December 11, 1938 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)March 6, 2020
Here is the fastest way to understand what McCoy Tyner did. Sit at a piano, put your left hand low and play an open fifth — a root and the note seven semitones above it — and then, on the offbeat, throw a three-note stack of fourths into the middle of the keyboard with the same hand. Now play a pentatonic scale on top with your right, fast, and lean on it.
You have just made the sound that became the default vocabulary of modal jazz piano. The raw materials were older than him — fourths and pentatonics were both in circulation, and the So What voicing predates his quartet years — but the combination, and above all the way of striking it, is his, and he is the reason every pianist after him has it.
Philadelphia, and the luck of an address
Alfred McCoy Tyner was born in Philadelphia on 11 December 1938, the eldest of three. He took his first piano lessons from a neighbour, then studied classical piano, and was led into jazz less by teachers than by geography.
The neighbourhood is the story. Bud Powell lived around the corner and had no piano in the apartment, so he came to Tyner’s mother’s house to practise. Lee Morgan, Reggie Workman and Bobby Timmons were local. Tyner sat in the room while one of the two or three most important pianists in the music worked, and later said he could not understand everything Powell was doing but liked it, and learned a great deal from him. His school friends nicknamed him Bud Monk, because Powell and Monk were all he talked about.
That is worth pausing on, because the received picture of Tyner is a modal player who arrived from nowhere with a new harmonic language. He arrived out of bebop, from a room where Bud Powell was practising.
He met John Coltrane at a Philadelphia club in the mid-1950s while still at school. Coltrane recorded Tyner’s tune “The Believer” in January 1958, two years before Tyner joined his band. He toured with Benny Golson and Art Farmer’s Jazztet first, and left it for Coltrane with some awkwardness: “There were probably some bad feelings at first with the Jazztet, but I think they understood better later on. John’s group was where I belonged.”
The Classic Quartet
He joined around the end of May 1960. The band assembled around him rather than arriving whole: Elvin Jones came in later that year, and Jimmy Garrison arrived in late 1961 and became the sole bassist in 1962. From then until December 1965 that quartet is the one everybody means. Across the whole span Coltrane never used another pianist; when Tyner was unavailable he simply did not hire a substitute.
Key records include My Favorite Things, Africa/Brass, Live at Birdland, Impressions, Crescent, and the one everybody owns, A Love Supreme.
The conventional framing is Tyner as Coltrane’s disciple, and it is half right. The other half is in a remark Coltrane made to the journalist Bob Dawbarn: “Tyner plays some things on the piano, but I don’t know what they are.” For the big-band album Africa/Brass he told the arranger Eric Dolphy to take the voicings from Tyner. The harmonic language of the most famous quartet in modern jazz was substantially the pianist’s.
Tyner’s own account of what he supplied is about rhythm rather than harmony, and it is characteristically unshowy. Speaking of Monk’s influence, he said his playing possessed the same metronomic rhythmic accuracy, and that because he had a good strong left hand, Coltrane knew he could count on that rhythmic foundation. Listen to A Love Supreme with that in mind and the whole thing reorganises itself: Coltrane and Elvin Jones are free to go wherever they like precisely because the piano is not going anywhere.
What is actually happening in the hands
Fourths instead of thirds, and the reason it matters. Western harmony stacks thirds. A complete seventh chord built that way hands you its third and its seventh, which between them settle what the chord is and where it wants to go. A fourth-based voicing need not contain either: it can happily omit the third, and frequently does, taking its function from the bass and the tonal context instead of stating it. That makes it ambiguous by default, and for modal music, where the whole point is that you are sitting in one scale rather than being pushed through changes, that ambiguity is the correct sound rather than a compromise.
Here is the exact shape, from the bottom up: third, sixth, ninth, fifth, root. On a C six-nine chord that is E, A, D, G, C — five notes, and every adjacent interval a perfect fourth. Learn that one shape and you have the sound.
Now be careful, because this is where most write-ups get sloppy. Two different operations get called the same trick, and they are not the same.
The first is keeping the pitches and changing the bass. Hold E, A, D, G, C and put a D underneath: you have the root, the ninth, the fifth, the eleventh and the flat seventh. The honest name is D9 sus 4, or D11 with no third. Not D minor eleventh and certainly not D minor six-nine, however often that gets printed: there is no F in the chord, so nothing in it is minor. Put a G underneath the same five notes and you get root, ninth, fifth, eleventh and thirteenth. Rich, and still no third.
The second operation is different: move the voicing through the scale rather than transposing it. Slide the shape up one step inside C major and you get F, B, E, A, D, which over a G bass reads as the flat seventh, third, thirteenth, ninth and fifth — a full dominant, because this time the third is present. Note what the diatonic move did to the intervals: F to B is a tritone, not a perfect fourth. Running a fourths voicing up a major scale always produces one of those, and it is exactly the position where the third turns up.
