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10651
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: another jazz giant falls...
URL: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/13/mountains-of-sound-the-music-of-mccoy-tyner/
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March 13, 2020 Mountains of Sound: the Music of McCoy Tyner by David Yearsley McCoy Tyner at Newport Jazz Festival, 1998. What resounds in many admiring ears and in the many panegyrics that followed in the wake of piano master McCoy Tyner’s death last weekend at the age of eighty-one is the colossal sound he pulled from his instrument: his left hand—with wrist high to get more leverage—thundering octaves that catapulted up from that low bass toward the middle of the keyboard to grab jagged chords. The right hand joined in either with simultaneous hammer blows of its own or to draw out fiery skeins of barbed, frenetic melody: a dance of life or death or both. Like John Coltrane, musical and spiritual leader of the famed quartet of which Tyner was a vital cohesive force during his tenure in the group over the first half of the 1960s, the pianist could unleash avalanches of sound or provide the spreading terrain over which the saxophonist unleashed his torrents. Too little praised in this week’s tributes was Tyner’s sensitivity. Great musicians are great listeners, a quality especially crucial for improvising chamber players in whose front ranks stood Tyner. These artists do not suppress their identity when in concert with others, but allow it to feed and flourish on their partners’ ideas, inclinations, genius. Already memorialized for the monumental dimensions of his pianism, Tyner had, as his admirers and emulators also know, a huge range that was as much about subtlety, calm, the thoughtful aside, and whispered affirmation, as it was about percussive outpourings. Tyner departed Coltrane’s band in 1965 because he felt it was getting too loud and jumbled. A watershed pianist, Tyner was a central influence on his colleagues and younger musicians during his lifetime, and will remain so after it. All jazz keyboardists refer to him in ways large or small, conscious or unconscious. Tyner made jazz history because he understood jazz history. As a teenager in musically rich Philadelphia, where Coltrane befriended the younger musician (twelve years his junior), Tyner became obsessed with the bebop greats, Bud Powell and Thelonius Monk. These two occupied opposite ends of the modern jazz spectrum, from the fleet to the sparse, and Tyner learned important lessons from both. In his Jazz Roots solo album of 2000, Tyner offered his appreciation of, and creative response to, his forbears—not just Powell and Monk, but also Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and others. Tyner had a huge range of jazz piano styles in his hands and heart. Jazz Roots closes with that chestnut—often reduced to mush by lesser figures—“Misty” written by Erroll Garner, another important piano stylist. Tyner begins his encounter with this standard as if ventriloquizing himself: while the drone bass threatens to burst its shackles into sforzando, the higher textures corruscate as if ready to launch into a dazzling fantasy. But the storm recedes, Tyner treads gently into the damp light; his elegant broken chords shimmer like Garner’s. Soon though, stride piano left hand and glittering arpeggio runs conjure Art Tatum, the mightiest of the jazz piano titans. This gives way to textures of his own devising that echo from the Coltrane years—as if Tyner himself is mingling on the keyboard with his heroes and a younger version of himself. At last Tyner returns to the crystalline repose of Garner with a dash of modal McCoy thrown in on the way out—not as a taunt but as a thank you. Yes, none were bolder that Tyner, but he was a wonderful ballad player, too. Coltrane understood this better than anyone, as can be heard on the albums Quartets and John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman—both on the Impulse label from 1963. Also from Impulse that same year came the numinous, suave, and swinging Nights of Ballads & Blues with Tyner fronting his own trio. Tyner had extraordinary gifts for creating atmosphere while illuminating an interior truth of a song even when—perhaps especially when—playing with others. His billowing chords and arabesques on Rogers and Hart’s “You are Too Beautiful” on the Coltrane/Hartman collaboration caress the object of desire in sound. In extolling this immortal of the piano pantheon there is a universe to choose from. Tyner made more than seventy albums as a leader and dozens more as a sideman. With Coltrane he was involved in more than thirty, though a few of those were released after the saxophonist’s death in 1967. I’ve heard perhaps a quarter of Tyner’s vast oeuvre, and I own a dozen of his recordings, mostly on the Blue Note; he signed with the label in 1967 and spent five years there. He launched this phase of his recording career with The