Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T10:45:14.257Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Apart Playing: McCoy Tyner and “Bessie's Blues”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2007

BENJAMIN GIVAN
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Jazz pianist McCoy Tyner's improvisation on the theme “Bessie's Blues,” recorded with the John Coltrane Quartet in 1964, exemplifies the traditional Afrodiasporic performance practice of “apart playing.” A formulation of the art historian Robert Farris Thompson, apart playing occurs whenever individual performers enact different, complementary roles in an ensemble setting. For interpretative purposes, the concept helps to provide a cultural context for certain pitch-based formal devices, such as substitute harmonies and playing “outside” an underlying chord or scale, which Tyner uses in the course of his solo.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , May 2007 , pp. 257 - 280
Copyright
© 2007 The Society for American Music

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrahams Roger D., et al. 2006. Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Agawu Kofi. 1995. African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Berliner Paul. 1994. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Brothers Thomas. 1994 “Solo and Cycle in African-American Jazz.” Musical Quarterly 78/3: 479– 509.Google Scholar
2006. Louis Armstrong's New Orleans. New York: W. W. Norton
Caponi Gena Dagel, ed. 1999. Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin', & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press
Chernoff John Miller. 1979. African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Actions in African Musical Idioms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Dean Roger T. 1992. New Structures in Jazz and Improvised Music Since 1960. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press
DeVeaux Scott. 1997. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley: University of California Press
Drouot Alain. “From Jazz Halls to Piano Festivals: An Interview with McCoy Tyner.” Clavier (May/June 2002): 11– 14, 45.
Gal Susan. 1988 “The Political Economy of Code Choice.” In Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives, ed. Monica Heller, 243– 61. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gottschild Brenda Dixon. 1996. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, Conn.: Praeger
Heble Ajay. 2000. Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice. New York: Routledge
Jaffe Andy. 1996. Jazz Harmony. 2nd edn. Tübingen, Ger.: Advance Music
Keil Charles. 1966 “Motion and Feeling Through Music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24/3: 337– 49. Repr. in Keil and Feld, Music Grooves, 53– 76.Google Scholar
Keil Charles. “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music.” In Keil and Feld, Music Grooves, 96– 108.
Keil Charles, and Steven Feld, eds. 1994. Music Grooves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Kernfeld Barry. 1983 “Two Coltranes.” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 2: 7– 66.Google Scholar
Labov William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Levine Mark. 1995. The Jazz Theory Book. Petaluma, Calif.: Sher Music
Malone Jacqui. 1996. Steppin' on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press
Martin Henry. 1996. Charlie Parker and Thematic Improvisation. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press
McDowell Deborah E. 1989. “Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kin.” In Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr. and Patricia Redmond, 51– 70. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
McFarlane Al. “The Black Scholar Interviews: McCoy Tyner.” The Black Scholar 2/2 (October 1970): 40– 46.
Merriam Alan P. 1962 “The African Idiom in Music.” Journal of American Folklore 75/296: 120– 30.Google Scholar
Meyer Leonard. 1989. Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Monson Ingrid. 1996. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Porter Lewis. 1998. John Coltrane: His Life and Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Powell Richard. 1994. “Art History and Black Memory: Toward a ‘Blues Aesthetic.’” In History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O'Meally, 228– 43. New York: Oxford University Press
Rinzler Paul. 1983 “McCoy Tyner: Style and Syntax.” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 2: 109– 49.Google Scholar
Rinzler Paul. 1999 “The Quartal and Pentatonic Harmony of McCoy Tyner.” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 10: 35– 87.Google Scholar
Sidran Ben. 1995. Talking Jazz: An Oral History. New York: Da Capo Press
Slobin Mark. 1993. Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press
Taylor Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann, 25– 73. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press
Thompson Robert Farris. 1966 “An Aesthetic of the Cool: West African Dance.” African Forum 2/2: 85– 122. Repr. in Caponi, Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin', & Slam Dunking, 72– 86.Google Scholar
Tomlinson Gary. 1992. “Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies.” In Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, ed. Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, 64– 94. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Waterman Christopher A. Response to Charles Keil, 1995 “The Theory of Participatory Discrepancies: A Progress Report” Ethnomusicology 39/1: 92– 94.Google Scholar
Waterman Richard Alan. 1952. “African Influence on the Music of the Americas.” In Acculturation in the Americas, ed. Sol Tax, 207– 18. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Wilson Olly. 1992. “The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in African-American Music.” In New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. Josephine Wright and Samuel A. Floyd Jr., 327– 38. Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press

Discography

Coltrane John. 1960. Giant Steps. Atlantic 1311– 2
Coltrane John. 1964. Crescent. Impulse! AS– 66
Coltrane John. 1965. A Love Supreme. Impulse! AS– 77
Coltrane John. 1966. Ascension. Impulse! AS– 95
Coltrane John. 1966. Coltrane Plays the Blues. Atlantic 1382– 2
Coltrane John. 1998. Coltrane: The Classic Quartet—Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings. Impulse! IMPD8– 280
Davis Miles. 1959. Kind of Blue. Columbia CL 1355
Henderson Joe. 1963. Page One. Blue Note 7243 4 98795 2 2