff decades later when he started booking acts for the Artists’ Quarter, a now-legendary and much-missed nightspot Horst came to co-own. 

McDuff’s first three-night stint at the AQ in the late ‘80s was “really cool,” Horst recalled. But according to the people who knew and loved McDuff, the second time he came to town probably saved his life, and helped to elevate the Twin Cities jazz scene over the next decade. With the late McDuff’s Centennial birthday on September 17, now is a good time to tell the story. 

Kathy Ann Johnson lived a block and a half from the AQ’s original location at 26^th and Nicollet, and frequently walked over to “hear the greats” when a relatively high-profile act was just around the corner. So it was with McDuff’s second visit, and the headliner was apparently smitten shortly after Kathy walked through the door. 

“He came up to me and started talking,” Kathy said. “Then during the band’s (first) break, he came back with a glass of wine for me. Then on a later break he asked me if I wanted a ride home.”

So Kathy waited around until the van could deliver her two minutes to her apartment. “He asked me to promise him that I would come back the next night,” she said. “So I did. And that was when he spent the night. That’s how it started.” 

“Suddenly I’m getting calls from Jack to hurry up and book him back, book him back,” Horst said with a laugh. “So I scheduled him for every six months and even that wasn’t enough.”

“He called me a lot and I went out to visit him at his place,” said Kathy, referring to McDuff’s apartment in Lenox Towers on 135^th Street in Harlem. Then, in the summer of 1990, a little more than a year after they’d met, the organist upped the ante on their relationship. 

“He called and I said, ‘Whatcha doin’? You going somewhere?’” Kathy recalled. “And he said, ‘No, I’m here.’ 

‘Where?’ 

‘Downstairs.’

‘You kidding!?’ 

“And he said, ‘No, I’m moving here.’ I was shocked, but it made me happy.”

Years later, when people would ask McDuff if he missed New York, he’d wisecrack, “Every chance I get.” Entering the ‘90s, New York was riddled with high crime and drug usage due to the crack cocaine epidemic. Race and class tensions were high as the mayoralty swung from Ed Koch to David Dinkins. Even the cultural advances — it was a golden age for hip-hop in the boroughs — further depressed the market for working jazz musicians already facing stiff competition from punk rock and new wave in the ‘70s and early ‘80s.

For McDuff personally, it was a particularly bleak point in his career. 

“He needed the change,” said saxophonist Jerry Weldon, a member of McDuff’s bands since the mid-’80s. “There was a period in his career where he wasn’t recording or playing very much. When I joined him he didn’t have a steady (record) contract or deal.”

Between the lines, many of the people I talked to for this story let it be known that McDuff also had a serious drug and/or alcohol problem. There was talk of his “partying” and “distractions.” The real tell was how many people echoed Weldon’s words about Kathy’s role in McDuff’s existence. 

“She saved him. No question about it. She probably saved his life. I don’t think I’m being dramatic, saying that. I really feel that way,” said Weldon, his voice thickening with emotion. 

“She cleaned him up but it was a great relationship because she did a lot for him but he did a lot for her too,” Horst remarked. 

Kathy had two children from a previous marriage, aged 10 and 12 when she first met McDuff. They lived together in an apartment in South Minneapolis. “He was great with the kids and they loved him,” she said. “I don’t ever remember him getting angry at them.” 

John McCauley, who became McDuff’s manager from 1992 to 1999 after promoting a show at the Fine Line featuring McDuff and fellow organist (and McDuff disciple) Joey DeFrancesco, seconded the sentiment, saying, “He was not only a good stepfather, he loved kids. My kids adored him. He had a generosity of spirit, a joy of living that came through when he played but also off the bandstand.”

Plopped into a more domestic environment in a smaller city, he reconnected with his artistry. Kathy cleared a room in the apartment filled with his instruments, where he could work on composing and arranging — longstanding sources of pride in his music-making. 

“He’d be behind that organ, and with the keyboards, all day. He got up before I would and keep the sound of the organ down. He told me, ‘I don’t want to wake you,’ and I’d say, ‘That’s okay, I’ve got to get up for work (at a nonprofit working with the homeless) anyway,’” Kathy said. 

A few years before he moved to the Twin Cities, McDuff had begun wearing a captain’s hat like one of his favorite musicians, Count Basie, and began billing himself as Captain Jack McDuff. When Kenny Horst asked him why he changed his name from Brother Jack to Captain Jack, he quipped, “It wasn’t a change, I just gave myself a promotion.”

His work took on a new sophistication. The snazzy, exciting jump-blues of “A Real Goodun’” and “Rock Candy” (“Guess what that one’s about,” Horst said) from his heyday, became steadily less frequent than charts that contained multiple voicings and complex harmonies fit for larger ensembles.

