Dave McKenna's career began at an young age, apprenticing with Boots Mussulli and Charlie Ventura in the 1940s. However, with an elegantly lush style bearing hints of ragtime and Gershwin and an almost inebriated playfulness, his inimitible style hearkened to the earliest days of jazz. Through the '50s, McKenna worked with some of the luminaries of jazz, including Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, and Gene Krupa, before taking up residency for most of the '60s in various clubs around coastal New England, the world of his birth and death and to which he would keep coming back. Jazz Times' Chuck Berg accurately stated: "If Bach had played jazz, he just might have sounded like Dave McKenna," in that he makes every single note and space count.