So the bass renames a fixed set of notes, but it cannot conjure a chord tone that is not in them. This is the same principle as the So What voicing and as Hancock’s Maiden Voyage chords; Tyner is the player who made it a default rather than an effect.
Now the thing that is specifically his: the attack. The voicing alone is not the McCoy sound. The signature gesture is rhythmic and it is two events, not one. The left hand strikes an octave, or an octave plus a fifth, low, on beat one. Then, after it, the three-note fourth voicing arrives. They are played sequentially, not held together as one chord. That gap is the whole thing: the low strike gives you a bass drum, the fourths land behind it like a horn section, and one hand has just done the work of a rhythm section.
And the right hand is pentatonic. Not scalar bebop lines with chromatic approach notes, but pentatonic shapes run fast and hard, sometimes side-slipped a semitone out of the key and back. The ordinary major and minor pentatonics contain no half steps at all, which is the useful property: fewer of the sharp dissonances that force a resolution, so you can stay on one shape over one chord for a long time and let the tension come from rhythm and register. That is a tendency, not a guarantee — any of those five notes can still bite against the harmony underneath, which is exactly what side-slipping exploits.
Why this is harder than it looks, and the reason most people give up on it. Modal playing removes the thing that normally does your work for you. On a standard, the chord changes generate interest whether or not you have an idea: the harmony moves, so something is happening. Take the changes away and leave one scale for sixteen bars and there is nowhere to hide. Every bit of momentum has to come from rhythm, from register, from dynamics and from how you shape a phrase.
That is what Tyner solved, and it is why the left-hand gesture matters more than the voicing. The fourths give you a sound. The strike-then-stack rhythm gives you a motor. Players who learn the chords and not the attack end up with a pretty, static, faintly new-age noise, and then conclude that modal jazz is boring. It is not boring. They have taken the harmony and left the engine.
Three things worth stealing, in ascending order of difficulty:
- Learn E–A–D–G–C in all twelve keys. One shape. Play it, name what it is over three different bass notes, and stop thinking of it as a chord with a name at all.
- Practise the two-event gesture, slowly. Low octave on beat one; fourths after it. Get the gap right before you get it fast. If you play them together you have a chord; if you play them apart you have a band.
- Improvise on one minor pentatonic for four straight minutes over a single chord, and make it interesting. No key changes, no chromaticism. Only rhythm, register and dynamics. This is the hardest exercise on this whole site and it is the actual Tyner discipline.
What the fourths did to everyone else
The reason this page is on a teaching site rather than a discography is that the vocabulary escaped him almost immediately. Chick Corea was working the same ground in the same decade. Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage chords are the same object approached from a different direction. By the 1970s a three-note stack of fourths in the left hand was simply what a jazz pianist played over a static minor chord, and it still is.
Guitarists took it too, which is a good test of how fundamental an idea is: a harmonic device that only works on one instrument is usually a trick, and one that transfers is usually a principle.
The other job he was doing at the same time
It is easy to file the quartet years as sideman work. They were not. Between 1962 and 1964, while playing in the most demanding band in jazz, Tyner also made six albums as a leader for Impulse!, with players including Jimmy Heath, Thad Jones, Art Davis, Henry Grimes, Roy Haynes and John Gilmore.
That matters for the same reason it mattered with Hancock: the pianists who changed the instrument were, almost without exception, running their own bands while holding down somebody else’s chair. The vocabulary does not develop from accompanying alone. It develops from having to decide what the music is.
Leaving, and saying why
By 1965 Coltrane’s music was becoming freer, denser and more dissonant, and he had added extra percussionists whose volume threatened to bury both the piano and Elvin Jones. Tyner left in December of that year. Elvin Jones followed a few months later. Alice Coltrane took the piano chair.
Tyner’s explanation is one of the least defensive statements a sideman has ever given about leaving a legendary band. This is the passage as it is usually quoted, ellipsis and all:
I didn’t see myself making any contribution to that music. … All I could hear was a lot of noise. I didn’t have any feeling for the music, and when I don’t have feelings, I don’t play.
Notice what he does not say. He does not say the music was bad, or that Coltrane had lost his way. He says he could not hear, he had no feeling for it, and without feeling he would not play. Our reading is that this is a musician declining to fake something, which is a rarer form of integrity than the one usually celebrated. He did not put it that way himself.
It cost him. The years immediately after Coltrane were a low ebb, and he has described them as such. He toured Japan in 1966, went out with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1967, and formed his own trio that year.
The Real McCoy onwards
From 1967 to 1970 he made seven albums as a leader for Blue Note. The first, The Real McCoy, is the one to own: Joe Henderson on tenor, Ron Carter on bass, Elvin Jones on drums, and “Passion Dance” as the opening statement of what a quartal, pentatonic, modal piano record sounds like when the pianist is leading rather than supporting.
In 1972 came Sahara on Milestone, a commercial breakthrough and a Grammy nomination, absorbing African and Eastern elements — he plays koto and flute on it as well as piano. Trident followed in 1975, a trio with Ron Carter and Elvin Jones on which he added harpsichord and celeste.
