March 6, 2020
The world has lost a titan with the passing of the legendary jazz pianist and composer McCoy Tyner. The Tyner family announced his death earlier today. He was 81 years old.
“It’s difficult to comprehend the magnitude of McCoy Tyner’s innovative contributions to music,” said Blue Note President Don Was. “As a leader and sideman, he recorded dozens of monumental Blue Note albums and has played a major role in shaping the character of our catalog. As an artist, his sense of harmony and rhythm has been pervasive—Mr. Tyner’s signature is forever imprinted upon the musical vocabulary of generations to come.”
It’s impossible to express how important McCoy was & always will be to our music. The amount of beauty he gave the world is simply staggering, from the tremendous body of work he created as a member of John Coltrane’s Classic Quartet to McCoy’s own magnificent albums for Blue Note, Impulse, Milestone, Telarc & more. His deep influence on nearly every jazz pianist to emerge over the past 60 years is immeasurable.
McCoy first recorded on a Blue Note session June 19, 1960 on trumpeter Freddie Hubbard’s debut album Open Sesame, and he played on dozens of classic Blue Note albums over the next decade including Hubbard’s Ready for Freddie, Joe Henderson’s Page One, In ‘n Out, and Inner Urge, Wayne Shorter’s Night Dreamer and JuJu, Bobby Hutcherson’s Stick Up!, Grant Green’s Matador, and Stanley Turrentine’s Easy Walker.
Tyner signed with Blue Note in 1967 and his label debut as a leader The Real McCoy stands as one of the greatest artistic statements of his career, a post-bop masterpiece that was a crystallization of his singular sound and introduced timeless compositions including “Passion Dance” and “Search for Peace.” A series of powerful, searching albums followed over the next three years including Tender Moments, Time for Tyner, Expansions, and Extensions.
Tyner returned to Blue Note after the label re-launched in 1985 and recorded collaborative albums with Jackie McLean (It’s About Time) and Bobby Hutcherson (Manhattan Moods), as well as several sublime solo piano albums: Revelations, Things Ain’t What They Used To Be, and Soliloquy. McCoy’s duo performance with Hutcherson was one of the most moving moments at the historic Blue Note at 75 concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in 2014.
RIP to one of the greatest of all-time…
Read The New York Times and NPR obituaries.
Explore McCoy’s greatest Blue Note moments with our playlist McCoy Tyner: The Finest.
