Biography
Dutch saxophonist Luc Houtkamp posed the musical query “Who Was Claude McLin?” on a 1997 Entropy trio date. An avant-garde piece bearing his name, let alone one that probed his very identity, would likely have struck the saxophonist himself as darkly comic. Viewed from the back of a club, McLin could easily have been mistaken for Lester Young; both men played tenor saxophone and cradled the instrument at the same distinctive angle. Such a comparison would probably not have displeased him. He launched his professional life at nineteen in Walter Dyett’s Chicago-area ensemble. After Army service he came back to the city in 1946 and fronted small groups in local bars and clubs until 1952. The Chicago scene crackled with intensity, its audiences especially drawn to the perspiring, high-stakes cutting contests that decided which player reigned supreme on any given instrument. Among the young tenor saxophonists—Gene Ammons, Von Freeman, and Johnny Griffin—McLin held his own; Ammons often joined McLin’s bands and sometimes shared bills with Griffin. When Charlie “Yardbird” Parker arrived in 1948, he was naturally paired with the rising Claude McLin & His Combo. Pianists such as Junior Mance and Wild Bill Davis were likewise active, and the Aristocrat and Chess labels captured many of these musicians in shifting combinations. McLin scored his first hit in 1950 with a version of “Mona Lisa” and worked with vocalist Laura Rucker, yet the success proved fleeting by the following year. Part of the difficulty may have stemmed from his embrace of bebop, then considered too advanced for popular taste; nevertheless he led groups called Beautiful Be Bop and the Claude McLin Bop Band and recorded in the early fifties with Bennie Green. A 1950 Pershing Hotel broadcast alongside Parker brought McLin his broadest exposure; the tapes have since been reissued countless times. His solos on that date are plentiful and mesh impressively with Parker’s. Sometime in the early fifties McLin left Chicago. He surfaced on the West Coast in 1954, backing R&B shouter Amos Milburn. Sporadic singles continued to appear under his own name, among them the up-tempo blues “Countdown Orbit One” and “Countdown Orbit Two” in 1960, titles that may have nodded to the space race, and the later strip-club grind “The Growler,” which hinted that his Baroque bebop days were receding. By 1964 he had turned to garage rock with “Jambo,” featuring a singer whose voice suggested an accidental ingestion of a harmonica. Unreleased tracks from the same period show him still exploring organ-based soul, jazz, and blues. As white rock bands and newer soul styles dominated, steady work dwindled. In 1978 he was driving a courtesy bus for a car-rental company at Los Angeles International Airport. He died in Los Angeles shortly after retiring from that job.
Albums