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Mark McLean Feature
by Stephanie Silliker
– April 4, 2005
As the pre-concert excitement heightens at the Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, a reserved Mark McLean, decked in a smart black suit and polished shoes, sits nonchalantly on a sofa in a backstage greenroom. With his wonderfully smooth black skin, pearly-white teeth and endearing dimples, the 30-year-old drummer could easily pass for someone 10 years younger. But, behind his boyish appearance lies a well-versed and well-travelled man. Grabbing one of the square sofa pillows, he places it beside him and flicks a switch on his metronome. A clear, consistent beat penetrates the air, like drops of rain hitting a tin can. Then, McLean takes his drumsticks and beats a rhythm on the pillow. “Thump-ata, thump, thump.” After about three minutes, he’s warmed up. Tonight he’s accompanying the young cabaret-jazz star Peter Cincotti in front of nearly 1,500 fans.
McLean, a once shy suburban kid from North York, admits to a time when he didn’t know much about what happened south of Sheppard Avenue. But now, this bebop’n Canadian cat has made his mark around the world. In addition to travelling with Cincotti, you can find him supporting Andy Bey on the veteran singer’s latest Grammy-nominated CD, American Song. He’s also played with jazz legend Oscar Peterson, toured with free-jazz experimentalist Jane Bunnett, jammed with popsters the Backstreet Boys and even performed on ABC’s hit reality series The Bachelorette. In his short career so far, this University of Toronto Music Graduate has appeared on 20 recordings, the first of which was an album by one of his mentors, U of T faculty member Don Thompson. Now residing in New York City, McLean is one of the hottest young drummers to have risen out of Toronto’s jazz scene in recent years. Bill King, editor of The Jazz Report says, “There is a fire and energy in his playing that separates him from others.” He’s truly a rarity among black Canadians of his generation, claims Mark Miller, one of Canada’s foremost jazz critics. McLean has headed into jazz rather than rap or reggae. Canada’s greatest contributions to jazz have not mainly been black, Oscar Peterson aside, nor have they been drummers. These are just two more reasons why McLean is so unique.
Of course his good looks and polished package don’t hurt, but what really makes McLean such a hot commodity is his versatility. Using sticks, brushes and even his bare hands, he’s at ease with a variety of styles, as comfortable with the slow-moving tempos favoured by Bey as he is playing the upbeat, contemporary style favoured by Cincotti. McLean is also fluent in a variety of idioms: Afro-Cuban, funk, jazz, R&B, calypso, reggae, rock and even hip hop. As it states on his Web site, “In Mark’s eyes, the sum of individual styles represents the whole of human expression. Being free of the burden of musical categorization empowers Mark to fully explore his own voice.” He simply loves music, all of it.
“Maybe it’s because Mark is just such a nice guy,” says George McLean of his son’s success. He and his wife, Joan, both immigrants from Guyana with a passion for music, are grooving in the basement of their North York home to A Diamond in my Hand, a tune McLean played with the sensational songstress Molly Johnson. The McLean’s have always supported their son’s musical ambitions, instilling within him the value of hard work.
Seated on a sofa, they beam with proud smiles. Their heads bob like buoys on water to their son’s beats. One of McLean’s old drum sets still gleams in a corner. In another corner lie many childhood memories. The McLean’s chuckle to themselves as they begin to reminisce out loud about when their two sons were young…
It’s the mid-‘80s and the basement lights are dimmed. Plastic picnic chairs are carefully placed in a row. “One for mom, one for dad, one for Aunt Ingrid....” Mark’s older brother Lester counts them out. An old TV stand and three cookie-tins serve as a drum set. Mark, Lester and their cousin Brian from New York are ready for their debut performance. Lester’s on guitar, Brian’s on drums and Mark’s on the microphone. Mom cranks the volume on a Prince song. “Preeeesenting: Mark McLean and company!” The crowd cheers.
