Some Jazz Records: (Early) McCoy Tyner Clippings
Comments on recordings from musicians and other actors of the jazz scene. Random and not-so-random listening cues from the archives.
Bennie Green and His Orchestra, Blow Your Horn (Walkin' the Bone)/Expense Account, Decca 28824, 1953, 10" 78 rpm.
"I used to play in high school and for the kids in junior high," pianist McCoy Tyner recalled in a 1970 Black Scholar interview. "Once, my band won a talent show in Philly’s Uptown Theater. At that time, [Bennie] Green’s ['Blow Your Horn'] was popular. My trombone player memorized Green’s entire solo, and I think we won on the strength of that. […] I remember I used to work with the rest of the band in my mother’s beauty shop. It had big windows, you know, and you couldn’t help hearing the music when you walked by. So everybody knew I had a band and sometimes they would stand outside and listen to me. Some of the dudes in the neighborhood were pretty rough, and they’d be out there listening, too. They would holler requests through the window. And, man, if you didn’t play those requests you might not want to come outside for a while. But those were good days."
Bud Powell, Bud Powell Piano, Mercury C-102, multiple formats.
The first McCoy Tyner interview to appear in the jazz press was published by Down Beat in 1963. "I was mainly influenced by records at that time, because there wasn’t too much jazz on the radio," Tyner said of his teenage years in the first part of the 1950s. "Bud Powell and his brother [Richie] were living just around the corner from me in Philadelphia, but they didn’t have a piano in their apartment, and Bud came to my mother’s house to play. I wasn’t familiar with his work and didn’t know who he was. It was hard to understand everything he was doing, but I liked it. Judging from the records he made with Max Roach and Ray Brown, I think he had reached his prime then, and I learned quite a lot from him and his brother Richard. They were profound musicians, harmonically and in many other ways. Bud had so much taste and creative ability that I couldn’t help learning from him." Bud Powell recorded only a few sides with Roach and Brown. Those 1949 sessions, Powell’s firsts as a leader, were packaged as a Mercury album and later reissued with improved sound on The Complete Bud Powell on Verve.
John Coltrane, A Love Supreme, Impulse! A(S)-77, 1965, LP; and John Coltrane, Ascension, Impulse! A(S)-95, 1966, LP.
Asked what he liked the most in his work with the John Coltrane Quartet by Black Scholar in 1970, McCoy Tyner answered, "I think I’ve enjoyed about everything I’ve done; all those things were nice and important. I think A Love Supreme […] was one I really like. Ascension, that was important, too. Most all the sets I did with John were important for my development." Tyner added that he didn’t know what Coltrane had in mind before the large ensemble convened for the Ascension session started to play and wasn’t given any directions by the saxophonist. "Just 'play.' No details. No structures," Tyner said. "He had a line, which he would call a melody line, that he opened with. That was all. We’d just build. You see, a melody can consist of three or four notes; it doesn’t have to be eight, nine or ten notes. You can set up an idea and go from there."
John Coltrane, The Classic Quartet: Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings, Impulse! IMPD8-280, 1998, 8 CDs.
"Do you feel strange walking into a set like this?," Black Scholar interviewer Al McFarlane asked McCoy Tyner about Coltrane’s Ascension. "Not really, because I was already into it. We hadn’t been doing it with that many pieces before, but with the Quartet. We recorded some things with the Quartet that were similar, but they haven’t been released yet," Tyner answered. During the period immediately leading to the June 28, 1965 Ascension date, Coltrane recorded a lot, visiting the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, NJ nearly once a week. Tyner might have been thinking of material taped on May 26, 1965 and June 10, 1965, for instance a version of "One Down, One Up." The material from these sessions eventually appeared in excerpted form on a variety of posthumous Coltrane releases. Its most complete incarnation is to be found on discs 4 and 5 of the Quartet’s complete Impulse! studio work.
Pretty sure that "the records he made with Max Roach and Ray Brown" - is someone's typo from somewhere along the line.. Clifford Brown not Ray Brown, would make sense.
I was always intrigued by how *far away* from the Coltrane Quartet sound the early McCoy records on Impulse sound: – for every slightly reminiscent modal vamp tune like say Contemporary Focus – there are lashings of standards and such swinging straight-ahead playing. Nights of Ballads and Blues for instance is an unashamedly pretty record with lots of soul
possibly Tyner was referring to the quartet version of Ascension from Salle Pleyel 28/7/65, though of course that recording would only come out as a bootleg.