Jazz pianist McCoy Tyner dies

McCoy Tyner, whose performances with John Coltrane’s groundbreaking quartet of the 1960s and on dozens of his recordings made him one of the most influential jazz pianists of his generation, died Friday at his home in Bergenfield, N.J. He was 81.

Tyner’s family announced the death on his website and Facebook page. The cause was not disclosed.

Tyner’s approach to the piano combined robust chords with delicate melodic improvisation. In 1960, he joined forces with Coltrane, a saxophonist he had known while growing up in Philadelphia. He was the last surviving member of what jazz fans call the “classic quartet,” which included the bassist Jimmy Garrison and the drummer Elvin Jones.

During his five years with Coltrane, Tyner performed on several albums that have become jazz landmarks, including “My Favorite Things,” “Crescent,” “Impressions” and “A Love Supreme.”

“Even though John was, so to speak, the engineer of the train, each of us had to fashion his own concept,” Tyner told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “The stimulation was mutual; while we always felt the strength of John’s presence, he told us that what he played was a reaction to what was happening around him.”

“A Love Supreme,” a fourpart suite conceived by Coltrane but largely improvised in the studio by the quartet, became one of the most revered albums in the jazz canon. It was recorded Dec. 9, 1964, two days before Tyner’s 26th birthday, and came to be seen as a musical expression that approached an almost trancelike state of spiritual release.

Throughout the recording, the shifting chords of Tyner’s piano provide a foundation for Coltrane’s driving tenor saxophone lines. At various times, Tyner takes over with confident, fleet-fingered solos that push Coltrane to ever more intense musical heights.

In the final movement, “Psalm,” Jones creates an ominous sonic cloudburst on drums as Tyner plays clanging chords and Coltrane seeks a path toward musical resolution.

“A Love Supreme,” which was released in 1965, is “without precedent and parallel,” Richard Cook and Brian Morton wrote in “The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings.”

Tyner left Coltrane’s group in 1965, becoming uneasy with the increasingly atonal and noisy direction of the saxophonist’s music.

In 1988, Tyner won the first of his five Grammy Awards. He recorded with various instrumentalists.

“His music, for all its power and intensity, would always retain a basic songfulness,” the Chicago Tribune jazz critic Larry Kart wrote in 1981. “Dark and brooding at some times, joyful and exuberant at others, Tyner’s playing could be described as one huge piano solo — an attempt to discover, state, reshape, and decorate a vast primal melody.”