Jim McNeely, a Grammy Award-winning musical artist who played piano with prominent ensembles like the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, the Stan Getz Quartet and the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, but who was best known for his invigorating big-band compositions, died on Sept. 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 76.
His daughter Clare McNeely said the cause was bile duct cancer.
“He transformed the art of writing music for big bands,” the composer Darcy James Argue said in an interview. “He writes so fluidly for big band, creates these wonderful colors and textures and makes the structures feel so natural and inevitable.”
To critics, Mr. McNeely was as deft at arranging other people’s music as he was at composing his own. Reviewing the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra’s album “Lickety Split: Music of Jim McNeely” in 1997, the critic Gene Seymour wrote in Newsday, “McNeely shows an enviable gift for unexpected yet logical paraphrasing and harmonic change-ups.”
A year later, when the keyboardist Chick Corea performed at Carnegie Hall with the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, Jon Pareles of The New York Times singled out Mr. McNeely’s arrangement of Mr. Corea’s “Matrix” as the concert’s highlight.
“The tune is a witty line for a 12-bar blues that Mr. Corea recorded in 1968,” Mr. Pareles wrote. “Thirty years later, he and Mr. McNeely kept turning it inside out: placing it in a one-chord meditation, having the band play parts of Mr. Corea’s original solo as he improvised comebacks, finding new implications in the harmony.”
Mr. McNeely received 12 Grammy nominations and shared one for best large jazz ensemble album, for the Vanguard orchestra’s 2008 recording “Monday Night Live at the Village Vanguard.” The release featured performances of several composers’ works, including Mr. McNeely’s, from the band’s Monday dates at that storied Manhattan jazz club.
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The post Jim McNeely, Innovative Composer for Jazz Big Bands, Dies at 76 appeared first on New York Times.
