You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - McCoy Tyner Solo Breakdown

Episode Date: July 10, 2020

Peter and Adam pay tribute to the late great McCoy Tyner on today's episode as they break down his classic "Reaching Fourth."Open Studio is proud to use their platform to support various nonprofits to help make the world a better place. The Nonprofit of the Week for this week is the Jazz Foundation of America. This is an organization that helps provide jazz and blues musicians with emergency funds, as well as connect them with performance opportunities in schools and the community. If you'd like to donate, go to https://jazzfoundation.org.Today's Open Studio Live Events (All times in EDT):1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)3:00 PM - Live Guided Practice Session with Adam Maness - Locked Hands - YouTube8:00 PM - Peter Martin - Shelter in Place #17 - Solo Piano Concert - YouTubeFor the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkInterested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear Podcast. Music advice coming at you every other day, not including weekends. Come getting on schedule, man. We are getting on schedule at Open Studio. Go to open studio, go to open studio, jazz.com to check out all of our jazz piano. Okay, just to let you guys know this is a very special episode. Adam has been drinking.

Spindrift. It's a very special episode. Are you going with the lemon two? We got to get them as sponsors, man. Spin drift is awesome. Because we can't afford the amount that we're consuming. here in the studio. You know what it is? It's only sparkling water and real squeezed fruit. It's none of that other BS that goes along. Yes. Do you know, just as a quick aside, you know some of the BS that they put in

those other ones? Like the one you love, Lecois? This is not from France. I don't know. Should you maybe not tell these? Natural flavors are never good. They're not good. They, but it's tricky because it's a natural flavor. They're trying to trick you. They're trying to trick you. Yeah, Spindrift has no, why are we doing a commercial for these people? I don't know. We like them though. Yeah, Spendrift. I mean, yeah. Wait, is it our sponsor Open Studio? Open Studio. We like them too. Get out. Oh, the spin drifts. There's no natural flavors in Open Studio jazz either. No, but there is natural flavor. Flava. That's right. Exactly. Yeah, come check out. You know, we've got so much new stuff that you're only, our biggest fault is that we have too much content.

But your piano wax is past. Oh, I was going to get you again. Where's a friend that come on now. Oh, a little Barron Lovelace Oh Oh, yeah Byron Lovelace Barren Lovelace

Where you're at Byron Byron Byron hasn't hit us up in a while I know I know I don't know We made him famous

I know Byron Byron's off the wagon He's not like What are we talking about today? Today we're talking about Reaching Fourth We're talking about

McCoy Tyner We're talking about just an unbelievable track and solo from one of our favorite pianists, the great McCoy Tiner. I've been listening to a lot of McCoy Tiner. This is from his album called Reaching Forth, 1963, Roy Hands on Drums, Henry Grimes on the bass. And I think it's an underrated record.

I think that whole period, I listened to yesterday, I listened to Inception, Reaching Fourth, and What was it, a Night of Ballads and Blues? Nights of Ballads and Blues. That's a great one, impulse. Yeah. They're all really good, man. I've slept on him.

I mean, I've heard him, but I've not, like, heard him, heard him. And it's been so cool to catch up with it. So this reaching forth, did I hear you correct in saying earlier that you have this on LP, as it were? So, no, I got, I have Inception on the way on LP. I'm going to get reaching forth, I think, a little bit later. But, you know, LPs are not, uh, it's not cheap. I know. I know.

I limit myself to a few a week or else. Yeah, we should make a little field trip up to vintage vinyl because sometimes they've got such items. They don't have a big online presence, so you got to go in. What do you know about record exchange? See, this is, I got to hit you to record exchange in South City. No, I don't know about that. Oh, my gosh.

You talk about dusty. Like literally, it's dusty. There's dust covers on the people that work there. Oh, yeah. Because it's so dusty. But, man, they have such a huge selection. It's so great. If you're, if you.

Webster records, are they still happening? No, I don't think they are. This is a place down here. But, but Euclid records. Euclid records, that's right. That's right. Yeah, we should get a sponsor for some of these records. That's right.

