McCoy Tyner

CD version. Time For Tyner is the third album McCoy Tyner made for Blue Note, recorded in May 1968 and issued the following year. After the expanded ensemble of Tender Moments, with its six-piece horn section, the pianist went the other way and built a quartet with no horns at all. Vibraphone and piano share the front line, which gives the record its ringing, airy surface, yet the playing is fierce. The first half is given to three long Tyner originals, the second to three standards taken apart and rebuilt.

The session took place at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs on 17 May 1968, produced by Duke Pearson and recorded by Rudy Van Gelder. Bobby Hutcherson plays vibraphone, Herbie Lewis bass and Freddie Waits drums. Tyner and Hutcherson had first recorded together two years earlier on the vibraphonist's own Stick-Up!, a July 1966 date that also had Lewis on bass. On this album their partnership goes further, with the two instruments often trading the roles of lead voice and harmonic cushion.

African Village opens the record and runs to about twelve minutes. It rests on the kind of open, modal vamp Tyner had worked on for years in the John Coltrane quartet, with Hutcherson's mallets cutting across the pianist's heavy chords. Little Madimba and May Street complete the run of originals. The line-up then thins out piece by piece. Rodgers and Hart's I Didn't Know What Time It Was is the last quartet track, The Surrey With The Fringe On Top is played by the trio, and Tyner closes alone with I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face.

Tyner had made his Blue Note debut with The Real McCoy in 1967, shortly after leaving Coltrane, and Time For Tyner belongs to the same first run of albums in which he defined his own sound as a leader. Here the vibraphone is not a guest but an equal partner, and the whole album is shaped around that pairing.

This is the Japanese UHQCD (Ultimate High Quality CD) edition from Universal Music Japan, catalogue UCCQ-9640, released in 2024 with remastering credited to Kevin Gray. It comes in a jewel case with an obi strip and the original sleeve notes reproduced on the back inlay, and it plays on any standard CD player.