McLean lived in a New York neighbourhood full of musicians, and when he took up the alto there were plenty of people to play and practise with, including Sonny Rollins and Bud Powell. He started playing with Miles Davis – who was, like McLean, a narcotics addict at the time – and made his first records with him in 1951, before setting out as a leader himself and also working with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He signed to Prestige in 1956 and made a sequence of exciting but often raggedy hard-bop albums for them: at this point his sound was a direct evolution of Charlie Parker's blues playing, with a sour edge that he never quite got rid of, suggesting a microtonal flatness in most of his solos. He lost his cabaret card because of his drugs problems and couldn't work in New York for a time, but he was engaged to perform in the jazz play The Connection, with Freddie Redd's group, and toured with it to London, a gig which lasted on and off until 1963. In the meantime, he started making albums for Blue Note, eventually recording some 20 sessions for them all through the 60s: he reputedly used to take his pet monkey (featured on the cover of Capuchin Swing, 1960) into Alfred Lion's office, in order to get the Blue Note boss, who despised the animal, to give him a fresh advance. His Blue Notes demonstrate a player facing up to the new music and wondering what to do about it: records such as Let Freedom Ring (1962) and Destination ... Out! (1964) suggested an awkward truce between his natural inclinations and the burdensome freedoms of the new jazz. In 1968 he began teaching at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, and started working with deprived children, and almost since then his musical career has taken something of a back seat. He made records for Steeplechase in the 70s, sometimes with his son René (b 1946) as a second saxophonist, and in the 90s he made moves towards becoming more active again as a performer; but later records for Verve and the revived Blue Note suggest a player whose best work is in the past. McLean's tart, often unlovely sound and astringent improvising have tended to divide listeners: for some he is an impassioned master of bop in its final stages. Others find him prolix and too often unconvincing.

Biography from Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia (2005).

If you'd like more information, check out The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2002) or The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz (2007), both of which are still in print.