Real McCoy. Besides tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, and Miles Davis’ bassist Ron Carter, Tyner was joined on the date by his Coltrane bandmate, drummer Elvin Jones, who adds abundant kinetic energy to the already unbeatable swing, launched right from the opening track with “Passion Dance”—an exuberant etude in joyful angularity. Tyner had worked for Blue Note many times before The Real McCoy, recording at the famed Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey from the beginning of the 1960s. There he’d contributed to sessions led by Lee Morgan, Blue Mitchell, Wayne Shorter, Hank Mobley, among others. One of those others was the soulful tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, who’d also spent time in Tyner’s Philadelphia playing with the organist, Jimmy Smith. Like Coltrane, too, Tyner had put in lots of time in R&B groups growing up, so he fit right into the Turrentine sound and style—the tenor man’s straight ahead grooves, his cool Latin numbers, and his ballads, too. Tyner played on five of Turrentine’s Blue Note records; the first of these was from 1964, and its title, Mr. Natural, speaks to the ease of the collaboration, the generosity of the music—the eponymous naturalness of it all. The LP was recorded in September of 1964, three months before he did the seminal A Love Supreme with Coltrane and a year before he left that quartet. A Love Supreme is perhaps Tyner’s most famous recording, and there is immense breadth and energy to his playing, but also—especially in the “Psalm” that is the final movement of the suite—poise and stasis. The pianist provides both foundation and vaulting for Coltrane’s prayers and plaints. So close chronologically to A Love Supreme and like it recorded at Van Gelder Studio, Mr. Natural is worlds away—a welcome walk in the secular fresh air. Tyner appears as clever musical chameleon, who even when and while he changes remains authentically himself. The consummate chamber musician and eager, expert listener enthralls and enlivens right from the waltzing blues of the title track. The B-side kicks off with another blues, “Tacos.” The requisite Latin spice is imparted by conga player Ray Barretta, heard for the second time on the LP after having joined in on “Mr. Natural.” Tyner introduces “Tacos” accompanied at first by just conga and bass, veteran Blue Noter Bob Cranshaw leaving plenty of space for the rest of the trio by playing on just the first and third beats of each bar. As if sampling the best street food, Tyner assumes the sardonic verve of a pianist like Wynton Kelly (and later Herbie Hancock)—he’s sparsely incisive, the laconic cool brightened by sparkling arcs of figuration. Lee Morgan on trumpet alongside Turrentine on saxophone step in to the scene to deliver the strutting tune with sly precision, braced by the electrifying Elvin Jones on drums. Morgan wrote the number and he gets the honor of the first solo: the trumpeter is as brash as ever, he holds back for his opening gambit, starts into a long line rising in volume and melodic amplitude towards its goal, the arrival marked by Tyner’s re-entry into the fray with a crisp chord more impulse than force. Morgan and the rest take off. Tyner and Jones are the twin motors capable of much more horsepower than called for here, their spontaneous colloquy and spirited collisions the product of all those Coltrane years together. Whether at idle or revving, the pair thrills. They thrive off each other, emboldened by the rest of the ensemble even as they bolster it. Beneath Turrentine’s improvisation Tyner explores more complex syncopations that spar and jostle with the drums. Tyner expands the temporal scale of his rhythmic structures and in so doing builds intensity, before the vigor slackens again for the start of his solo. This he begins with an initial aloofness, but he soon warms to his tasty theme, ripping off a bluesy right hand run up and back over a wide expanse of the keyboard. With his sticks, Jones breaks into a chattering double time that spurs Tyner to some disjointed, yet agile arpeggios. Pulling back on the throttle, the pianist mulls over a bluesy riff, tries some cool quips intermixed with virtuosic skeins, before getting down to stubborn chords that spar with Jones, who gets in some climactic bashes. Tyner implies more power than he deploys: enough to thrill, but not overwhelm. His exuberance never strains. The crucial ingredients Tyner added to this jaunty blues represent just one of the myriad examples of musical diversity and ingenuity that he always adapted to those he played with. Tyner could create mountains of sound and rouse sublime thoughts, but it is his musical range that ensures his legacy as securely as do the grand visionary moments that he fostered and felt. It was in listening to others that he sounded most like himself. DAVID YEARSLEY is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com |
10660
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: another jazz giant falls...
