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| McCoy Tyner - Expansions (1968) |
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| AMG Review by Scott Yanow (4 1/2): Of pianist McCoy Tyner's seven Blue Note albums of the 1967-1970 period, Expansions is the most definitive. Tyner's group (comprised of trumpeter Woody Shaw, altoist Gary Bartz, tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter on cello, bassist Herbie Lewis, and drummer Freddie Waits) is particularly strong, the compositions (four Tyner originals plus Calvin Massey's "I Thought I'd Let You Know") are challenging, and the musicians seem quite inspired by each other's presence. The stimulating music falls between advanced hard bop and the avant-garde, pushing and pulling at the boundaries of modern mainstream jazz. =============== In terms of quantity and quality, two jazz pianists towered over the 1970s: Keith Jarrett and McCoy Tyner. Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea had, by and large, gone the fusion route and Cecil Taylor had an uncharacteristically unproductive decade insofar as his recorded output (and of the records that he did release in the 1970s, only three are in print at the time of this writing). Yet Tyner seems to have slipped under the radar of many music fans since then, having neither the name recognition of Hancock or Corea, nor the hipness credentials of Jarrett or Taylor. This is a shame because, unlike Jarrett or Taylor, Tyner is a very easy and affordable artist to get to know: he has a gigantic catalog to his name, a large percentage of these titles are in print and many of them are on the moderately-priced Blue Note and Original Jazz Classics labels. Furthermore, Tyner is still very much alive and kicking; as of this writing he is healthy and still regularly performs and records at a high level. Most jazz listeners will recognize McCoy Tyner as the pianist from John Coltrane's classic quartet (1960-1965), the ensemble that produced most of Coltrane's best known and most respected albums. However, a sampling of Tyner's own records from the 1960s and 1970s should make it apparent that Coltrane's quartet was not the product of Coltrane's genius plus three followers along for the ride. It seems clear to me that Tyner had a strong, individual musical vision and was a significant creative contributor to Coltrane's most indispensible music. Tyner's style was his own and it evolved slowly over the course of his career. Thus, the fact that he released albums at a dizzying rate for many years is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing for those who listen to his music because he has, by my estimates, been stunningly consistent, releasing literally dozens of superlative albums and very little that is mediocre. It is a curse because such a glut of similarly-styled music makes it difficult to single out any particular handful of records as being either essential or definitive. A nice upside to this, though, is that a prospective listener could go to a record store and blindly buy just about any of Tyner's Blue Note or OJC titles and probably wind up very pleased. Roughly paralleling the fertility of the progressive rock movement, Tyner's music was at its deepest, most experimental and most pluralistic between the late 1960s and mid 1970s. Toward the end of the 1970s he began to economize; he pared down the size of his groups, dropped the exotic titles and album covers and gradually eased his style and image back toward something more compliant with jazz convention, although his interest in Asian and African music continues to this day. Tyner remains a follower of his own muse, a player of impeccable taste who can create beauty and elegance from the most dissonant of chord progressions. In 1967 Tyner released the post-bop landmark The Real McCoy, an album considered by many observers to be Tyner's best of the 1960s. Thereafter, Tyner's style began to slowly change and it is at this point that his work first started to intersect with the exploratory trendrils of jazz that also touched progressive rock. His compositions became more spacious and probing and he often scored them for unconventional jazz instrumentation. But not for electric instruments. Despite an occasional likeness in some of Tyner's music to what other electric jazz ensembles were doing contemporaneously (a few of Herbie Hancock's early 1970s pieces come to mind here), Tyner stayed acoustic. Thus his jazz credentials remained intact though, in retrospect, probably at the price of greater contemporary noteriety. The presciently-titled Expansions, recorded in August of 1968, is Tyner's first album-length move away from the post-bop style he had perfected on The Real McCoy, and toward the heavier, more open sound that would characterize his 1970s recordings. One could detect this style emerging on the original compositions from his previous album, Time For Tyner (1968), but the second half of that record reverted to covering standards. Expansions features a septet with some marquee names, as Tyner borrowed Ron Carter and Wayne Shorter from Miles Davis' quintet and also enlisted the great Woody Shaw — an alumnus of Eric Dolphy and Chick Corea's bands — to go along with Bartz, Lewis and Waits. The first two tracks represent the greatest stylistic breakthroughs. At twelve minutes apiece, "Vision" and "Song of Happiness" are generous performances that tug at the boundaries of post-bop. Tyner might have deployed his signature '60s chording technique in some places, but he also used these pieces as launching pads for some fleet-fingered, impressionistic soloing that takes the compositions into entirely new realms. This style benefits from the textural variety offered by the septet, especially on the Japanese-influenced "Song for Happiness," where Bartz plays flute and Shorter switches to clarinet. Ron Carter's groaning, irritable cello colors these first two tracks and contributes to a feeling of unsettling transition. The reins are pulled back slightly on the rest of the album, but I find it to be no less interesting. "Smitty's Place" is an artfully warped tribute to the swing era that is practically Ivesian in execution. "Peresina" is a beautiful, deceptively intricate kiss goodbye to post-bop and the performance of "I Thought I'd Let You Know" is stirring, carried as it is by Ron Carter on the cello. Expansions is out of print at the time of this writing and has been for a number of years; however, Blue Note is slowly remastering and reissuing Tyner's albums and I expect that this one will be available again relatively soon. review by Matt P. — 10-14-05 |
