Friday 23 November 2012

McCoy Tyner [Remembering John] 

After delving fairly deeply into Keith Jarrett, i wondered 'what other Pianist would be good to explore in the Piano Trio idiom?', and i came up with McCoy Tyner, unlike Jarrett, he can be a fairly complex and thick textured Pianist, he can play lots of notes fast, sometimes he smothers his ideas with too many notes, but once you get used to him you can see the overall structure of what he's trying to do, of course he was the main Pianist for John Coltrane, and that's where the title comes from, in essence this is a Coltrane-less Trio, stuff that Tyner played with Coltrane, and two thirds of the tracks are written by Coltrane, i bought this disc way back in 1998, and in August of that year it was my 'Disc of the Month', it helped me see that there was life beyond Jarrett, into a world of many different Pianists, i still need to explore the Piano Trio idiom a lot more.

McCoy Tyner is American, he's now an old man of Jazz at age 73, one of the greatest Jazz Pianists ever, and extremely influential, he recorded this disc in 1991, the front cover [by Gene Martin] is a portrait of Tyner, looking down from above, and onto the keyboard, though a better background would have worked, i like the way the lettering is sideways on a red / brown background, the Artist / title in different colours, the whole thing works well.

Out of all these tracks, it track 3 'In Walked Bud' that i so much like, it's a Thelonius Monk tune, and what a great tune it is, here it lasts for nearly 7 minutes, .

Here's McCoy Tyner's album on the All Music website, you can play the first 30 seconds of each track.