Now Forgotten, Gary McFarland Introduced Jazz to Pop-Rock

Now Forgotten, Gary McFarland Introduced Jazz to Pop-Rock

Following his mysterious death, Gary McFarland was swept to obscurity, but he had a major impact on modern music.

By Marc Myers in the Wall Street Journal

On the afternoon of November 2, 1971, jazz vibraphonist, composer and arranger Gary McFarland left a Manhattan recording studio and headed to the 55 Bar in Greenwich Village. A short time later, the 38-year-old McFarland collapsed in the bar and died almost instantly. The official cause of death was a heart attack, but it soon became apparent that the seizure had been triggered by liquid methadone that was added to his drink and those of two friends who were with him. One of them, jazz drummer Gene Gammage, barely survived but never disclosed the events of that day, while the other, writer David Burnett, went into a coma and died several days later.

The two deaths were never fully investigated, and how the trio wound up consuming lethal doses of methadone remains a mystery. What is clear is that in the years after his death, McFarland and his music slipped into obscurity. Many of his albums today are out of print, and his sizable contribution to the merging of jazz and pop-rock—starting just months after the Beatles’ arrival in 1964—has been largely forgotten.

Now, McFarland’s life and death are being re-evaluated with the release of “This Is Gary McFarland: The Jazz Legend Who Should Have Been a Pop Star” (Century 67), out this week. The CD/DVD set features a previously unreleased live recording of the Gary McFarland Quintet in 1965 and a documentary directed by filmmaker Kristian St. Clair. The DVD not only provides rare footage of McFarland but also features interviews with his widow and friends about his music and poisoning.

“McFarland broke boundaries at a time when music was polarized over age, race and even electricity,” said Mr. St. Clair, in a phone interview. “He inherently understood pop-rock and was evolutionary rather than revolutionary. He’s really the missing link between jazz and rock.”

A dashing, charismatic jazz prodigy who was young enough to grasp the melodic merits of AM-radio hits, McFarland was one of the first arrangers to elegantly combine jazz, folk, rock and bossa nova without losing each one’s sophistication or intimacy. His eclecticism helped set in motion the orchestral jazz-pop revolution of the ’70s advanced by CTI Records, and his wistful influence can be heard in themes for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Laverne & Shirley,” “Taxi” and other sitcoms.

CTI-founder Creed Taylor, who gave McFarland his start as a leader, reflected on the arranger in a phone interview. “There was this sensuality and freshness to Gary’s music that made you instantly admire what you heard,” said Mr. Taylor, who produced McFarland’s Verve albums in the ’60s. “I first met Gary in early ’61 and hired him right away to arrange an album for Anita O’Day. Gary could score these beautiful floating phrases that were so hip.”

Born in Los Angeles in 1933, McFarland was raised in Oregon. His parents were musically inclined, as were his four brothers. In 1941, awed by boogie-woogie, McFarland taught himself to play piano. Drafted into the Army in 1953, he bought a set of vibes out of boredom and because they seemed easy to play.

After the Army, McFarland was a fast study. He played in a quartet but couldn’t read music. Encouraged to learn, he attended Boston’s Berklee School of Music. But after a semester there and a summer at the Lenox School of Jazz in Lenox, Mass., McFarland dropped out in 1959 to write big band arrangements.

In New York, he arranged orchestral jazz albums in 1962 for trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and saxophonist Stan Getz before composing and arranging his most significant jazz album in 1963 for Verve—“The Gary McFarland Orchestra With Bill Evans.” “Bill on piano and Gary’s vibes and orchestration were a perfect match in terms of lyricism and space,” said Mr. Taylor.

The jazz-rock turning point came in June 1964 with McFarland’s recording of “Soft Samba” for Verve. The orchestral album, which featured guitarist Antonio Carlos Jobim, included cover versions of several new Beatles hits and marked the debut of McFarland’s signature wordless vocalese and whistling. “I heard Gary playing his vibes in rehearsal and singing the notes just as he hit them with his mallets,” said Mr. Taylor. “He had a beautiful voice but had a difficult time remembering lyrics. I thought we should try the vocalese and whistling on the album, and it worked.”

But McFarland’s further jazz-pop explorations in 1965 and ’66 drew fire from the jazz press, which loathed the British Invasion and its outsized commercial success. In September 1967, McFarland responded in an article for Down Beat called “Confessions of a Non-Purist.” The Beatles, he wrote, “are really tuned in and have that extra little sack of magic that distinguishes the super from the fair.”

McFarland next turned to arranging Julius La Rosa’s Las Vegas show and scoring TV ad jingles. In early 1968 he co-founded Skye Records with guitarist Gabor Szabo and vibist Cal Tjader. Two of his most interesting projects from this period are “America the Beautiful” (1968), an early jazz-rock fusion album, and “Genesis” (1969), the sole jazz-folk album by Wendy & Bonnie, two singing sisters from San Francisco.

By 1970 alcoholism, which had plagued his family for generations, made McFarland unreliable. On the day he died, he was helping to improve another arranger’s show score and shifting back to jazz. Two years later, a novelist and former heroin addict Mason Hoffenberg, who died in 1986, told Playboy that it had been his methadone that fatal afternoon. “I’m wandering around with two bottles of methadone in a basket and some clean underwear, and suddenly I’m face to face with Burnett. . . . . So we went into this bar, talked for a while and I left. But I forgot my basket. So he very naturally went through it. He and another guy [McFarland] drank the methadone, and they both died.”

Unresolved is whether McFarland knew what he was drinking. Whatever the case, the release of “This Is Gary McFarland” is a dynamic reintroduction to a pioneering artist that ought to convince record labels to reissue his music.

Mr. Myers, a frequent contributor to the Journal, writes daily about music at JazzWax.com.

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