1962 · Album
Tippin’ the Scales
Recorded 1962 · Blue Note · Produced by Not specified in available sources
A Session That Waited Seventeen Years
Tippin' the Scales captures McLean in his prime, though the world wouldn't hear it until 1979.
Tippin' the Scales exists in a strange pocket of jazz history—recorded in 1962 but shelved for seventeen years before anyone outside Japan could buy it. That gap matters. By 1979, when it finally surfaced on the Japanese Blue Note label, McLean had already moved through several chapters of his career. Hearing this session then meant hearing a time capsule: McLean in the early sixties, still operating within Blue Note's hard bop orbit, before his later work pushed further into free jazz and spiritual exploration.
The album's real interest lies in how straight-ahead it is. This is McLean doing what he did best in that era—tenor and alto saxophone played with clean articulation and emotional directness, no pyrotechnics, no apology. The 1989 CD reissue added three alternate takes, which gave listeners a chance to hear how the band worked through these pieces, the small variations and choices that separated one take from another. For anyone curious about McLean's working method, those alternates are genuinely useful—they show thought in action, not just the final product.
The long delay before release probably explains why this record never lodged itself in the standard McLean discography the way his better-known sessions did. It arrived too late to shape opinion when it first existed. But it's worth hearing now precisely because it shows McLean as a working musician of genuine craft, without the weight of later myth attached. If you know McLean mainly through his spiritual recordings, this is a useful corrective—evidence that his foundation was always solid, even when he played it straight.
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