It is difficult to overstate the enormousness of the sound McCoy Tyner brings forth from a piano. It's not so much the volume -- although it's plenty loud -- as the capacious depth of the rumbling that makes Tyner's style so distinctive and attention-grabbing. On top of thunderous block chords he adds rich layers of melodic punctuation, garlands of harmony and tag-along rhythms. The energy is tumultuous, yet his command is self-evident and absolute.
He minted those plangent pyrotechnics as a member of John Coltrane's seminal quartet more than 45 years ago. Coltrane was a spiritual seeker who wanted to make a visceral musical connection with both his fans and his deity. Tyner, who played with a cathedral-like grandeur, was the ideal foil. Tyner not only threw up the sonic scaffolding that supported Coltrane's saxophone ascents, but carried on with a near-equal density and thematic rigor when it was his turn to solo.
That's why Tyner wasn't obscured in the shadow cast by Coltrane's exalted status. While Trane was clearly a mentor, Tyner had developed most of his distinctive sound by the time he joined the group in his early 20s.
"The one condition I put on myself was that I didn't want to sound like anybody else," Tyner, who brings his own quartet to Orchestra Hall on Thursday, said by phone from his New York home last week. "Everyone in the neighborhood felt that way."
That's easier said than done when one of the guys in that Philadelphia neighborhood was Bud Powell, probably the most influential bebop pianist in jazz at the time. Tyner balanced the allure of Powell's example with intensive individual practice. "Every day," he says simply. "My mother was a beautician and she bought a piano and set it up for me right in the beauty shop. And before that I would alternate going between three clients of hers who owned pianos."
Eventually, he developed a style that incorporated Powell's knotty phrases and left-handed comping with the prodigious technique of Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson, but with more percussion and less glissando in his touch. Decades later, whether it is a song from the '60s or the '00s, his work remains immediately recognizable.
Gravatt's 'third tour of duty'
Tyner occupies such a distinctive place in the jazz pantheon that he can pretty much play with whomever he wants. Thursday he will showcase an intimate crew that may be less illustrious than some groups he has assembled, but is familiar with Tyner's work and distinguished in its own right. Saxophonist Gary Bartz and drummer Eric Kamau Gravatt have played on and off with Tyner since the late '60s. Bassist Gerald Cannon, the young 'un in the band, played with late Coltrane drummer Elvin Jones before spending seven years with trumpeter Roy Hargrove.
