Musician Les McCann has passed away.
He released more than 60 albums in his lifetime and worked with major recording artists throughout his impressive career, The Hollywood Reporter says.
Les McCann passed away at 88
McCann had been living at a nursing care facility for the past four years and was recently diagnosed with pneumonia.
He was born in 1935 in Lexington, Kentucky. At age 17, he then went on to service in the Navy.
The performer discussed his musical beginnings and the Navy in an interview with the Oxford American in 2017.
“I wanted to go to the Navy School of Music,” he said. “In high school, whenever instruments were passed out by the school district, my school got whatever was left, whatever the other schools did not want. So I played an instrument called a sousaphone, a big horn in the back of the band. I played it all through my last two years of school, only to find out when I joined the Navy it was an instrument no one else used. (Now you see ’em in every marching band.) So they sent me off to Cincinnati to take a test. They brought out a tuba, and I said, “Wait a minute, this is not what I play.’ They said, ‘This is all we use.’ So I said, ‘Please do not send me back to Lexington.'”
The musician was well known for the 1969 Montreaux Jazz Festival, where he performed Compared to What, a protest song.
For newer generations, his work was sampled by artists such as Notorious B.I.G., Slick Rick, Dr. Dre, and Naughty By Nature.
Follow Us
Subscribe