URL: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/16/spiritual-how-mccoy-tyner-lives-on/
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March 16, 2020 Spiritual: How McCoy Tyner Lives On by Charles Komanoff It isn’t quite true that McCoy Tyner, who died earlier this month, was the last survivor of the John Coltrane Quartet. Reggie Workman, who for a while held the string bass chair that Jimmy Garrison would claim until Trane’s death, is alive and well, 82 years young, living, teaching and gigging in and around New York City. There are many reasons to acknowledge Workman. One is that he played on and contributed mightily to what, in my view, stands, nearly sixty years on, as jazz music’s most stirring and emblematic performance: “Spiritual,” from Nov. 3, 1961, recorded near the end of the Coltrane band’s two-week residence at New York’s famed Village Vanguard night club. The same can be said of McCoy Tyner’s piano playing on “Spiritual.” Indeed, the two of them, Workman and Tyner, don’t merely propel Coltrane, playing tenor and soprano saxophone, and Eric Dolphy, playing bass clarinet, to majestic heights. Each note by them, each chord, is, in its own right, dazzling and profound. Nearly 14 minutes long, “Spiritual” unfolds through six more or less symmetrical sections. Parts one and six have Trane on saxophone stating the incantatory C-minor theme, resolutely and mournfully in the opening, more urgently and passionately at the close. (The theme is drawn from the song “Nobody Knows De Trouble I’ve Seen,” which Coltrane likely saw notated in his copy of James Weldon Johnson’s Books of American Negro Spirituals, as scholar Lewis Porter reported in his Coltrane biography.) Parts two and five are given over to Coltrane improvisations, first on tenor saxophone, with which he opened the song, and then on soprano sax, with which he ends. Dolphy’s solo is part three, and Tyner’s follows, part four. Tyner’s piano solo is, for me, the heart of the piece, as well as the pivot point from Dolphy’s almost-jaunty solo, in C major, back to the tune’s native C minor. Starting with seven measures of major chords before U-turning back to the minor key, it will cover nearly three and a half minutes, about as long as Coltrane’s opening solo. Outwardly, it typifies Tyner’s improvisations throughout his five years playing with Coltrane: single-note passages in the right hand framed by left-hand “stacks of harmony,” as one commentator described his distinctive, intentionally ambiguous chord voicings. These eventually culminate in climactic ten-fingers-together passages, with the chords’ top notes forming compelling melodic sequences of their own. Whereas Coltrane’s earlier tenor solo revolved around the “tonic” C and, secondarily, G, the other prime note in the C minor scale, Tyner constructs much of his single-note improvisation around F, which in the key of C is the “response” note in the traditional blues call-and-response. Not only does this help differentiate Tyner’s melodies from Coltrane’s; it also imbues them with a bluesy sense, yet free of any blues cliché that might detract from the overall spiritual feeling. The second half of Tyner’s solo is mostly given over to his majestic two-hand chord melodies — bright blocks of sounds that build, breathe, ascend, gather and build again. This stringing together of chords with stacked harmonies would become a signature of Tyner’s style with Coltrane, with no two sequences quite the same. Each was stamped with its own flavor. Somehow, Tyner’s chord sequences on “Spiritual” seem infused with, well, spirituality. There’s a sense of devotion in them, as they strive toward some summit, striding forward with only the briefest pauses. At last, returning from the mountaintop and finished with melody, Tyner largely confines himself to two alternating C minor chords in the piano’s middle register. The chords, capped with the note G and differing in just one or two interior notes, create a comforting appetency. Tyner is consecrating the ground for Coltrane’s second, searing solo, this one on soprano saxophone. That is McCoy Tyner, a month shy of his 23rd birthday. (Below is a transcription I made decades ago of the first half of Tyner’s solo, right-hand only. For a rich portrait of Tyner’s six-decade career, see David Yearsley’s Mountains of Sound, published here last week.) Alongside him, Reggie Workman, one year older, is anchoring the ensemble on his string bass and propelling it with buoyant authority. For much of Coltrane’s and Tyner’s solos, Workman’s task will be to carry “Spiritual” on a simple, resonant C-minor phrase: C – G – F – Eb, then back to C. He will frequently repeat the phrase for six measures and devote the seventh and eighth to a turnaround cadence in G that resolves satisfyingly to C minor to begin the pattern again. But that is the barest description, akin to calling a towering redwood a mere tree. Workman’s variations on this frame are richly melodic and filled with bends, thrusts and throbs that seem uncannily attuned to where the soloist has just been and is now headed. Or do Tyner and Coltrane go where Workman has pointed? It is impossible to tell, this is jazz at the fullest level of communion. Listen to Workman’s stabbing, extending