ALBUM REVIEWS : A Good Mix for Veteran Jazzman

McCOY TYNER

“Prelude and Sonata”

Milestone

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Like a number of veteran performers, pianist McCoy Tyner has decided to rattle the cage with the young jazz lions and see what shakes out. The results, on this late 1994 album, produced for Japanese release, are impressive, with only one noticeable misstep.

Tyner is smooth and affable on several trio tracks with the gifted young bassist Christian McBride and “Tonight Show” drummer Marvin “Smitty” Smith, and briskly interactive with saxophonists Joshua Redman and Antonio Hart. One of the set’s most effective aspects, in fact, is the revelatory quality of Redman’s playing on “For All We Know” and the Chopin “Prelude in E Minor,” the vitality of a young imagination that is growing by leaps and bounds. Although the dynamic between Tyner and Redman is very different from that of the classic Tyner-John Coltrane affiliation, each musician seems powerfully (and understandably) stimulated by the responses of the other.

The misstep here is the inclusion of an absurdly misconceived rendering of the familiar theme from the Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 8 (C minor). Neither Tyner nor Hart--who carries most of the melodic responsibility--appears to know what to do with the theme, once it is stated over a medium groove tempo, and the whole matter winds up in cluttered confusion. But it’s the only point on the album in which the cage rattling fails to produce positive results.

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