Gary McFarland: Voyage of Discovery

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“Gary McFarland was unknown at twenty-eight when he turned up at a 1961 rehearsal [of Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band] with two pieces, "Weep" and "Chug-gin'," profoundly influenced by Ellington and Strayhorn.

When he died tragically ten years later, his reputation had been sullied by several commercial projects. But the McFarland that Mulligan sent on his way was an impressive writer (he soon fulfilled his promise with The Jazz Version of How To Succeed in Business, Point of Departure, and The October Suite), with an ear for melody and the ability to layer rhythms in the wind sections.

Like Bob Brookmeyer and Thad Jones, McFarland extended Ellington's harmonic density, employing what the arranger and educator Rayburn Wright called "grinds"—major and minor seconds woven into the voicings.”

- Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz [p.362-363]

Any musician who is self-taught to any degree knows this as an almost universal truth: if you can hear it, you can find a way to play it.

I had to “unlearn” everything once I began taking drums lessons, because there is the right or correct way to execute music on the instrument; and then there is the way we learn to play when only the ear is the guide.

But I was a Jazz drummer before I became a technically proficient Jazz drummer. I just found a way to replicate on the instrument sounds that I heard while listening to records.

And although I wasn’t in their league, many of the Jazz greats learned to play by ear and received technical training later in life or, in some cases, not at all.

This is also true of composer-arrangers.

As a teen-ager, Gil Evans listened to records at speeds slower than 78rpm’s to pick out sounds from the Louis Armstrong recordings that he treasured and then invented his own notation system to write arrangements before he had any sort of schooling in the art of orchestration.

This may account for the fact that Gil’s arrangements always seem to use unique combinations of instruments including tubas with flutes and rarely heard [in Jazz] reed instruments such as the oboe and English horn.

He was trying to replicate into music sounds that he heard in his head and these odd or unusual instruments were the best source to emulate his impressions.

He didn’t know what he couldn’t do, because he had no formal training to tell him otherwise.

Enter Gary McFarland.