Customer Reviews

Tender Moments (24bt) (Mlps)

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The latest batch of Blue Note/EMI RVG reissues (8/10/04) feature some terrific albums, all of which until now have been out-of-print on CD for some time. In fact, two of the titles, Freddie Hubbard's "Blue Spirits" and this title, McCoy Tyner's "Tender Moments," have been unavailable (aside from a brief reprint in the old Collectors Choice reprint program) for nearly 15 years! Well I must say it is great to finally revisit Tyner's "Tender Moments." This December 1, 1967 session features an extended lineup of six frontline players with rhythm trio, as McCoy seemed to favor larger groups in his post-Coltrane Blue Note days. On this date the pianist is joined by Lee Morgan on trumpet, Julian Priester on trombone, James Spaulding on alto sax and flute, Bennie Maupin on tenor sax, Bob Northern on french horn, Howard Johnson on tuba, Herbie Lewis on bass, and Joe Chambers on drums. Tyner's inventive, modern compositions (all six are his on this disc) are particularly appealing for their delightful, textured horn interplay, with the 'Trane tribute "Mode to John" and "Utopia" being my personal favorites. This is one of those rare Blue Note gems that I have enjoyed for years, and now with this reissue you can too.

"Tender Moments" is a very big change from Mccoy's first on Bluenote. the Players have amuch more abrupt approach to the compositions. Along with Spaulding on Alto and Flute, Morgan on Trumpet, Maupin on Tenor, and Priester on Trombone, is the less familiar French Horn work of Bob Northern and Tuba of Howard Johnson. I give a lot of credit to the tuba because he creates this kind of lifting feeling and the rest of the Horns blend in incredibly well. The coltrane tribute, "Mode To john", is a Modal based tune. The Spontaniety it lacks is made for with complex arrangments. Tyner had an inclusive repertiore of tunes and he experimented with different rhythmns and time signatures. "The High Priest", not to be confused with a Messengers tune of the same name, is a Thelonious Monk influenced piece and incidently sounds very much like a Monk tune. "Utopia" and "All My yesterdays" are standout tracks with great dynamics and fluency. Thankyou bluenote for reissuing great music.

In an interview with McCoy Tyner, he claimed his favorite albums were Fly With the Wind, The Real McCoy and Tender Moments. While the title would lead you to believe its an album of ballads, its quite the opposie. Its post bop big band in the style of Andrew Hill-Passing Ships or Gil Evans before his watered down fusion period. With Lee Morgan as the trumpet on it as well as other classic musicians, this an album for anyone who likes jazz period. Get it while its still available.

If you are the panio player in the top unit in jazz, John Coltrane's, you do what he wants. Playing lots and lots of free jazz. But leave and start making your own albums, and you can do what you want.

Tender Moments, though, is not the ballad album the title may have you thinking. It is more a hard bop take on the blues. Tyner must have found it refreshing to return to music with chord changes, because given where jazz was in 1967, this is pretty straight forward.

That does not mean it does not have a powerful edge. Tyner lines up a fantastic band--James Spaulding, Jullian Presser, Joe Chambers, among others--and this mid-sized band plays great blues.

But this is no conservative hard bop throwback, allthough the driving rhythms and clean changes are hard bop informed. The band gives the album a full sound, and Tyner is not afraid to add chord subtitutions that make Tender Moments edgy and keep the suprises comming.

We can always listen to Love Supreme or Ascention or Sun Ship, but it is great when we can also both return and look forward with an album like Tender Moments.

First off, in my collection, Herbie Hancock was overwhelmingly representative as both a sideman and soloist. I realized this one night when I was listening to Wayne Shorter's "JuJu" and finally noticed the strength of Tyner's muscular style. I had never noticed the piano, which is a rare thing that I miss ANY nuance of ALL instruments (although not in one sitting, of course)within a recording. I contribute this lack of awareness to 1) Wayne Shorter's amazing playing and, more importantly, 2) my growing distaste after awhile for Trane's quartet sound during the time when all those Impulse recordings began to sound the same - you know, those opening chords that all sounded like dramatic openings of THE song? But how many THE songs can you have? This, I found out in Ratliff's incisive biography of Coltrane, was the main reason Tyner finally left Trane, stating that he just wasn't feeling the music anymore and can't play when he can't feel it. Makes sense. so basically, I was never interested in McCoy Tyner because of all that same-sounding work with Trane. An unfair assessment, to say the least - as this album, "Tender Moments", was to show me. WOW, I AM A CONVERT!