All right. So, I thought we would. just listen to up until the bass solo because he really cares about the bass solo anyway. Oh my goodness. No, no, I'm kidding. We should listen to the whole track. It's four minutes long. It's not that long.

So let's just listen to the entire track. Can we stop and talk about it? I love doing that. And it's, it's going to be, it drives Andrew crazy. Oh, it does. We can talk about it afterwards.

Okay, but, and we'll just invite folks if you do like a time when we do talk about everything, join us for our Tuesday evening live sessions. Go to openstead of jazz.com slash live. That's right. You know what else? I do. And, you know, send us your email, your suggestions for sessions.

If you want to listen to music with us, we do it every Tuesday live on YouTube. It's awesome. We've got to talk later about what we want to do tomorrow night too. Let's check it out. This is Reaching 4th, 1963, McCoy Tyner, Roy Haynes, Henry Grimes. You know what I'm saying? That's what we're talking about McCoy Tyner.

Please check out the entire track as well. This is actually amazing bass solo by Henry Grimes, who we just lost a couple of months ago. And, of course, the great, great, great, great, Roy Haynes, who's still kicking it, doing his thing. So let's talk about a couple of, things McCoy's doing here and how someone who would want to get that sound could get that sound. We can't break down every note of the solo or even the construction of it, but it's really advanced,

especially for how young he was on this. And it's, you know, we were talking the other day about being yourself, right, and that sound. You know, the rest of the record, this was kind of in a period where he was being, I was reading up that the producer of these records, and I'm going to forget down his name, but for Impulse, it was kind of Bob Teal. Bob Teal, thank you, was pushing him to be more sort of Oscar Peterson-ish or straight ahead, right? And this track on this record, which is his second record as a leader, only his second record as a leader,

is really more in his sound, right? His, where McCoy ended up, you know, being known for. And there's some certain signatures here that are very McCoyish and that a lot of people have borrowed since. The first, I think, is those fourth voicings in his left hands. So, you know, this is like an ace.

He's really reaching forth with those. with that left hand. Quite literally. So most of the tune goes between like an A7, A7 Suss to a B flat. Yeah. Suss B flat 7, right? Which are, by the way,

kind of interchangeable in this context. But that A7 that he's playing, three-note voicings mostly, right? Yeah. He's hanging out around here a lot. F-sharp, C-sharp, and G. Yeah. Right?

And then he can slide these diatonically. That's what's so cool about. So you can just slide these up in A-dominant scale, right? Moving every note. I love that one. And they work great. Yeah.

Same thing. When you go to B flat, you can slide them up and down that B flat and xalidian scale. That's kind of the first like hallmark of this sound. Yeah. And I think that a lot of times when people are first getting into McCoy's playing and such a beautiful expansive sound and they want to start to get these little things, they think, oh, fourth voicings. Okay, they only are talking, they're only hearing or thinking about the perfect forefaces.

fourth ones and not that one with the, all fourths are fine. Augmented force, perfect force, combinations of them. Yeah. And so you want to think about that. When you set yourself up and forth on this, on like a mix of lydian scale or domicale, if you just move them diatonically, you're going to have different kinds of fourths. Right. Right.

It's not all going to be perfect. It's going to have tritones. And I think, you know, too, I know you're probably planning on talk about this later. We'll just throw it in there. You know, a lot of the genius of McCoy, especially in this early McCoy period, is about how he uses the same voicing and concepts for voicing, both the actual voicing and the diatonic movement of them in his melodic playing as well. That's right.

Yeah, yeah. It's in there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, and it's a good reason why you should learn these voicings and the diatonic movement and application of them with both hands. So you can go through like left hand, just like you want to go with the, I mean, right hand, just like you want to go through it with the left hand, same thing.

