| Jazz Legend McCoy Tyner Turns Over a New Leaf at Blue Note |
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McCoy Tyner with Special Guests Toots Thielemans and Joe LovanoJune 19 – June 24, 2007Two Sets, 8:00 pm & 10:30 pm Blue Note Jazz Club 131 West 3rd St bluenote.com  McCoy Tyner played extensively with jazz god John Coltrane.  Joe Lovano, left, and Toots Thielemans split the dates with McCoy Tyner.  Toots Thielemans, famed harmonica player and whistler.  Joe Lovano is a tenor sax player who has charted his own path in jazz with expressive devices. The subsequent MTM release will be a studio CD and state of the art DVD featuring guitarists Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell, John Scofield, Derek Trucks, banjoist Béla Fleck, backed by the all-star rhythm section of Jack DeJohnette and Ron Carter. Rounding out the trilogy will be a live solo piano recording to be released late in 2007. The Blue Note performances will act as a launching point for this exciting new chapter in Tyner's music – don't miss it! The show includes McCoy Tyner (piano, compositions), Gerald Cannon (bass), Eric Kamau Gravatt (drums); with guests Toots Thielemans (harmonica – June 19-20, Tues – Wed), and Joe Lovano (tenor saxophone, June 21-24, Thurs – Sun). It is not an overstatement to say that modern jazz has been shaped by the music of McCoy Tyner. His blues-based piano style, replete with sophisticated chords and an explosively percussive left hand has transcended conventional styles to become one of the most identifiable sounds in improvised music. His harmonic contributions and dramatic rhythmic devices form the vocabulary of a majority of jazz pianists. Born in 1938 in Philadelphia, he became a part of the fertile jazz and R&B scene of the early '50s. His parents imbued him with a love for music from an early age. His mother encouraged him to explore his musical interests through formal training. At 17 he began a career-changing relationship with Miles Davis' sideman saxophonist John Coltrane. Tyner joined Coltrane for the classic album "My Favorite Things" (1960), and remained at the core of what became one of the most seminal groups in jazz history, The John Coltrane Quartet. The band, which also included drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Jimmy Garrison, had an extraordinary chemistry, fostered in part by Tyner's almost familial relationship with Coltrane. From 1960 through 1965, Tyner's name was propelled to international renown, as he developed a new vocabulary that transcended the piano styles of the time, providing a unique harmonic underpinning and rhythmic charge essential to the group's sound. He performed on Coltrane's classic recordings such as Live at the Village Vanguard, Impressions and Coltrane's signature suite, "A Love Supreme." In 1965, after over five years with Coltrane's quartet, Tyner left the group to explore his destiny as a composer and bandleader. Among his major projects is a 1967 album entitled "The Real McCoy," on which he was joined by saxophonist Joe Henderson, bassist Ron Carter and fellow Coltrane alumnus Elvin Jones. His 1972 Grammy-award nomination album Sahara, broke new ground by the sounds and rhythms of Africa. Since 1980, he has also arranged his lavishly textured harmonies for a big band that performs and records when possible. Toots Thielemans is a Belgian guitarist and whistler, and the greatest living virtuoso (and perennial winner of Downbeat's Readers and Critics Polls alike) on his "Miscellaneous Instrument", the harmonica. With a career that goes back to World War II, Toots has played with everyone from Benny Goodman and Charlie Parker, to Paul Simon and Jaco Pastorius. At his 80th Birthday week in fall 2002 at the Blue Note in NYC, Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder stopped by to sit in, not surprising, since Toots is revered by musical giants both young and old. Everybody's heard Toots, if not live or on record, then on the soundtrack of such movies as Midnight Cowboy, or playing the Sesame Street Theme, or whistling on that famous Old Spice commercial. Active during a period of jazz history when it seemed radical innovation was a thing of the past, Joe Lovano nevertheless coalesced various stylistic elements from disparate eras into a personal and forward-seeking style. While not an innovator in a macro sense, Lovano has unquestionably charted his own path. His playing contains not an ounce of glibness, but possesses in abundance the sense of spontaneity that has always characterized the music's finest improvisers. Lovano doesn't adopt influences — he absorbs them — so that when playing a standard, he exudes the same sense of abandon as when playing totally free (which, it should be pointed out, he does well, if infrequently). Lovano's most significant achievement is his incorporation of free and modal expressive devices into traditional chord-change improvisation. Tickets are $55 per table, $30 at the bar June 19-20 and $45 at the table, and $30 at the bar June 21-June 24.
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