![mccoy tyner equinox transcription mccoy tyner equinox transcription](https://highfidelityla.com/covers/big/R-8674846-1466370991-4348.jpeg)
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. These two occupied opposite ends of the modern jazz spectrum, from the fleet to the sparse, and Tyner learned important lessons from both. 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. Tyner made jazz history because he understood jazz history. All jazz keyboardists refer to him in ways large or small, conscious or unconscious.
![mccoy tyner equinox transcription mccoy tyner equinox transcription](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GLBNxiQO5Uk/hqdefault.jpg)
Tyner departed Coltrane’s band in 1965 because he felt it was getting too loud and jumbled.Ī watershed pianist, Tyner was a central influence on his colleagues and younger musicians during his lifetime, and will remain so after it. 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.Īlready 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. Great musicians are great listeners, a quality especially crucial for improvising chamber players in whose front ranks stood Tyner. Too little praised in this week’s tributes was Tyner’s sensitivity. 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. 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. 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. McCoy Tyner at Newport Jazz Festival, 1998.