The organist Pat Bianchi only met McDuff once, as a shy teenager, before becoming a disciple of DeFrancesco later in life. But he is enamored by McDuff’s work, to the point where he is staging “A Centennial Celebration of Jack McDuff,” for three nights in Vancouver on his current tour, with hopes of finding backing to continue the project. 

What struck Bianchi about McDuff’s time in Minneapolis was that “compositionally he was in full bloom, writing constantly with some creative and unique structures. Like ‘Spec-Tator,’ which has really advanced and creative harmony, so modern it kind of blew me away. It was a very fertile period for him.” 

With his creativity peaking, McDuff had trouble confining himself to his music room. People venture out and sit in on gigs all the time, and McDuff had a standing invitation from Horst to drop by whenever he wanted at the various incarnations of the Artists’ Quarter, after it had left its original locale. 

But McDuff was in a smaller pond than New York. And while jazz fans got the extraordinary pleasure of seeing him live at random but not infrequent spots around town, it was hard to command “national act” admission to a club like the Dakota when his own band came in to showcase his burgeoning trove of new music. While he tried to heed the caution of his manager McCauley to dial it back, he found it difficult to resist requests to literally come out and play. 

So he struck a deal with Lowell Pickett of the Dakota. “Jack [McCauley] talked about how going out hurt his ability to make a living, so he kind of used me, in the best possible way,” Pickett revealed. “We made an arrangement to fly in his band, The Heatin’ System, four times a year on weeknights for a two-night stand. We could charge more for tickets and pay him accordingly. And when people would ask him to come out, he didn’t have to be the bad guy; he could say, ‘No, the Dakota won’t let me.’”

Getting straight, having a cloistered music room, playing out locally a little more often and then restricting it to the high-caliber bandmates from New York who knew him best was a progression that really paid off. 

“He had fresh energy; he could work with more vigor and more thoroughness,” said Andrew Beals, the more senior saxophonist in the The Heatin’ System alongside Weldon. “He knew thousands of tunes and could reharmonize a standard in such a beautiful, rational way. He was tough on the band; I think because of his ex-military background in the Navy. No sugarcoating his criticism. School was out and this was a professional band.” 

“When had a thick book of arrangements and when he’d come in with a new one it was like a new child,” Weldon added. “Hearing what you sketched on paper come to life, that’s a great experience.” 

Word of McDuff’s renaissance filtered out to the general public. The duets with DeFrancesco were gaining notice and local writer Tom Surowicz wrote a great profile in the jazz bible Downbeat. A couple of years after arriving in Minneapolis, McDuff had a contract with Concord Records, beginning with a reunion of the Holloway and Benson band but then with a larger ensemble that utilized the complexity of his new arrangements. There is a gorgeous ballad on that second record entitled “The Room, For Kathy.” 

Jack and Kathy were married in 1993, at a time when she was already accompanying him on international tours to Africa, Europe, even a Norwegian cruise liner. “He told me, ‘When I was alone I would just be in my room and sleep all day. Now I get to see the countries,’” Kathy McDuff said. “I got time off from work; it was such a good time.” A tour of Japan was especially lucrative, and enabled the couple to purchase a high-rise apartment on the fringe of Loring Park, where Kathy still resides.

But in 1998, McDuff suffered a debilitating stroke that left him in a near coma for about a month. Kathy called McCauley, who arrived to help. And down at the hospital, Lowell Pickett was one of the first people on the scene. “That showed me something about Lowell,” McCauley said. 

While he eventually recovered enough to resume playing, McDuff walked with a cane for the rest of his days. It diminished the quality of his playing somewhat, but that ineffable feel and connection to the blues still shined through. 

Whether McDuff died from heart failure (the reported cause) or a further series of small strokes is hard to know. He was confined to his bed in a care facility for the last months of his life, as Kathy continued to take him dinner from his favorite restaurants when she got off work. 

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Asked what motivated him to form a centennial celebration involving bandmembers who played with McDuff to help him recreate the transcriptions of his arrangements, Bianchi said: 

“Jack always stood out to me because of his compositional sense and arranging sense. But also because he was kind of the Art Blakey (the drummer considered the greatest mentor in jazz) of the jazz organ world. He brought up so many guitar players I’ve worked with: Paul Bollenbeck, Dave Stryker, Mark Whitfield, John Hart — and that’s not counting George Benson and my old boss Pat Martino.” Then Bianchi extended the lineage to a half-dozen drummers and a similar number of horn players. 

“They all got their start playing for Jack and he doesn’t get enough credit for bringing people along and educating them on the bandstand.” 

His legacy endures through his recorded music, but just as important are the invisible threads like these woven throughout a career that owes its back end to the support and love of the Twin Cities jazz scene.

The post How Minneapolis helped jazz legend Jack McDuff turn over a new leaf appeared first on MinnPost.

Originally reported by MinnPost by Britt Robson. Read the full story at the source.