Secret Story - This Is Gary McFarland

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

A new documentary film, This Is Gary McFarland, is a potent reminder of the cult jazz musician who, as the film maintains, could have been a household name, but instead suffered a dreadful death at a relatively young age. By Keith Shadwick.The short career of Gary McFarland (1933-71) has not been celebrated in the way that the short careers of, say, Eric Dolphy, Tina Brooks or even Dodo Marmarosa have been. The reasons are not hard to locate: McFarland, a distinctive and resourceful composer/arranger who played competent rather than spectacular vibraphone, faced the financial and artistic implications of each subsequent 1960s musical revolution with an open-eared pragmatism that put him in a profitable but lonely place.

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