As a kid, McLean was more interested in hearing the cheers that follow a well-executed goal. He, like many of his friends, was an avid hockey player. His childhood dreams revolved around being a top-scoring member of the Maple Leafs. But, at nine-years-old, after watching a young girl play the piano on TV, he began taking lessons with Heli Zelenka, the organist at his family church. “There was me, playing the piano, and my brother playing the saxophone and the guitar,” says McLean. “My parents tolerated a lot. There was a lot of noise in the house.”
The McLean household was host to many parties, including lively Caribana celebrations. From calypso and soca to Quincy Jones and Duke Ellington, notes would colour every room from the second floor right down to the basement. But McLean’s musical history stretches far beyond the four walls of his childhood home. His great uncle, Reggie McLean, was a pianist in Sydney, Nova Scotia during the 1930s. Cy McLean, another great uncle, led Canada’s only full-scale black orchestra in the Swing Era of the 1940s.
And jumping ahead a few generations, it was in 1988 that McLean himself first tested the drums. As a Grade Seven student at Pleasant View Jr. High School, he was given the choice of which instrument to play in the school band. “There were two senior percussionists that got to play all these fun look’n things...the drums, the shakers,” McLean says. “I thought they were unique.” Although he continued playing the piano, the drums became his primary voice for performance. A year later, he received his first very own Pearl Forum Series drum set for Christmas.
Soon, drums became his obsession. As an “A” student at Sir John A. MacDonald High School, McLean would set his alarm clock early just to squeeze in an extra hour of practice before class. He would wolf down his lunch just to spend more time perfecting his style. By Grade 10, he began composing his own songs and formed his first jazz combo with some classmates. “We were all pretty much the band geeks, hanging around the music room all the time,” says Andy Lee, McLean’s high school friend. By the time he was 18, McLean began conducting the school’s junior jazz band himself. “Mark was always totally focused,” says Lee. “He was the one who was going to make it.”
And he did. In 1994, McLean beat out nearly a hundred competitors to capture the only drumming spot in the Jazz Studies Program at the University of Toronto. During the half-hour audition, he dazzled Paul Read, the Program’s director, and veteran trumpeter Chase Sanborn, a Faculty Member, with his talent. Off the top, McLean chose to play an upbeat Afro-Cuban number, moving on to a sweet-sounding ballad and finishing off with a cool blues. “I wanted to cover a variety of styles,” says McLean. “I really wanted to be different.”
After the audition, Read and Sanborn accepted McLean into U of T, offering him the Kinghorn Entrance Scholarship. The Music Department at York and McGill wanted him, too. He’d even been accepted into the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. But McLean was sold on U of T’s Bachelor Degree in Jazz Performance. He remembers his first uneasy trips down to the U of T campus, “It was like a foreign land going down to Bloor and St. George. I was like, where am I?”
But it wasn’t long before the 20-year-old McLean found his way into Toronto’s jazz scene. He studied hard with some of U of T’s finest musical educators, including trumpeter Kevin Turcotte, drummer and composer Barry Elmes and legendary bandleader Phil Nimmons. In 1997, he debuted at the Montreal and Toronto jazz festivals and performed with the great Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson. A year later, he had scored a prestigious award from the esteemed Canadian jazz magazine, The Jazz Report, for post-secondary school musician of the year. On top of all this, McLean continued playing with his brother, Lester, as a member of the acid jazz and funk band, The Colour of Soul. “I would play with the Colour of Soul one night, Molly Johnson the next and Jane Bunnett following that,” says McLean. Playing different styles with different people, McLean’s reputation as a musical chameleon began to take shape.
“Anyone can say they can do it all, but they can’t,” says Jane Bunnett, a Juno award winner and two-time Grammy nominee who fuses jazz with Afro-Cuban music. She started calling McLean for gigs in the summer of 1998. “You can be versatile, but you still need to bring your own personality to the table. That is what is so great about Mark. He is versatile but maintains his integrity.”
McLean and Bunnett dynamically interact on stage at the Imperial Oil Theatre on a Monday in March. Bunnett draws the musical portrait while McLean colours the background with his tasteful brushwork. It’s a musical give-and-take. It’s an art. But suddenly, he gets rid of the brushes and pulls out a different move. Using his fingers, he gently jabs at the drumhead. “I always feel so fresh when I am able to do all of these different things,” he says. “It’s like being in a costume shop, but you are still the same person.”
