During one of my recent YouTube deep dives I got to revisit this absolutely barnstorming live performance by the late, great McCoy Tyner and his trio, and it’s simply too good to keep it to myself.

For those who’ve yet to come across Tyner: he’s a giant of his field, shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Miles Davies and Herbie Hancock, and he had an equally giant sound to match. His influence (particularly his ‘modal’ harmonic vocabulary and voicing style) helped to profoundly shape the direction of jazz piano during the great decade of change in the 1960s, pushing it forward in bold new ways.

Tyner came of age in Philadelphia, among neighbourhoods where Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk loomed as influences. By the time he joined the John Coltrane Quartet in 1960, he already had a sense of his distinctively “big” sound — strong attack, resonance, voicings built of stacked fourths rather than conventional thirds and sevenths; blisteringly long melodic sweeps blending blues, bebop, modal jazz, African and Asian influences with this constant, powerful sense of forward momentum.

There’s something unapologetically joyful and maximalist in how Tyner plays, compared to say Monk (oblique) or Miles (stoical). It’s an assertive style: thick, rhythmic, almost percussive. In Tyner’s world, the piano isn’t a polite tool for sophiticated titillation; it’s a bulldozer shaping terrain to trek and inhabit. His harmonic choices feel open, suspended, clustered, expansive, a whole new dramatic architecture of sound. According to jazz historian Ted Gioia, Tyner “delighted in ambiguous voicings … often played with a thunderous two-handed attack that seemed destined to leave permanent marks in the keys”. 

One of the things I find especially compelling in his performance style is the balance between power and vulnerability. He can open a passage with a great wave of chordal energy, and then fade into a whisper-like moment of suspended melody, building up, pausing, breathing, then surging again.

For a pianist, Tyner’s work is instructive. He didn’t merely adopt the accepted piano role; he extended it, and that extension has echoes in virtually every jazz pianist who came after him. The chordal language he developed — quartal voicings, open left-hand textures — has become something of a toolkit in modern jazz. Yet Tyner remains distinct, because his sound isn’t just about technique — it’s about personality, conviction, and the sheer force of sound.

Watching him live, you sense that Tyner is ever-aware of the moment, of what’s just happened and what might come, and how he can nudge the music forward, sideways, into an unexpected corner. I found myself noticing small moments: a left-hand ostinato that shifts slightly, a right-hand motif that leaps wide then resolves gently, a sustain pedal pressed just enough to let the sound bloom but not blur. And in those details is the hallmark of Tyner’s craft: he makes the piano sound like a whole orchestra is playing, roars, whispers and all.

Ultimately, though, Tyner’s brilliance lies not only in what his hands did, but in what his mind and spirit did through the piano. Tyner’s playing isn’t just flashy or virtuoso for its own sake: there’s real soul here. In his time with Coltrane (notably albums like ‘A Love Supreme’) the music sought something beyond entertainment, something spiritual, almost transcendent. That sense of purpose or drive comes through again here: the pianism isn’t disconnected from feeling. That really matters.

People often talk about Tyner’s power, but I don’t think “power” is exactly the right word. It’s something closer to conviction. He sounded like someone who knew what the piano could do. Even when he played a single chord, those famously open, wide-spaced voicings he loved, the sound has a kind of inevitability to it, like this was the only chord that could have been played in that moment. Not flashy, not ornamental, but grounded.

And that grounding feels deeply personal. Tyner grew up in a musical world shaped by church, community, and a certain seriousness about life. There’s a kind of prayerfulness in his music, not sentimental, not soft, but searching. When he plays, the piano becomes a site of inquiry. He keeps returning to a few tonal centers, cycling through them like someone circling a thought that can’t quite be spoken, and the piano his way of thinking through it. He’s not trying to convince you of his taste or his brilliance or his knowledge. He isn’t arguing for the music. He is inside it, and the meaning comes from the act of inhabiting sound fully and without self-consciousness.

So when we talk about Tyner’s influence, the quartal voicings and the modal intensity and the unmistakable left-hand power yada yada yada… these are only the surface. The deeper influence is the sense that the piano is a place where you go to understand something about the world—or yourself. A site of personal truth-telling. A place where you don’t need to embellish — just to listen, to lean in, to let sound carry weight.

Happy Sunday!

Will