The Real McCoy

The Real McCoy begins a Blue Note chapter, not McCoy Tyner’s career as a leader. He had already made leader dates for Impulse while working with John Coltrane. That distinction makes this 1967 album more interesting: an established composer and pianist chooses another setting for his music, rather than suddenly stepping out of anonymity. The record gives five original pieces a deliberate sequence and a consistent quartet.

Joe Henderson plays tenor saxophone, Ron Carter bass and Elvin Jones drums. Jones brings a shared history with Tyner, but the saxophonist and bassist are not the other members of Coltrane’s classic quartet. Familiar instrumentation therefore creates room for different relationships. With Tyner supplying every composition, the album’s identity also rests on what the musicians are asked to play, not simply on the leader’s recognizable piano sound.

An expansive first side

The original first side contains only Passion Dance and Contemplation. Their lengths in the current delivery exceed eight and nine minutes respectively; the second piece is the longer one. The opening does not exhaust the album’s large scale. Instead, two substantial performances establish the first half, making a useful distinction between the force suggested by a dance and the inward turn suggested by contemplation.

Three pieces across the other side

Four By Five, Search for Peace and Blues on the Corner form the second side. Each lasts roughly six minutes, giving this half a different balance. Search for Peace is not the final destination. A blues follows it, so the programme leaves another kind of movement after its most explicitly peaceful title. The sequence resists a simple journey from intensity to permanent repose.

Writing for this quartet

One tenor voice sits alongside piano, bass and drums, without a trumpet completing a two-horn front line. That arrangement keeps the relationship between the keyboard and the single wind instrument central. Tyner’s leadership means providing the material in which all four can work. The closing blues belongs to that portrait as fully as the two long opening pieces: the new chapter accommodates several musical directions.