HAMMER TIME:

I think I saw Tyner perform live twice: once at an outdoor concert at Lincoln Center, where he was a vigorously pulsing dot in the distance, and later at the Blue Note downtown, where he was only a few feet from me and I could stare, mesmerized, at his thundering left hand. He raised it high over the keyboard, above his head, before sending it hammering down, blasting open the time that followed, filling the bars with cascading showers of high notes. That, more than anything else, was the definitive Tyner gesture: opening the musical measure with that heavy left-hand chord, which was simultaneously a drum, a cymbal, and a signal to the rest of the music about where it should begin and end; more than any pianist save Cecil Taylor, Tyner understood his instrument as a series of pitched drums.

How, from that high distance, did his hand know where to find the chord he wanted when it slammed back down to the piano? But that is the least of his miracles. As Johnny Cash said, "Your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills." That's a humbling truism about all creative work, but the limiting factors are different for each art form. Writers are stuck with a particular vocabulary, a language, and the deep memory of the kinds of sentences they heard growing up. A singer is stuck with the particular resonating chamber that is their body. Tyner was perhaps blessed by being stuck with those catapult hands and an unwavering conviction that rhythm and melody should tell a story, enact a high drama. It can be cheesy at times, but mostly I find I agree with--am glad to be a part of--the story his music tells.

It's enough, more than enough, really, for an artist to simply find a voice, to chisel it out of the noise and to keep it ringing clear across a lifetime. Though he tried lots of modes and moods, Tyner began his professional career in the early sixties as a fully formed artist, and his last albums, from the aughts, are not unlike his first. From the beginning, his musical voice--seeking, earnest, exciting--was his alone. 

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