“You have to have some talent!”, Tyner laughs when I press him on the issue over the phone from his home on New York’s Upper East Side. “I don’t think you can do too much without that.” Tyner points out that the piano is essentially percussive, and he says that his own rhythmic dexterity is attributable to his early years playing conga drums. (He gave it up because he was hurting his hands.) But he adds that he studied all kinds of music growing up. “I had books of Chopin, I had the R&B experience, I played for a dance school, did some Latin things. I had a well-rounded background. But touch is very, very important. It’s not necessarily technique, it’s how you embrace the instrument. And how you use the pedals, and all those things, that determine your sound.”
DEVOTION: Garrett’s The Great Wall pays homage to China, but the touchstone throughout is Coltrane. |
What’s also sometimes forgotten is that Tyner, like Coltrane, was not exclusively a modal player, and that the modal experiment was an extension of their encyclopedic knowledge of harmony. Hearing Tyner play with his big band in the ’90s, I was struck by how his style reached back past his immediate predecessors and heroes, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, to the full chordal style and stride rhythms of Art Tatum. And you can hear that too on his 2000 tribute album, Roots (Telarc). “Art set a precedent for pianists because he really played the instrument completely. But I do think that what belongs to you, your identity, your personality, has a lot to do with your sound. I was a pretty stubborn guy: I always wanted to sound like myself, even though I was influenced by people like Oscar Peterson, Teddy Wilson, and Art influenced all of us. But I never wanted to be like him or wanted to play Art’s licks. But some people influence you so much because the artistry is on such a high level, and Art was like that.”At Berklee, Tyner will be working with the touring “Story of Impulse Records” band, whose members in this incarnation will include Dave Liebman, Donald Harrison, Wallace Roney, Steve Turre, Charnett Moffett, and Eric Kamau Gravatt. For a complete timetable of BeanTown events, including a panel discussion on Impulse Records with Liebman and author Ashley Kahn, visit www.beantownjazz.org.
Two recent CDs by jazz musicians in their 40s show that Coltrane is very much alive: Kenny Garrett’s Beyond the Wall (Nonesuch) and the Branford Marsalis Quartet’s Braggtown (Marsalis Music/Rounder). Garrett (who plays the massive BeanTown free block party on September 30) has been touring for the past couple of years with Coltrane’s late-period running partner Pharoah Sanders, but The Great Wall is their first studio album together. It’s ostensibly inspired by Garrett’s travels through China; he samples chanting Tibetan monks and deploys the string instrument the erhu. But the touchstone throughout is Coltrane — in the droning pedal harmonies, in the playing of Garrett and Sanders, in the mantra-like devotional themes. (The album is dedicated to McCoy Tyner.)
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