Big Jay McNeely, Los Angeles, 1951
Photo by Bob Willoughby
Big Jay McNeely, rhythm and blues saxophonist, was born 94 years ago today.
Inspired by Illinois Jacquet and Lester Young, he teamed with his older brother, Robert McNeely, who played baritone saxophone, and made his first recordings with drummer Johnny Otis, who ran the Barrelhouse Club that stood only a few blocks from McNeely's home.
Shortly after he performed on Otis's "Barrel House Stomp,” Ralph Bass, A&R man for Savoy Records, promptly signed him to a recording contract. Bass's boss, Herman Lubinsky, suggested the stage name Big Jay McNeely because his real name, Cecil McNeely, did not sound commercial.
McNeely's first hit was "The Deacon's Hop," an instrumental which topped the Billboard R&B chart in early 1949. The single was his most successful of his three chart entries.
Thanks to his flamboyant playing, called "honking," McNeely remained popular through the 1950s and into the early 1960s, recording for the Exclusive, Aladdin, Imperial, Federal, Vee-Jay, and Swingin' labels.
But despite a hit R&B ballad, "There Is Something on Your Mind," (1959) featuring Little Sonny Warner on vocals, and a 1963 album for Warner Bros. Records, McNeely's music career began to cool off.
He quit the music industry in 1971 to become a postman. However, thanks to an R&B revival in the early 1980s, McNeely left the post office and returned to touring and recording full-time, usually overseas.
His original tenor sax is enshrined in the Experience Music Project in Seattle, and he was inducted into The Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame.
In 1989, Big Jay McNeely was performing at the Quasimodo Club in West Berlin the night the Berlin Wall came down, "and Cold War legend has it that Big Jay McNeely blew down the Berlin Wall in 1989 with his earth-shaking sonic sax torrents outside the Quasimodo Club in West Germany"
McNeely wore bright banana- and lime-colored suits, played under blacklights that made his horn glow in the dark, used strobe lights as early as 1952 to create an "old-time-movie" effect, and sometimes walked off the stage and out the door, usually with the club patrons following along behind.
At one point, in San Diego, police arrested him on the sidewalk and hauled him off to jail, while his band kept playing on the bandstand, waiting for him to return.
McNeely died in Moreno Valley, California on September 16, 2018 of prostate cancer, at the age of 91.
Here, McNeely and Detroit Garry Wiggins perform “High Rate of Speed”