The following is a feature by jazz journalist Morgan Enos about the late, great jazz pianist, synthesist and singer Les McCann, through the lens of his most recent archival recording, Never a Dull Moment! Live from Coast to Coast 1966-1967). McCann passed away at the end of 2023.
When you survey Les McCann’s six-decade discography, it’s intriguing that he didn’t call a record Never a Dull Moment! until the very end of his life, because that was his very motto.
“That’s how he viewed his life,” explains fellow pianist Joe Alterman, a McCann devotee who befriended him 12 years ago, and stayed tight with him until his death. “He used to tell me, ‘I’ve tried everything twice.’ He wanted to experience all of life, and wanted everyone to. That was him — never a dull moment.”
The expression doesn’t only explain McCann’s life, but his career.
The Kentuckian pianist and singer hit the ground running at the top of the 1960s, recording a slew of bluesy, swinging dates for Pacific Jazz Records, mostly with his Les McCann Ltd. trio. After six albums on the Mercury subsidiary Limelight, McCann signed with Atlantic, for whom he recorded 11 albums.
These included 1969’s Swiss Movement, which documents his hash-fuelled performance at Montreux Jazz Festival with the aforementioned trio, trumpeter Benny Bailey and tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris. Swiss Movement gave McCann his biggest hit in the form of a riotous cover of Gene McDaniels’ protest song “Compared to What,” and hot on its heels came 1971 and 1972’s synth-powered Invitation to Openness and Layers, both smouldering cauldrons of heady vibes.
In his later, pop-oriented work, McCann stepped out more as a singer than a piano man, which was part and parcel with the artist he’d always been, but divided critics anyway. A 1994 stroke didn’t manage to sideline him: he recorded until 2018.

On 29 December 2023, McCann passed away from pneumonia. He was 88. He leaves behind his prodigious legacy via his pipes and keys, but also in the hip-hop universe: McCann has been sampled by Snoop Dogg, Nas, the Notorious B.I.G., Eric B. & Rakim, and many more.
Fortuitously, McCann got to see the release of his latest archival album, Never a Dull Moment! Live From Coast to Coast (1966-1967), via Resonance Records. The release features live recordings at the Penthouse in Seattle and the Village Vanguard in New York, the former with the core rhythm section of bassist Stanley Gilbert and drummer Paul Humphrey, and the latter with bassist Leroy Vinnegar and drummer Frank Severino.
What you’ll hear isn’t just a worthy send-off for one of soul jazz’s all-time greats. (“I heard them, and I said ‘Daaamn!’,” the ever-colourful McCann exclaims in the liner notes.) If you’re a McCann neophyte, Never a Dull Moment! is no mere curio: it provides a crystal-clear window into the artist’s bluesy, soulful, ascendant essence.
First things first: as you hear throughout Never a Dull Moment!, McCann’s artistry was permeated with the blues.
“Les McCann was a beautiful blues player, one of the best,” pianist and composer Ethan Iverson tells LondonJazz. “His beat was simply hypnotic, and each piano phrase sounded like it was spoken by Mother Earth herself.” (On his Substack, Iverson declared, “McCann is one of the funkiest ever.”)
Part of this comes from gospel: McCann was reared in the Shiloh Baptist Church, where he, his four younger brothers, and his sister, sang in the choir. “Everybody has the blues in their heart,” he once said. “When I grew up, the blues was it. The blues and church music are exactly the same, with different words.”
Another key component of Never a Dull Moment!, and McCann’s work at large, is a sense of accessibility and ebullience.
“His big heroes were the pianists Carl Perkins and Erroll Garner, and he loved this joyful-sounding thing,” Alterman states. But while McCann had clear influences, he wasn’t beholden to them. “He had an appreciation for everything,” Alterman continues. “But he was really less concerned about playing jazz than he was playing Les McCann – that’s what he called it.”

The down-home, uplifting nature of some of McCann’s work bound up some critics. That’s the hunch of Greg Bryant, a radio broadcaster who hosts Evening Jazz on WRTI in Philadelphia.
“I’m working personally on marrying musicians who are covered in the press, with musicians who do well at radio,” Bryant says, citing the frequent, half-century-old gulf between the two. “I think there’s room for the avant, and there is room for the accessible. And I think because Les played feel-good music most of the time, it was actually confounding to the critical community… what can really be said about it that isn’t in its structural, soulful DNA?”
Bassist Adam Dorn – whose father, Joel Dorn, produced a number of McCann’s records – posits that this will only lead to the music’s longevity. “Les will always have some sort of loyal following,” he says, “because it was so organic, and real soulful, and just not pretentious.”
Sure, Never a Dull Moment! comprises a specific snapshot of the artist, a couple of years before he leapt into uncharted waters with the success of “Compared to What,” and his giant evolutionary step with Invitation to Openness and Layers. But this birds-eye view of the release’s context reveals another important facet: McCann’s sense of spontaneous, constant evolution.
“You’ve got Les McCann, who’s like grits and gravy,” says pianist and organist Brian Charette, who recorded the tribute “Mood for McCann” with drummer Jordan Young on Young’s 2012 album Cymbal Melodies. “This gravelly voice and this soul kind of piano.” On the other hand? “You have Eddie Harris, who’s playing this crazy wide-intervallic stuff,” Charette says of the late tenor great. “The trumpeter, Benny Bailey, is very wild; he’s kind of in the middle of those two.”
Charette points out that Swiss Movement was an impromptu concert, with an ensemble of festival-mates that had never previously performed together. What could have been a mess in lesser hands turned out to be McCann’s zenith in the marketplace: Charette calls “Compared to What” — and Swiss Movement as a whole — the “desert island pick.”
“I don’t want to say they’re rough, but they’re raw,” he says. “You really get to hear them working it out and how the beat works and how they’re kind of coming into the arrangements.”
If that’s the desert island pick, then Never a Dull Moment! fills another role: the final McCann release of his lifetime could be your place to start, and then move backwards. Think of where McCann had been, and would venture to; this live recording represented something of a precipice.
And no matter which direction you go, you’ll find there’s… well, the title says it all.