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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2007

BENJAMIN GIVAN
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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

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