Pianist revolutionised jazz with and after Coltrane
PLAYING a supporting role to a force of nature is tough in any form of music — and in the maelstroms of jazz improvisation, tougher still. Pianist McCoy Tyner, who died on March 6, aged 81, answered a call to do just that in 1960 when he began a partnership with saxophonist John Coltrane.
Aged only 21, Tyner spent the next five years as a key member of a Coltrane quartet that influenced musicmaking across all genres and produced such classic jazz albums as
Impressions (1963), Live at Birdland (1963) and A Love Supreme (1964).
He powered an already dynamic band with fiercely slamming, drumlike lefthand chords and harmonic ambiguities that set Coltrane’s spontaneous melodic imagination free. He could also deliver his own marathon improvised solos that were as free and unpredictable as those of his boss. Yet for all his intensity, Tyner was the most serene and genial of characters, with a chuckle that seemed to house multiple levels of meaning.
Tyner’s methods have influenced every generation of jazz pianist since the 1960s, and he stood shoulder to shoulder with such illustrious keyboard modernists as Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans. After Coltrane’s death at the age of 40 in 1967, Tyner embarked on a distinctive career of his own as a soloist, band leader and composer.
Born in Philadelphia on December 11, 1938, McCoy was the son of Beatrice (nee Stevenson), a beautician, and her husband, Jarvis Tyner, a church singer who worked for a firm that made medications. Aged 13 he began piano lessons, and later attended the Granoff School of Music, whose alumni included
Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie.
He led his own R&B band as a high school pupil and played locally with a budding star, the trumpeter Lee Morgan. His neighbours in the early 1950s also included the pianist siblings Richie and Bud Powell, the latter one of the pioneers of the 1940s bebop revolution.
Tyner was playing professionally by 16. Another local, the already successful saxophonist and gifted hardbop composer Benny Golson, hired him in 1959 for the Jazztet, a new ensemble Golson would colead with the trumpeter Art Farmer for the next three years.
The most significant experience in the young Tyner’s apprenticeship was his friendship with Coltrane, who had by that time already come to prominence with a careerlaunching stint in Miles Davis’ quintet. Coltrane was an obsessive innovator whose saxophone experiments led him to compress intricate, fastmoving scales into seamless tumults of sound. ‘‘Coltrane and I grew up in a period when you were supposed to try to be different, not copy someone else,’’ Tyner told me in 1994.
‘‘I met him at 17, used to sit on his porch with his mother — she had an old upright piano — and talk and play. He was amazing, absorbed music so quickly.’’
Tyner remained in Coltrane’s quartet until the classic lineup with bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones imploded under the pressure of the star’s constant striving for more transcendental and structureless music. Tyner left in 1965, unreservedly respectful of Coltran’es singlemindedness but no longer able to locate the point of his presence in his vision.
From 1970 onwards, Tyner’s devotion to acoustic music came up against the emergence of a different kind of jazz. He eschewed electric music, despite its popularity, and for a time considered taking up taxidriving.
By 1972, however, he and a band of younger newcomers began to hone an acoustic mix of Coltraneesque hooks and Latin grooves. Albums from that time included live sets Enlightenment (1973) and Atlantis (1974), still revered today.
In the 1980s Tyner often toured with allstar acoustic groups and in 1988 formed a big band that won two Grammys.
In the mid’90s he led an AfroCuban band and revealed himself to be a compelling solo pianist with his Jazz Roots album in 2000.
In 2002, he received one of jazz’s highest accolades when he was named a jazz master by the National Endowment for the
Arts.
He is survived by his wife, Aisha, his son, Nurudeen, three grandchildren, and siblings
Jarvis and GwendolynYvette. — Guardian News & Media