McCoy Tyner, R.I.P.

"No one — not Art Tatum, not Powell, not Monk, not Bill Evans — dropped a bomb on jazz pianists quite like McCoy Tyner. There was pre-McCoy and post-McCoy, and that was all she rote."

This line comes from a perceptive piece on McCoy that pianist Eric Iverson published on his blog, Do the M@th, a few years ago. (I have plundered it shamelessly in the notes that follow.)

I'm neither a pianist nor a musical theorist, but my interest in McCoy's music goes way back. In fact, one of my top-ten musical experiences must be the night I heard McCoy at the Cafe Extraordinaire, a store-front club in South Minneapolis that was in operation for only a few years before folding in April 1971. You won't find many references to it online or even in local jazz histories like Joined at the Hip. But I heard Joe Henderson there, and Woody Shaw, and McCoy.

I was in high school at the time, and was lucky to have a few friends who, like me, were "into" jazz. Dave took a special interest in Thelonious Monk, as I recall, and Carl's dad had been an amateur jazz trumpeter. We all listened to the local jazz station, KSJN (soon out of business) and that's how we came to know who was going to be playing at the Extraordinaire. Just our luck, Carl had recently inherited his aunt's antique green 1954 Chevy Bel Air—the model with the rounded fins. This was important, because the Cafe Extraordinaire was a good twenty miles from Mahtomedi. The other side of the world. We had figured out how to get there with a Hudson Street Atlas—there was a freeway exit nearby—but we really had no idea where we were.

In those days Mahtomedi was a village like the one Dylan Thomas describes in Under Milk Wood. And the "cafe" was a small, dark, empty storefront not far from Nicollet and Lake lined with a few rows of folding chairs.  

The cover was six dollars, cash—a fortune, when you were making ninety cents an hour mowing other people's lawns. On the night when we heard McCoy, we arrived late and ended up in the first row. There was no bandstand; I stretched out my legs and rested them on the front leg of McCoy's piano.

The sound was powerful. Everything you heard on a Coltrane album, without the need for a tenor saxophone. Swirling arpeggios, mountains of block chords that could not find rest, pounding rhythms extending up my legs from the piano.

Iverson repeats the story that "Tyner was really down and out for a few years at the end of that decade." A world-class artist playing for forty-five people in a hole-in-the-wall on Lake Street in South Minneapolis? I can see why.

What made Tyner's approach unique? It seems to me that he devised way to establish a harmonic field in which chord changes followed one another or shifted back and forth without ever suggesting any kind of resolution. Tonic and dominant didn't interest him. Drawing on these harmonies McCoy developed a series of riffs that sounded to me, back when I first heard them in high school, like whole tone runs, which once again eschewed the conventional patterns of the diatonic scale in favor of a cosmic tinkling. But McCoy produced these chords and runs with such authority that the word "tinkling" is entirely out of place. These were booming, massive, flurries that keyed you up and carried you away.

The musical vocabulary that McCoy developed sustained John Coltrane's famous musical explorations, which were based more on frenzied repetitions and variations than any kind of harmonic or structural innovation. And there are listeners even today, no doubt, who think of him as "Coltrane's pianist." I think it's fair to remark that during the 1960s, McCoy did sound more powerful and cosmic and impressive on Coltrane's albums than he did on his own, due to the added energy Coltrane brought to the table.

Yet McCoy's essential contribution to the quartet is sometimes underestimated even today. An aside McCoy once made when discussing the music of Thelonious Monk underscores the rhythmic value of his style:

“The music of Monk is strange, fleeting, and presents the peculiarity of being at one time very shifting but also very grounded, with a very sure tempo. My playing, I believe, possessed also this metronomic rhythmic accuracy….because I have a good strong left hand, John knew that he could count on this rhythmic foundation….”

But his unorthodox harmonies were no less significant. He provided the voicings for some of Coltrane's landmark recordings, and Coltrane once remarked: “Tyner plays some things on the piano, but I don’t know what they are.” 

On McCoy's more conventional early albums, there are plenty of moments when you can hear him diverging from the harmonic patterns suggested by the "standard" he happens to be playing, drifting into his personal modal style out of habit or preference. These can be jarring moments ... but interesting.

And he often resorts to an extended descending flurry of notes that we've heard many times before—his signature riff. (Then again, so does Monk.)

Iverson remarks that unlike Bud Powell or Bill Evans, two masters who use the conventional tonal system, "Tyner’s pitches seem to transcend conventional Western harmony. It is a private language of sound; it is bells and drums in a pre-colonial village; it is banging stones together at the first communal fire."

I heard McCoy a few times later in his career, at Orchestra Hall and again at the State Theater as part of a "super-trio" that included bassist Ron Carter and tenor Sonny Rollins. Both were worth attending, for sure, but neither had the intimacy or the intensity of a club performance.

I lost touch with McCoy's work in the 1970s. My early favorites among his LPs were Time for Tyner and The Real McCoy. I wouldn't mind hearing Sahara again, to see what he was doing with Sonny Fortune, a likely sympathetic collaborated on soprano sax. The only one that I purchased again as a CD was Trident, which captures something of the roiling force of his style. His later album Infinity, with Michael Brecker, which re-inaugurated the Impulse label, is high-energy and very solid.  

But there are 74 recordings listed in his discography. So, what do I know about McCoy Tyner?