A new documentary film, This Is Gary McFarland, is a potent reminder of the cult jazz musician who, as the film maintains, could have been a household name, but instead suffered a dreadful death at a relatively young age. By Keith Shadwick.

The short career of Gary McFarland (1933-71) has not been celebrated in the way that the short careers of, say, Eric Dolphy, Tina Brooks or even Dodo Marmarosa have been. The reasons are not hard to locate: McFarland, a distinctive and resourceful composer/arranger who played competent rather than spectacular vibraphone, faced the financial and artistic implications of each subsequent 1960s musical revolution with an open-eared pragmatism that put him in a profitable but lonely place.

Just what that place was and why it was so singular is explained beautifully in a film shown at a string of US festivals last summer, This Is Gary McFarland. Directed and produced by McFarland fan Kristian St. Clair, it utilises interviews with McFarland’s surviving family, the musicians he worked with and the music business associates who are still alive. St. Clair was also allowed by McFarland’s family to use footage of his wedding – a real New York event whose attendees included Lalo Schifrin, Gabor Szabo, Clark Terry, Jim Hall, Steve Kuhn, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Bob Brookmeyer, Sy Johnson and Machito.

McFarland was pretty much an autodidact, coming to music during a stint of National Service then completing just a semester at Berklee before drifting off. He attended the same summer the School of Jazz at Lenox that Ornette Coleman appeared at and managed to impress John Lewis, who helped him in his career. McFarland moved to New York and began getting his music performed by ensembles such as Gerry Mulligan and Stan Getz and also got involved in the Orchestra USA project under the guidance of Lewis and Gunther Schuller. McFarland’s more ambitious works of the day turned up on a number of Lewis and Schuller-led albums, including an album on Atlantic, Essence, where Lewis led a variety of all-star ensembles playing an all-McFarland programme. It seemed that McFarland was headed for a respectable career swapping musically satisfying projects with the usual commercial and TV fare that composer/arrangers took on at the time.

But McFarland was a maverick with his own very special “ear”, giving him a distinctive sound in whatever he did. His wife Gail, interviewed by St. Clair, summed up McFarland’s attitude towards his career. “He said ‘always pretend you know what you’re doing or you won’t have the opportunity to do it.’ There was a lot of catch-up.” McFarland enjoyed music from different genres when it was definitely not cool in jazz circles to do so. In an age when a conga player on a jazz record was regarded as “exotic”, McFarland very early on embraced bossa nova (he scored Stan Getz’s best-selling Big Band Bossa Nova album) and the British Invasion’s rock songs (they crop up on many of his more pop-inspired projects of the 1960s). Albums such as The ‘In’ Crowd and Soft Samba have little or nothing to do with conventional jazz, but St. Clair makes a strong case for them representing high-quality instrumental pop music at its best.

Conversely, throughout the 1960s McFarland supplied a stream of brilliant musical works that are neglected today largely because they were written for ensembles that have long fallen out of fashion in fashionable circles. McFarland’s unique combinations of tone and timbre, his beautiful part writing and his wonderful wit are best represented by his work for larger jazz ensembles – for example, his brilliant album, The Gary McFarland Orchestra: Guest artist Bill Evans (Verve). On his October Suite with Steve Kuhn he alternates a small string ensemble with a wind ensemble in ways no-one else had previously thought of in jazz. St. Clair quotes musicians and business associates talking of the world McFarland was moving through when making these records – having to deal with Bill Evans’ heroin addiction, for a start, and dealing with it brilliantly during and after the sessions. Profiles (Impulse!) finds him at the fullest extent of his commitment to conventional jazz forces in a concert celebrating and showcasing soloists from Clark Terry and Zoot Sims to Gabor Szabo and Richard Davis.

This concert also introduced the name Norman Schwartz to the general public, he being the man who “presented” the Profiles concert and who was to have a complex but ultimately malign influence on McFarland’s career. As one old sweat says in the film: “Stan Getz – whom nobody liked – one thing I’ll say in favour of Stan Getz is that he’s the only person who succeeded in cheating Norman Schwartz.”

As the 60s moved into the flower power era and beyond, McFarland consciously sought out a creative marrying of jazz and rock thought processes. By 1968 he had composed and scored his masterpiece, America The Beautiful: An Account of its Disappearance (Skye). This album moves with complete conviction from quasi-classical solo cello theme statements to of-the-moment electric guitar declamations, inspired sax solos and tremendously exciting brass section shouts, all within a tightly controlled set of themes and developments.

The other point to notice about this album was that it was released on Skye, the independent label McFarland had set up with Gabor Szabo and Cal Tjader (with the help of Norman Schwartz, of course). Skye lasted just three years before it went belly-up, but in that time it made a considerable artistic statement of purpose. St. Clair details McFarland’s part in the achievement very well indeed. McFarland’s demise in 1971 was shocking and strange: a recovering alcoholic, he and a couple of friends went for a drink in a New York bar after a recording session. While there he and two other men were slipped drinks by Mason Hoffenberg, co-author of the book Candy, that were laced with liquid methadone. He suffered a heart attack that killed him pretty much instantly: another of the victims died three days later in hospital. The third man, the bartender, was violently ill but eventually recovered. One of McFarland’s brothers suggests in the film that the bar was protected by the Mob, so no enquiry was held. McFarland was an incidental casualty of life. This excellent and sensitive portrait shows why he still matters. It is hoped that a European showing will not be too far off and that a DVD will eventually appear. Meanwhile, details can be found on thisisgarymcfarland.com.

This article is  ttakken from Jazzwise Issue #112 - to receive  a FREE CD - Subscribe here.