He left John Coltrane's quartet at the height of its success, but pioneering jazz pianist McCoy Tyner is happy to revisit the glory days, writes Ray Comiskey
Although McCoy Tyner's name is inextricably linked with John Coltrane's - he was pianist in Coltrane's classic 1960s quartet, one of the seminal groups in jazz - the breadth of his musical reach tends to be overlooked. In his long career he has led, written for and recorded with big bands and played in a variety of small group settings embracing influences drawn from his bop origins, post-bop modal adventures and African, east Asian and Latin music.
It's also salutory to remember that he was a major force in the evolution of jazz piano; at one point it seemed that McCoy Tyner clones were popping up all over the place, a development he freely admits he wasn't happy with.
"I didn't criticise people," he says of that time. "If I heard some of them doing some things that I thought were things I did, I'd say 'oh, it's lovely, I like that.' But I wasn't seeking people to follow me. They found something useful in what I was doing. But it only happened for a limited amount of time, not an overwhelming amount of time."
The better ones grew out of it anyway? "Of course. That's the way it is. Bud Powell, who lived round the corner, and Thelonious Monk inspired me to play their music - at my rhythm'n'blues kind of stage with my r'n'b band made up of teenies. But then I started to listen to older musicians that turned me on, like Charlie Parker."
As Tyner's twin inspirations at the piano, Powell and Monk, aged, they became more and more mentally fragile, borderline personalities who grew increasingly withdrawn and sad; when they died, their finest days were long gone. Tyner, on the other hand, seems eminently together. Courteous and genial, he's a world removed from the image of the serious young man, furrowed in concentration, that emerges from the old footage of the Coltrane Quartet days. Nevertheless, he acknowledges his musical debt to them.
"What I'm saying is that they inspired me, but I knew I could never be like them," he says. "There's nothing wrong about being inspired by somebody, but you don't wanna be a carbon copy. You use somebody as a guide to a certain point and then you shoot off on your own."
It's clear from his career that he has practised what he preaches. The most spectacular example of that was his departure from Coltrane in the mid-1960s, when the quartet was the biggest jazz draw on the planet. Coltrane himself had been almost deified by his followers as a guru, sage, and musical revolutionary.
His high seriousness seemed to consume all who fell under his spell. The late Ronnie Scott, for example, an intelligent, witty man and a gifted musician, admired the gravitas of the great tenor's playing and personality, but felt diminished, even intimidated by it.
Did Tyner ever feel overwhelmed by Coltrane? "No," he says, unsurprisingly. "I think he had the amazing ability to select people that could support his ideas but that had a certain amount of originality. That they could sound like a part of the organisation but not really just condemned to a life sentence in something, you know. He wanted you to be able to understand the fact that we were supporting each other . . . A lot of times pianists, when the soloist is adventurous, they want to lock him into a certain chordal structure and it keeps an artist who has an idea from doing his thing. I don't know why he should have to do that. So that's why John was very good at picking who played with him."
WHY DID HE leave Coltrane? "He, at this point, was kind of into a thing with no particular structure. You know, playing a chordal instrument, that you have to restrict yourself to the framework of chords. I'm definitely not going to play single notes every time I sit down and play behind somebody; at times that would be injected, but not to a thing where you're limiting your creativity and your freedom doing that.
"So I felt he was going into an area that might have been interesting to him, and I felt that I didn't want to abandon the chordal concept - not that I was gonna sit there and play chords all night," he adds, laughing. "And I did have some harmonic sophistication, about if certain things were played I could put something underneath, not to restrict him, but to complement what he was doing. But at one point I thought: 'Well, I don't want to do that all the time, either.' "
By then the pianist was recording under his own name, too, for the Impulse label, so his thinking chimed with his producer Bob Thiele's suggestion that now was the moment to make a break.
It wasn't the most propitious time to do that, however. Rock and other pop forms were in the ascendant and he found the going tough. The late Woody Shaw, a marvellous trumpeter who was with Tyner then, said work was so scarce the group should have been called The Starvation Band.
Tyner bellows with laughter at the quote. "Well, I think that's a little extreme," he says. "I had a sandwich now and then."
Perhaps it's the memory of that time that taught him a certain pragmatism, too, like the fact that he's leading a stellar septet to play music gathered under the banner, The Story of Impulse Records. A label that once billed itself as "The New Wave In Jazz", Impulse is now history in that sense; an honoured part of that era in the music's history, but history nevertheless. So why is he doing it?
"Something came up," he answers. "like they were honouring Bob Thiele, who was my first producer at Impulse, of course. But the thing is the label doesn't record the music any more, so they're looking back in retrospect and thinking about what they did years ago, and they're not looking ahead and thinking of evolving this kind of music."
Is it a kind of marketing concept? "Well, I think they're doing a reissue kind of thing. I think that's the ultimate reason for doing this kind of thing. I mean, I'm not knocking it. It's interesting."
GIVEN THE QUALITY of the group he leads - relatively young players such as Wallace Roney (trumpet), Donald Harrison (alto) and Eric Alexander (tenor), Tyner's regular rhythm section of Charnett Moffett (bass) and Eric Kamau Gravatt (drums), and the veteran, Steve Turre (trombone) - is there any likelihood new music might be unveiled?
"Well" - there was that deep laugh again - "I might do some anyway! In other words, throw in a few new things, some of the stuff that I've written recently. We'll see if I can do a little mix of things, that the label will be mentioned, and material from that period, but I don't think it's gonna consume the whole programme."
One pointer to reinforce the possibility that the venture won't slide towards the comfort zone of nostalgia is the fact that, besides Tyner himself, some of the arranging for the septet has been done by Dave Liebman. A musician aptly described as cliche-free, Liebman will not, unfortunately, be with the band here, although he will join it for other tour dates.
Tyner will be 68 this year. So what does he think, at this stage, of the music to which he has dedicated his life? His answer amounted to a personal credo.
"Jazz is not gonna be a dinosaur and stay around in one form," he says, "because the nature of the music is that it has the ability to change and alter itself and do something else. It's a creative art form . . . People like myself and some other people try to just grow and develop, but not necessarily compromise to the point where we just completely ignore the traditions of the music."
Evolution, rather than revolution. Or maybe a bit of both.
On Wed, July 5, McCoy Tyner will give a public interview, moderated by Donald Helme, presenter of Lyric FM's Jazz Alley, at 6pm at the National Concert Hall, Dublin. Tyner's septet will perform at the NCH on Thur, Jul 6, at 8pm as part of Walton's World Masters Series