January 27, 2005
Bassist: Stanley Clarke
What a joy on stage at Yoshi’s this week: Pianist McCoy Tyner, the inimitable one, is gushing soul as he thunders through standards and originals with bassist Stanley Clarke and drummer Billy Cobham. At Tuesday’s late set, this celebrity power trio played with the urgency of an express train and the accumulated spirit of 115 years on the bandstand — which is about how long, in aggregate, these three artists have been on the scene.
Tyner’s mystery is that his harmonic language and rhythmic feel have percolated through jazz, generally, and the moves of thousands of piano players, specifically, since around 1960. Yet every time Tyner shows up on stage, you realize that no one ever quite captures his sound, and no one else — no one — plays with his indescribable spirit. A single chord — or even a single note — from Tyner is a thrilling event, ushering in a unique world of music.
This band actually multiplies Tyner’s impact, and too bad for you if you don’t have tickets. The trio is performing through Sunday, but all shows are sold out. Next week, Tyner returns with a different all-star line-up, capping his annual two-week residency at the Oakland club.
Truth be told, there have been occasional concerts at Yoshi’s the past few years when Tyner, now 66, seemed willing to let his band mates do the heavy lifting. But Tuesday, he came out swinging with his knotty chords, two-handed scorpion runs up and down the keyboard, and crashing left-handed piston-strikes, which conjure the austere tolling of heaven’s bells: Bong! Bong!
Go, McCoy.
He started with Irving Berlin’s “I’ll Take Romance” — Tyner is a sucker for a great melody — and the trio immediately showed its in-synch-ness. It’s not as if these musicians have shared the stage much over the years, but Cobham and Clarke have been in and out of Tyner’s recording sessions since the ’70s; they know the language. On the Berlin tune, Cobham quickly was extending and completing Tyner’s phrases while speedy Clarke zipped down the middle of the musical turnpike with his sturdy, supple walking bass lines.
I attended the concert with a couple of listeners in their early 20s who hadn’t previously heard much music like this; their responses were interesting.
One, a heavy-metal drummer, was knocked out by Cobham’s use of dynamics, his ability to control rhythms at the lowest volumes and then bash hell out of the drums — but always with precision, never misplacing a subdivision of a beat, of which there are thousands as Cobham spreads out across his giant trap set, which seemed to be raining cymbals on Tuesday.
On Tyner’s “Angelina,” which got into some loping, Cuban montuno-ish rhythms, Cobham was using three sticks, two in his right hand, one in the left, just to increase the rhythmic possibilities. The guy’s ridiculous.
As is Clarke, master of high-on-the-bridge filigree and singing, sliding chords that ooze from his instrument. After an extended solo in which Clarke played his acoustic upright like a Spanish guitar, with brooding melody and breakout flamenco flourishes, the other young listener at my table said he had heard Les Claypool, the eclectic rocker, do that sort of thing. But then he said, “But Claypool probably took it from this guy,” which is probably true.
Later in the set, Tyner took his own unaccompanied solo on “Lazybird,” written in the 1950s by John Coltrane, the pianist’s old employer. He played the anthem straight, then fractured it, pointillized it, gospelized it and strode through it like James P. Johnson. It was music as cubist painting, viewed from all angles at once. Yet Tyner never lost the song’s exalted feeling.
Which is what Tuesday’s show was about: virtuosity held in check, always in the service of jazz’s exalted message. Go McCoy.
McCoy Tyner
with Terence Blanchard and Ravi Coltrane
Where: Yoshi’s, 510 Embarcadero West, Oakland
When: Tuesday through Feb. 6 (performances this week, with Stanley Clarke and Billy Cobham, are sold out)
Tickets: $22-30; (510) 238-9200, www.ticketweb.com
From:
http://www.dalecruse.com/weblogarchives/2005/01/power_trio_led.html
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