bass notes at the transition from Tyner solo to Coltrane’s, at 10:10. Or his bass strumming, playing two notes at once, around 10:50, something almost unheard of for backing a jazz solo, but here an insistent beating heart that will not be quieted. I’ve said only a little about Dolphy and haven’t mentioned Coltrane’s drummer, Elvin Jones. Dolphy’s solo, with its playful, bubbly bass clarinet, its intentional choice of a major key, and its easy, loping phrases, is a cheering contrast to Coltrane’s and Tyner’s austere, minor-key grandeur. Dolphy’s presence is also felt in the opening and closing sections, where his lower-register honking appends an almost physical flesh to Tyner’s and Workman’s roiling piano and bass beneath Coltrane’s incantations. Jones, for the most part, is neither polyrhythmic, as he will soon be on Coltrane recordings like “Out of This World” and “Your Lady,” nor explosive, befitting the composition’s worshipful quality. He comes especially to the fore toward the end of Tyner’s solo, lending drive to the gently swaying chords; in Coltrane’s soprano solo, during Workman’s bass strumming; and in the closing expression of the theme as he surrounds Coltrane’s horn in shimmering sheets of cymbals. As for Coltrane himself, there is little to add to what has been said about his stature and accomplishments as instrumentalist, composer, innovator and exemplar. In The Atlantic in 1987, twenty years after Coltrane’s death, one writer spoke of Coltrane’s “world-weary melancholy and transcendental yearning” — a description that is eerily apposite to “Spiritual.” Heard today, Trane’s initial, tenor solo seems to transcend melancholia. It feels suffused with grief — not just from three-and-a-half centuries of subjugation, but as a premonition. Africa was in liberation, the Freedom Rides were in full swing, Martin and Malcolm were at the height of their powers . . . yet in the tenderness of Coltrane’s improvisation there is almost a foretelling of the suffering to come. Through his horn, Coltrane seems to be singing, “Hear me, listen to me, abide with me.” His soprano solo toward the end is replete with not just yearning but struggle, as if surging against the shackles of times past, present and future. When Coltrane relents, it is to repair to the “Nobody Knows” spiritual from which he built the tune. There is a final flourish, with the entire band — Dolphy, Tyner, Workman and Jones — whirling and thrashing around him, until they too subside, leaving Workman to close, alone, plucking his bass strings, three times, C – G – C, it is finished. The applause that follows — remember, this is a “live” recording, before one or two hundred people in a cellar on Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village — sounds heartfelt, if perhaps stunned. Since Impulse Records released “Spiritual” in 1962 on the Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard LP, I have listened to it a thousand times. Each time I too am overcome. This music has guided and carried me almost all of my life, filled me with awe and gratitude for the men who made it. As a pianist who can sense if not fully grasp what McCoy Tyner did, I want to say that a world that can give us Mr. Tyner is a dear thing. Rest in everlasting peace. Charles Komanoff, a bicycling advocate and traffic modeler, is a longtime New York City resident. |
10663
From: Daisy Lionheart, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: another jazz giant falls...
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Thank you for posting these poignant articles. Reading them makes my heart fairly burst with appreciation and understanding of their truth. Love their phrasing and analogies, in reference to a time and characterization of internal state among the artists. The intuitive connectedness on "Spiritual", "Live at the Village Vanguard" is awe-inspiring, as if they are ONE in spirit! Definitely one of my favorites, as well. Music of the spheres, indeed! |
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10661
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: another jazz giant falls...
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wow |
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10653
From: Daisy Lionheart, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Love McCoy, Thought He Would Live Another Ten Years, At Least!
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Especially love his solo on "My Favorite Things" (John Coltrane's end solo is 'magical', too... PCH cruising music!) LOL McCoy was the last of the 'Fab Four'... THE best jazz quartet ever! IMHO, of course! Been listening to them a lot, last few days.😔 Sadness and Joy...we have been blessed by their 'everlasting' GIFTS! R.I.P. McCoy...et al. |
10655
From: Daisy Lionheart, [DNS_Address]
Subject: John Coltrane Quartet..."I Wish I Knew"...Featuring McCoy Tyner Solo
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Lovely piece from the album "Ballads", 1962 https://youtu.be/ju02Q2dfYDw |
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10658
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: John Coltrane Quartet..."I Wish I Knew"...Featuring...
| heaven... |
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