Just as Tyner's sound jumped out at me when he worked away from Trane on Wayne Shorter's work, so his compositional brilliance knocked me OUT! I believe Trane's friendship and apprenticeship sort of overshadowed Tyner after awhile, maybe even blighted him a little, because DAMN, this recording is something else altogether, something less homogenous, more jewel-like. This kind of writing is very distinct for someone so young at the time. Tyner says in the liner notes that he'd been "reading some books on composition". Wow. Just like that, huh? Really, if that's the case, then McCoy is a naturally gifted composer - I'm sure others on this webpage were already aware of this, I'm just saying that this album did this for ME, amazed me.

I should note, though, that in particular the sing "Man From Tanganyika" was one of those rare gifts to my ears. I like the whole CD, but this one song I just can't stop listening to. The nine pieces and the way they are arranged is just...what? Perfect in actualizing its intentions. It's very Eastern - and by this I mean African as well as Asian. Spaulding's flute is this texture, made possible by Tyner's doubling underneath it, making it almost ethereal - and speaking of Spaulding, although Lee Morgan is the star horn on this recording date, I personally feel Spaulding's work, especially on this song, is far more impressive than Morgan's, with much more to say and saying it with thought, swagger, and a complete conceptual understanding of Tyner's idea, whereas Lee Morgan is, well, Lee Morgan.

Tyner's solo, which opens the tune, is a brilliant shimmering angular thing in red and orange and yellow, let's say, aligned perfectly with the by turns gleaming and misty rain forest textures of the song. I'm not quite sure, but there might be an "in-sen" scale in there, the Japanese pentatonic scale, actually the koto tuning notes. Let's see...I think what really made me appreciate the mind of Tyner on this tune is the thought behind the way the all the various streams of sound interweave. It makes sense from a metaphorical sense in that literally there are points when the various horns actually weave, which is reminiscent of certain visual patterns prevalent in Africa, visual motifs also akin to the Celtic knots (by extension also a feature of some of Trane's solo style).

After hearing this song, I have VERY little doubt about who was mostly behind the song "Africa" from the "Africa/ Brass" album. Now, although many people note that Dolphy did the arrangements for that song, I've found not one composition in Dolphy's discography that comes near this brilliant cystal clear and complex line(s) of thought. Dolphy tended toward far more dissonance than Tyner (Tyner utilizes dissonance less than Dolphy's manneristic style, just like Trane utilized Bird's babbling schizophrenic call-and-response-type soloing style less than Dolphy's over the top unsubtle style - or good gawd, that horrid flute vibrato, yuck! LOL)."Africa" and "Man From Tanganyika" are of the same cloth, the same weave, a kind of music even my non-jazz hip-hop friends can even dig - I played these one after the other after playing a few Trane songs from different years and in the middle of our chess game, my friend stops to say, "Aw, there we go, who's this? This sounds more modern." And he's right. And although the only credit given McCoy for "Africa" was that Dolphy supposedly arranged the horns based on Tyner's voicings, I think not. How, or where, I wonder, did McCoy GET these ideas? WHY do they sound African? So as a musician, this kind of composition is compelling to me, definitely something to study. I've already started transcribing THIS one. Cool.

All in all, I'll say this: this CD opened my ears and turned me on to McCoy Tyner, and now I can't wait to buy up a whole lot more of his stuff, for SURE! Very enjoyable.

Tender Moments is my least favorite of the music McCoy Tyner recorded for Blue Note - overall, a very strong body of work. It's probably the tamest of his recordings for the label - if you like the polyrhythmic modal grooves and intense saxophone expressions on later albums like Expansions, Enlightenment, or the early Milestones, you'll probably be disappointed. The orchestrations, which echo Gil Evans and Duke Pearson, are generally interesting and thoughtful - someone who is less wedded to the idea of "what a McCoy album should sound like" might like it more than I did. If anything, those that find the early 70s albums to be unrelenting in their intensity might actually find the "tenderness" of this album to be appealing. The lineup is a very strong one though I wouldn't say any of the participants gives a particularly standout performance (I would have subbed Woody Shaw for Lee Morgan, and cut loose Bennie Maupin a little more).

I'd recommend getting Tyner's other Blue Note recordings first, but this album is a worthwhile listen.