The song wanders within the space of a single harmony. To me
these sounds somehow evoke exactly the idea of contemplation. It’s the deep, bassy left hand playing that
became his inimitable style and one of my favorite aspects of his sound.
Listen to McCoy’s
playing about a minute and a half into the song, starting around here.
This is based on simple harmonies known as fourths, an interval
that doesn’t particularly express a lot of joy or sadness but leaves a lot of
creative ambiguity. Listen to the same song about a minute later.
This is the sound that keeps coming back to the Gregorian
chant I talked about before. By the end of the clip, you can hear that McCoy is
doing all kinds of intense soloing in the upper register, but it still comes
back to the crashing fourths in the bass. McCoy’s sound is recognized for
“voicing” chords in fourths, which basically means he strips the harmonies down
to their simplest components and allows the treble to create whatever mood he
wants to evoke.
One of the most influential jazz pianists of the 20th
century, McCoy was a mainstay of John Coltrane’s rhythm section who would go on
to create a unique style of playing that is still popular today.
Here’s a song called Effendi from the Inception album that made it onto my wedding list
This is primarily based on two harmonies that are used in
much the same way as the previous example.
Music that sits on one or two harmonies might readily be
passed off as … boring? After all, the word “drone” is generally not used as a
complement. The following excerpt is an example of why this doesn’t get boring
The music is still floating above the same harmony. But McCoy
is creating dissonance – intentionally playing notes that don’t line up with what’s
going on underneath.
Listen to him do the same thing on his song Reaching Fourth:
For years this music sounded to me as if it were a set of
constantly shifting harmonies and that McCoy, somehow, had managed to steer me
through it by creating a “magnetic north” with his left hand. I actually had to
sit down and look at the lead sheets for these songs to understand what was
actually going on: McCoy led me to believe that the song had embarked on a vast
harmonic journey when, in fact, the song hadn’t strayed far from its own living
room.
This, as it turns out, was precisely one of the innovations
of modal jazz. For years, jazz musicians had accompanied complex chord changes
by playing notes that were “in key” with the harmonies of the song. Rather than
building songs on repeated chord changes, modal jazz stuck with a limited set
of chords and allowed the soloists to play along with them or stray further
away.
I traced McCoy’s solo recordings from his first album, Inception, through his recordings of the
early 1970s. Reaching Fourth, Today and
Tomorrow, and The Real McCoy are
my favorite albums that encompass his classic sound so well. His 1968 album Time for Tyner replaces piano for
vibraphones and shows him experimenting with African sounds, which he manages
to do while maintaining his modal genius. By the early 1970s his music had come
to focus on mixing jazz with African folk music, a different take on “fusion”
than his contemporaries, who had taken jazz in the direction of rock.
Albums of the era:
Inception, 1962
Reaching Fourth, 1962
Today
and Tomorrow, 1963
The
Real McCoy, 1967
Time
for Tyner, 1968
Sideman performances of the era:
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