Big Jay McNeely
Cecil "Big Jay" McNeely turned the honking tenor saxophone into a full-body spectacle, walking the bar and lying flat on his back at LA's Olympic Auditorium while blasting through his 1949 chart-topping instrumental "The Deacon's Hop." Raised in Watts and steeped in the West Coast jazz scene around Billy Berg's club, he channeled the tenor lineage of Illinois Jacquet and Lester Young into pure rhythm-and-blues theater, one of the "saxophone honkers" historians now credit as forgotten architects of rock and roll. He kept touring and recording into his eighties, outliving nearly every peer from the honking scene he helped define.
McNeely was explicit that Illinois Jacquet's honking, crowd-rousing solos were his model — the template he then blew up into a full stage act, walking the bar and lying on his back while still wailing on the horn.
listen forJacquet's "Flying Home" has the same screaming, repeated high-note climax that McNeely stretches into an entire song's worth of tension on "The Deacon's Hop" — Jacquet invented the trick, McNeely built a career on never letting up.
McNeely also named Lester Young's tenor sound as a formative influence, and it surfaces on his rare ballad sides — a smoother, more lyrical read of the horn than his honking reputation usually suggests.
listen forYoung's cool, legato phrasing on "Lester Leaps In" isn't an obvious match for a honker, but you can hear that same unhurried, vocal-like phrasing in McNeely's 1957 vocal feature "There's Something on Your Mind" once the horn drops the theatrics.