VOICES & RHYTHM OF THE CREATIVE PROFILE by HAROLD MCKINNEY

More spiritual jazz in a true Tribe tradition. This is a vocal & instrumental album which is going from spiritual to more straight jazz. Tip!Harold McKinney was one of the leading musicians in the Detroit jazz scene for over sixty years. As a child, he first took classical lessons with his mother Bessie Walon McKinney, an organist, but it wasn’t long before he fell under the influence of Charlie Parker's music and he turned his attention to jazz. After graduating from Northwestern High School, McKinney attended Morehouse College in Atlanta and, after returning to Detroit, he studied briefly at Wayne State University before going to Germany to undertake military service. After returning to the United States he worked with a wide range of jazz folk including Roy Brooks, John Coltrane, Kenny Burrell and Wes Montgomery. But it was with his association with Marcus Belgrave, Wendell Harrison and Phil Ranelin that McKinney is most fondly remembered, especially by the jazz community of Detroit. It was as part of the Tribe Artists' Association that McKinney found a new voice at a critical time. A voice that resulted in one of the prime releases on the Tribe record label, one of the leading black label collectives of the 1970s, along with Strata East and Black Jazz.