Jackie McLean – Lights Out! (Mono)

“Analogue Productions’ 180-gram mono LP reissues of Jackie McLean’s first two Prestige albums prompts us to reevaluate this hard-swinging jazzman. … The only way McLean’s bright, biting sound was ever heard to better advantage was live.” Sonics = 5/5; Music = 3.5/5 — Duck Baker, The Absolute Sound, April 2013

A perpetual favorite among Jackie McLean’s earlier recordings, Lights Out finds the hard-swinging young alto saxophonist in 1956 still very much under the wing of Charlie Parker, who had died less than a year earlier. Yet McLean was beginning to find ways out of the seductive artistic security of Bird imitations. For one thing, he was experimenting with tonal variations. For another, he was working with Charles Mingus, and Mingus’s genius as a leader included forcing musicians to look deeply into their most cherished stylistic practices. The McLean of Lights Out is the hot young bebopper with a slightly acid edge to his sound and a solid blues foundation under everything he played. McLean and trumpeter Donald Byrd occasionally engage in the “pecking” technique of mutual improvisation they developed as members of the George Wallington Quintet.