John Mehegan Quartet - Casual Affair (2020)

In 1959 the pianist, John Mehegan teamed up with trumpeter Kenny Dorham for this record for the Request label. His last recording took place in 1960 (a few titles with a trio) but he kept active as an educator during his last two decades. John Mehegan published many instructional books on jazz, wrote reviews for Downbeat and other magazines, and was a busy lecturer on jazz and improvisation.

"If you hear this disc you'll understand why John Mehegan (1920-1984) is best known as a jazz educator. In my youth I spent unhappy hours trying to teach myself jazz improvisation from his extensive volumes. They were useless. Mehegan realised it was essential to play a song in all keys, but his route to this end involved an arcane and academic use of Roman numeral chord notation, whcih completely obscurred the recurrent building blocks of the 32-bar song form. Many years later I discovered the works of Comrade Cork, which pointed me in the right direction. Feather and Gitler's "The Biographical Encyclopedia Of Jazz" says that Mehegan's "Jazz Improvistation" was the first definitve text on jazz mechanics, so maybe it deserves some credit as a pioneer."