MUSIC REVIEW: McCoy Tyner Trio at the Mahaiwe

Submitted by Seth Rogovoy on February 21, 2010 - 9:36pm
Classical Music

 

 
 
 
Review and photography by Seth Rogovoy
 
 
(GREAT BARRINGTON, February 21, 2010) -- The McCoy Tyner Trio made more dynamic, colorful, explosive music with just piano, bass, and drums than many a dozen-piece funk band or a symphony orchestra in its tightly wound 75-minute concert at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center tonight.
 
 
Kicking off his program with one of his signature tunes, “Fly With the Wind,” Tyner laid down the basic rules of the evening: riff-based tunes propelled rhythmically by his percussive keyboard attack in conjuction with the springy accompaniment of bassist Gerald Cannon and drummer Eric Kamau Gravatt, all three of whom so dominated their instruments they made them seem like toys.
 
 
But they didn’t sound like toys. Rather, they sounded like a physics experiment, to see how much sound and rhythm you could get from what were essentially three rhythmic percussion instruments by stripping down the music to its atomic level, rearranging the molecules, and watching fusion and fission explode in swaths of abstract melodies and harmonics.
 
 
“Ballad for Aisha” was typical. This 1978 tune began, duly, as a pretty ballad, but not via single-note passages of melody, but rather Tyner’s signature muscular, block chord approach in the right hand and his fierce, pounding rhythms driving the band in his left. It’s a wonder how Tyner gets so much music out of his instrument without playing an abundance of notes like some bebopper gone mad; instead, he lets chords ring out and resound over and against each other so that they paint aural colors, lifted on the wings of bass and drums. By the end of this number, any resemblance to a conventional ballad was gone, replaced by telepathic interlocking of rhythms between Tyner’s left hand and Cannon’s bass.
 
 
Calling the tunes in the moment from the piano, Tyner clued the band in and then the audience that next up was “Afrika Village,” from his 1968 album, Time for Tyner. The tune took off on a driving funk riff in Tyner’s left hand with Cannon’s bass, before turning it all over to Gravatt, who played an elaborate abstraction of African drumming.
 
 
A highlight of the evening was the Tynerized rendition of Duke Ellington’s “In a Mellow Tone,” in which the trio broke down the swinging standard into its component parts, exploring the drama in the chordal changes, stretching out on a limb before returning to the trunk with an explosive theme.
 
 
The sound this evening was spectacular. While all the instrumentation was acoustic, everything was miked and the bass was driving through an amplifier onstage, so that at one and the same time the trio fully resounded throughout the august theater while retaining the intimacy of a basement jazz club. The players themselves lent the proceedings the air of a jam session; they seemed to glory in the moment, never phoning it in nor going through the motions but rather driving each other through surprise, challenging each other with tricks and jokes, all in the spirit of fun and communication and total respect for each other -- all of which was contagious, lending the entire proceedings drama and exhilaration.
 
 
It’s still only February, but it’s hard to imagine that this concert won’t go down on most attendees’ lists as one of the top shows of the year.
 
 
 
Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning music critic.
 
 
 
 

 

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