And then the B flat. and you want it because you know from the piano standpoint it's really about the shapes and you can talk about a different instrument for other instruments if you want to get that Bokoi's on it's going to be all melodic because you can't you know you can't play the chords at the same time but you can run through them you know in a horizontal

fashion as opposed to the vertical chords so true and one more voicing thing on this track in particular he does a lot of this right and this is a spread voicing idea right so it's and he's using this like in a solo like that kind of thing still doing I think a lot of three-note voicing's in force from what I can hear in his left-hand,

and then adding this octave with a fifth up from the bottom note in the right. Yeah. Bigger sounding melodies in octaves, again, with that fifth. So like here, right, so I have that F-sharp, C-sharp, G-voicing from the top down in my left-hand, and then A-E-A. Yeah. Right? Can add another note maybe to that left-hand voice if you want, but really, that's the sound.

Fantastic. Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. And then one more thing that I... I just want to point out is just the penitonic thing, right? Yes. It's not even that pentatonic what he's doing. You know what I mean?

There's penitonics in there. There's a lot of those fourth voicing, as you were saying. But he's using different pentatonic scale. It's not just like the A pentatonic scale. He's not doing that at all, actually. Right. There's a lot of D major. Yes.

He'll do that. He'll do G or E minor to the B minor or the D major. Kind of mix them interchangeably. He'll just do shapes on the dominant scale. Right. Yeah, I mean, McCoy always had such a great concept on actually inside playing. And I would say even like, you know, pentatonic, like understanding all the different diatonic pentatonic that you'd have over the static, well, you know, elongated sections where you're

sitting on one court. He was, of course, known to be, especially later on, but even, you know, on this recording, too, like a master of taking it out and bringing it. But the whole thing is you can't take it out unless you know how to play inside. And so I think in some ways, pentatonic is such a modern sound, but such a, inside way to play too. Well this, I would say 99% of what he played on the solo is inside. Right. It wasn't outside the changes. Yeah. And it wasn't like, oh, he hadn't discovered that yet. It's just like he knew how to apply it like the dramatic, dramatic implications on what it does

in your solo. He's such a master of understanding that and pulling it out at the right time. And I think too, because this tracks at the beginning of the album, I don't know. There could have been some thought about that. It's like, let's ease our way into it. Yeah. You got any other thoughts on what we heard? Well, I think, you know, as always, it's an interesting thing to kind of in analyzing McCoy's style is to talk about like how much you know another McCoyism in terms of, I mean that sounds horrible when I'm playing

on this keyboard, but you can imagine McCoy playing out of a beautiful Steinway and it's like fifths, octaves, or octaves and fits. I mean, it's such a simple thing and so it becomes what a lot of pianists try to ape as far as McCoy's playing. But with a lot of things that are simple

but very effective by great artists like this, check out when he used. him, how he uses them, and how they work into the flow of his playing in general, especially on the solos, the timing of when he goes down and hits those octaves. Of course, yeah, the power and the resonance he was known for that and that became a big part of his playing. But, you know, really the application and like how it kind of became sort of defining his style, I think, was as much about when he used him and how he used him as the fact that, yeah, it's an octave and a fifth. And so we can learn a lot from that if you want to use those. And everybody wants to use them

at some point, but don't make it just like you're imitating and you're just mashing down on these random-ass fifths and octaves, you know, make it count. For sure. Awesome, man. It's great stuff. If you haven't checked out the early McCoy stuff as a leader, go check it out all those impulse records. I'm just really loving getting into this man. And

yeah, we should get some more vinyl for this around studio. Yeah, and the last track on this I love. Maybe we could even check it out going out. I don't know. Let's do it. Yeah. Have you met with Jones. I love this arrangement. And I believe, I haven't listened to a record in a while, but I believe that it's in a fun, not funny, but it'll key that, babe.

Oh man, the whole record. It's in E-flat, I think. Right before this is a killing arrangement of Old Devil Moon. Old Devil Moon's great, yeah. And goodbye, what a beautiful, beautiful tune. So we'll go out on that. Go to Open StudioJazz.com to check out

all of our jazz piano courses, all of our jazz courses, whatever you want to check out. It's all there, you know. Yeah, that's how we do it. So have you been able to show you. I hope it's in E-flat. We'll see.

You'll hear it.