After gaining more musical expertise with Bunnett, McLean was ready for the leap of his life. With a U of T Bachelor of Jazz Performance Degree in his hand and high hopes in his heart, he headed down south to the world’s jazz Mecca: New York City.
_ _ _
Dressed in a pale blue, long-sleeved FUBU t-shirt and jeans, McLean lounges around his one-bedroom apartment on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. It’s a well-kept, modest flat with a narrow kitchen, but what with his busy schedule he admits he doesn’t spend a lot of time here. In the living room, a mound of CDs is piled around his stereo system. Pictures, hung on one wall, form a kind of shrine to three of the greats: Billy Holiday, Miles Davis and Charles Mingus. McLean pops in a DVD of the Branford Marsalis Quartet performing John Coltrane's A Love Supreme in Amsterdam. He watches the TV screen intensely, commenting that it is just as important to observe the music, as it is to listen to it. He examines the facial expressions, posture, technique and overall energy of great musicians. “This is a great way to learn and appreciate the music on another level,” he says. Leaning comfortably back into the sofa, his fingers tap along with the rhythm.
During his first year in the Big Apple, he stayed with his Aunt Ingrid in Brooklyn. He soon moved in with Erik Jekabson, the trumpeter who tours with John Mayer, and Dan Pratt, one of the leading tenor saxophonists on the NYC jazz scene. Always trying to improve his style, McLean took lessons from such sensational drummers as “Jazz Maniac” Kenny Washington and radicals like Brian Blade and Billy Kilson. Musically, McLean admits he feels more at home in NYC than in Toronto. “I admired a lot of people down here,” he says. “They played the way I was trying to play the drums... the way I am still trying to play the drums.”
The primal energy of jazz is rooted in the drums. Loren Schoenberg, Grammy-Award winning saxophonist and executive director of the Jazz Museum in Harlem, believes that drumming goes beyond just technical ability; it taps into a form of psychic energy. McLean himself describes the feeling as an out-of-body experience. “I feel like I am watching the music from the audience, or standing behind myself, watching myself play,” he says. McLean aspires to be in this state of mind while performing, where every beat of the drum seems effortless. “The drummer really has to know when to kick it up a notch and when to kick it back a notch,” says Christian McBride, a top-ranked bassist in NYC and co-director of the Jazz Museum in Harlem. The drummer is essentially the rhythm keeper, and it’s the rhythm that makes you want to shake your hips and tap your toes when you listen to music. McBride also emphasizes that, “A drummer has got to be a good listener.”
One night, shortly after he arrived in New York, McLean was listening to internationally renowned pianist and singer Andy Bey at the Jazz Standard. Later that night, he gave the veteran his demo tape and a year after that, Bey asked McLean to accompany him at a concert in Atlanta, Georgia. McLean was such a hit, that later that same year Bey hired him to play at the Berlin Jazz Festival. It was McLean’s first trip to Europe. “He always had a spark,” says Andy Bey. “He always showed a lot of adaptability and versatility to different styles and genres. He is a very bright young man, and I like that about him.”
In 2003, while performing with Bey at the Blue Note in New York, Peter Cincotti approached McLean. Ever since then, McLean has been recording and travelling internationally with the budding 21-year-old star who’s been dubbed the new Harry Connick, Jr. “For me, playing with Mark is kind of like talking,” says Cincotti. “We are speaking a musical language and we are communicating all the time. He knows where I am going and I know where he is going.”
McLean and Cincotti’s musical closeness is evident on stage at the Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo. His beats blend beautifully with Cincotti’s sweet-sounding melody on the piano. Behind the drums, McLean’s shy nature seems to disappear. He is now an outgoing performer at ease in front of a large audience. He delicately glides his fingertip along a cymbal, demonstrating yet another shade of musical talent. The sound slowly fades under his touch, cuing the crowd’s applause. Then, a wonderful smile spreads across McLean’s face. You can tell he’s enjoying himself.
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