He worked for another five decades in every format the music has — solo piano, trio, small group, big band — and kept absorbing material from outside jazz, including African, Latin and Eastern sources, without ever losing the identity of the sound. He took the NEA Jazz Master award in 2002 and won five Grammys. He died in New Jersey on 6 March 2020, aged eighty-one.
Blue Note’s president Don Was put the scale of it plainly on the day: that it is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of Tyner’s contributions, and that his sense of harmony and rhythm has been pervasive. That is a record label being sentimental about a former artist, and it is also just true. There is no way to play modal jazz piano in a way that does not refer to him, including by deliberately avoiding what he did.
What is documented and what is a story
On the personnel of The Real McCoy. You will find sources giving Jimmy Garrison on bass. It was Ron Carter. Garrison and Elvin Jones are so welded to Tyner in memory that the substitution happens by reflex, which is a good reminder that a familiar-sounding fact is not the same as a checked one.
On his influences. The picture of Tyner as a pure modal innovator is incomplete. He came out of Powell and Monk, said so repeatedly, and was called Bud Monk at school. The fourths are what he added, not what he replaced.
And a note on the quartet’s harmony. Coltrane’s remark that he did not know what Tyner was playing is charming and is also evidence: the harmonic vocabulary of that band came substantially from the piano chair, and the arranger of Africa/Brass was told to go and get the voicings from him.
A note on the word powerful
Every piece written about Tyner reaches for it, including this one, and it is worth being precise rather than atmospheric about what the power actually is, because saying he hit the piano hard is both true and useless.
Three things are going on. The first is register: he uses the bottom two octaves constantly, where most jazz pianists live in the middle, and low notes on a grand piano carry physical weight that mid-range notes do not. The second is spacing. Set against a close-position tertian voicing, a five-note stack of fourths spreads across more than an octave, and wider spacing tends to let the individual notes stay distinct instead of fusing into one colour. Tends to: audibility also depends on register, dynamics and what else is sounding, and fourths piled up low will muddy like anything else. The third is the gesture again: a low strike followed by a chord is two impacts where other pianists produce one.
None of that requires unusual physical strength, which is the useful part. It requires register, spacing and rhythm. You can get most of the way to that sound at a moderate dynamic if you get those three right, and no distance at all by hitting the keys harder.
Where to start, honestly
The Real McCoy, and specifically “Passion Dance”, because you can hear the left-hand gesture in isolation before the band builds on top of it. Then A Love Supreme, listening only to the piano, which is a strange and rewarding way to hear a record you already know. Then Sahara for where he went when nobody was telling him what the band was.
Then learn one shape — E, A, D, G, C — and spend a week refusing to play a third in your left hand. It will feel like a restriction for two days and like a new instrument by the end.
Start with these records
- The Real McCoy 1967
Essential! Features 'Passion Dance' - a modal tour de force. This album defines McCoy's sound: powerful, percussive, harmonically rich. - Sahara 1972
Adventurous, spiritual jazz with African influences. The title track is a 25-minute journey. Features koto (Japanese instrument) and flute! - With John Coltrane: A Love Supreme 1965
One of the most important jazz albums ever. Hear McCoy's spiritual, modal playing support Coltrane's quest. Life-changing music. - Trident 1975
A trio date with Ron Carter and Elvin Jones, McCoy adding harpsichord and celesta for color. Includes the beautiful 'Impressions' and the lyrical Monk ballad 'Ruby, My Dear.'
How to listen
- If you are starting out
- 'My Favorite Things' with Coltrane - accessible modal masterpiece with a simple vamp. Let McCoy's fourths wash over you.
- If you can already comp through a standard
- 'Passion Dance' from 'The Real McCoy' - study the modal vamp and how McCoy builds his solo. Notice the quartal voicings!
- If you are transcribing
- Transcribe McCoy's solo on 'Impressions' from various recordings. Compare his approaches. Analyze his use of fourths and pentatonics.
Sources
Every date, title and quotation on this page is checked against at least two independent sources before it builds. Where sources disagree, the page says so instead of picking the better story.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: A Brief Guide to Quartal HarmonyAli Jamieson
- McCoy Tyner (1938-2020)Blue Note Records
- The Evolution of John ColtraneBret Primack, Coltrane Code
- When McCoy Tyner Came to TownChris Deliso
- McCoy Tyner research starterEBSCO
- McCoy Tyner's RevolutionEthan Iverson, Do The M@th
- Quartal Harmony: The Ultimate Guide To Building Epic ChordsFree Jazz Lessons
- Innerviews: McCoy Tyner, Communicating SensitivityInnerviews
- McCoy Tyner on Burt BacharachPerfect Sound Forever
- McCoy Tyner Jazz Guitar Lesson TributeRichie Zellon
- McCoy Tyner's BiographyThe HistoryMakers
- Fourth VoicingsThe Jazz Resource
- McCoy TynerWikipedia