McCoy Tyner

Today And Tomorrow is the fifth album by McCoy Tyner as a leader, released by Impulse! in 1964 while he was still the pianist in the John Coltrane quartet. It joins two very different sessions recorded eight months apart, a trio date and a sextet date, and the contrast between them is the point of the record. One side of Tyner looks back to the standards repertoire, the other towards the broader writing he would develop later.

The trio tracks were recorded at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs on 4 June 1963, with Coltrane's bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Albert Heath. The sextet followed on 4 February 1964, with Thad Jones on trumpet, Frank Strozier on alto saxophone, John Gilmore on tenor saxophone, Butch Warren on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. Bob Thiele produced both, and Rudy Van Gelder was the engineer.

The sextet pieces carry the weight of the album. Tyner's Contemporary Focus and Three Flowers, the latter over ten minutes long, use the three horns as a compact section and leave long stretches to the soloists, with Elvin Jones driving hard underneath. Thad Jones's T 'N A Blues is shorter and looser. The trio pieces are all standards, from Dizzy Gillespie's Night In Tunisia to Autumn Leaves, and When Sunny Gets Blue closes the record as a ballad.

The front line is an unusual one. Gilmore had been the tenor voice of Sun Ra's Arkestra since the 1950s, while Thad Jones had left Count Basie's orchestra only the year before, and Tyner writes for both. Garrison and Elvin Jones, Tyner's colleagues in Coltrane's group, tie the two halves of the album together.

This 2024 edition is part of Verve's Verve By Request series, supervised by Ken Druker. It was remastered for LP by Kevin Reeves at East Iris Studios in Nashville, pressed on 180g audiophile vinyl at Third Man Pressing in Detroit and packaged in a gatefold sleeve.