Official BSG Jazz Chanteuse Cyrille Aimee has a pretty amazing facebook post about Steven Sondheim at a recent show.

I hadn't had a chance to acknowledge that my all-time most influential musical artist in my life, and Phila.-native McCoy Tyner passed away a couple weeks ago. Ironically, I had just gotten off the phone with one of my oldest friends back in Phila., who was also an avid Jazz guy and a grammy award winning record producer - and he called me back a few minutes later to tell me the news. He had been in poor health for some time, and become gaunt and fragile. I'm not a gushing fan type person - and I've never 'followed a band' but I'd seen Tyner more than any other artist over 60 times in multiple cities and countries. I first saw him at age 17 year old at the long defunct Temple Ambler Music Festival which used to run in the summers in Ambler and was the summer home of the Pittsburgh Symphony. McCoy was in his prime in his late 30's doing the Tour titled: The Greeting - a Live Album of the same name was released. That 1977-1978 period are noted by some of his greatest work on record with The Greeting, Super-Trios and the double-record with Sonny Rollins, That tour they played in Phila @ The Academy of Music.

He was a modest soft spoken guy, not a great marketer - and the bio's make a big deal about his time with Coltrane which spanned about 4-ish years from 1960-1965 when he was in his 20's. But his contribution to the art-form outside of Coltrane is much larger than most acknowledge and his contribution to the piano is unique and immense. As many stud pianists as there are and have been - including the likes of Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea and Gonzalo Rubalcaba - there has never been anyone like Tyner. Some younger guys of the last 20 years have tried to emulate some of his sound - but his evolution and voice were so so unique that no one can do what he did or sound like him. Starting in the mid-80's he softened some of his style. He went back to a lot of standards and some times those renditions were rich - but I felt less intensity and less inspiration from him - he did go a grammy winning big band CD and started to record solo which was awesome because he could do things no one else could do.

But his most fertile period was around 1974-1979 though I saw him in the 80's and 90's and 00's and there were memorable moments. At a 75th anniversary concert for Tommy Flanagan pianist part of SF Jazz some years ago, McCoy was the 2nd half of the concert and he did a version of Lazy Bird (known from the Coltrane classic recording Blue Train in '59) and there was a lingo in the old days in Jazz called "cut-time' where you went twice as fast, the real heads could play in cut-cut-time and this version was so fast, so intense and I had shivers in my spine and almost teared up. McCoy was channeling the spirit world - his sound was unique and had direct ties to the lineage going back to the slave fields.

I had to stop seeing him in recent years because it was top painful for me to hear him reduced to an old man who was fragile and a shadow of his former self.

Here is a nice clip from a concert in Norway summer of 1975. This was the time after he recorded the double-album Atlantis and he was playing with Azar Lawrence who had a post-Coltrane tone to his sound. They often did the standard My One And Only Love, and there are two songs and interview with McCoy on this clip if you watch til the end. He plays My One and Only Love on the Atlantis album solo, and again with Solly Rollins on a later recording in 1980-ish.

RIP - McCoy Tyner.

Thanks PTK.

You already had my HoF vote for next year but that was a HoF post.

You know about 100x more about jazz than I do, but I enjoy Parker & Coltrane and most of their collaborators.

Did you see Dizzy Gillespie play the free show on the Art Museum steps during the Bicentennial celebration? Still a great memory for me.

I got a record player for my birthday last year and have been slowly building up my vinyl collection. Love jazz, so that's been a big focus. A small selection of my all-time favorites I've picked up thus far:

Miles Davis - Sketches of Spain
John Coltrane - Giants Steps
John Coltrane - A Love Supreme
Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um
Charles Mingus - Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
Keith Jarrett - The Köln Concert
Duke Ellington - Such Sweet Thunder
Return to Forever - Romantic Warrior
Mahavishnu Orchestra - Birds of Fire

Several of those were part of my vinyl collection that I gave away when I moved to TX.

The Saturday night jazz show on WRTI is fantastic. “Jukebox Jazz.” They take anything from Beyoncé to Journey to The Beatles and whatever and do jazzy covers of popular songs. Great dinner listening.

Wes