The Deacon Is Speakin'

There was a melting pot of blues and jazz and whatever else you could find in post-war USA. Big Jay McNeely came to prominence in the late-'40s with his tenor saxophone and his particular style of playing – a style known as honking. Pushing instruments to the limit has been a long tradition in music and similar to overdrive for electric guitars, there's honking for tenor sax. “Well, it will be for an eternity,” McNeely says, “because it is soul and it's going to reach the heart of the individual. And it will last forever.”

McNeely's list of collaborators and touring shows reads like a dream playlist. “Johnny Otis was the great one and the guys were cool,” he recollects. “The Top Ten Revue was cool [with] Little Richard, Etta James and Joe Turner – that was kicking every night. James Brown, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan… So many to name. And of course the great Cab Calloway, Chuck Berry and Bobby Darin.”

Things changed in the '50s when a new thing called rock'n'roll started making the rounds. Those early rock'n'roll records have a similar style to the honking. It's just the instruments that changed. “They took the saxophone out and put the guitar in the place of the saxophone,” explains McNeely, matter-of-factly. “So that's where it became a monster, guitar took over. But there was always a place for the saxophone.”

As with a lot of showmen of McNeely's era, getting the place hopping was the most important thing. There were times the venue wasn't big enough for the show McNeely was putting on, so he'd take it outside. The crowd would follow. At one show he was arrested and the band played on while someone went down to the slammer to bail him out. The show very much must go on.

“The police came by and saw me outside blowing my horn. In those days with no microphones the bands couldn't hear each other,” McNeely says. There were always new ways to get a reaction from the audience. “I had never laid on a floor before and in Tennessee and the band was kicking and the people weren't responding. I got on my knees nothing happened so I laid on the floor and people went wild, I tried it again in Fort Worth, Texas and then I did it in LA and the rest is history. It wasn't something I planned to do but I was just trying to get a reaction from the audience.”

It might not be so easy to get crowds to follow you out into the street as it was once upon a time. But McNeely sees the crowds as just as crazy as ever. “No different,” he says. “People go crazy and clubs are still the same. I walk, they follow me – that's what so great about this music. We did Malaga, Spain with Adam [Hall & The Velvet Playboys] and Vienna and people are just as wild as they ever have been.”

Somewhere along the line, the rhythm and blues of Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan turned into Beyonce and Usher R&B. There seems to be a long way between the two but McNeely sees it as streams from the same river. “Well, it's the same,” he says. “If you [go] back and listen to 3D [or] The Goof… they can't categorise me. I'm not a blues cat but I know how to play the blues – same with funk and soul. I can play any groove: I can go into a blues house and play blues; I can go to a rockabilly fest and play rockabilly; jazz fest and play jazz. If you want to get into funk [I'll] play funk.

“Music is always evolving. You got to work with everybody. Wherever you go, you have to evolve just like rhythm and blues evolved.”

Big Jay McNeely will be playing the following shows:

Friday 7 to Sunday 9 December - Meredith Music Festival, Meredith VIC
Friday 14 December - Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth WA