Jackie McLean
Day 63
#86 – John Lenwood ‘Jackie’ McLean (1931–2006). American jazz alto saxophonist, composer, bandleader and educator. Albums include: Swing, Swang, Swingin’ (1959), Let Freedom Ring (1962) and New York Calling (1974).
I kept reading about McLean’s intensity of playing. So I selected really bright colours and started to look at how I could express it typographically. Listening to some high notes made me just think of placing the letters high on the page. As he played Alto Sax, positioning the sax high on the page (as with the Mehldau image) it looked like a ‘J’. But this was too similar to the Mehldau image. Changing it to a typeface, something rough and unusual, gave it more energy. It still looked a little boring, so repeating the typeface and overlapping them, in different colours and adjusting the end to look more like an alto sax worked better.
1 hour
Listen...
to excerpts from ‘Swing, Swang, Swingin’.’