Fernando Gros

McCoy Tyner In Hong Kong

Last night we had the chance to see McCoy Tyner in con­cert at Hong Kong City Hall. In my exper­i­ence, City Hall is the best con­cert venue for jazz in Hong Kong and last night was a rare priveedge as Tyner is one of the true living legends of Jazz.

The con­cert itself was short. Advert­ised as an hour and fif­teen, it ran a little over that, but included breaks for the band walk­ing on and off during encores. It’s a small com­plaint I know, but with a group this tal­en­ted there are so many songs and styles they could have covered, it felt like all we got was a taste, not a full meal. Still, leave them want­ing more is the old saying…

Tyner’s impro­visa­tion was less expans­ive than it might once have been, but his rythmnic found­a­tion and the soar­ing beauty of his chord­work were on full dis­play. Tyner really is a musi­cian who has con­trib­uted to the vocab­u­lary of Jazz and last night he showed us what that was all about. He also brought with him an impress­ive, dynamic and music­ally inter­con­nec­ted band.

Gerald Cannon was a fam­ilar voice on the bass, having played with Roy Har­grove, Elvin Jones, Bran­ford Mar­s­alis and others. His play­ing was a con­trolled mix of soldiity and play­ful­ness. Eric Kamau Gravatt was a new name to me on drums. How­ever his dir­ect­ness, ima­gin­a­tion and abilty to evoke a wide pal­lete of sounds from a basic kit was cap­tiv­at­ing. I will be hunt­ing down some of his recordings.

But, in many ways the night belonged to trum­peter Chris­tian Scott, who is one of the most dazzling young stars in con­tem­por­ary jazz. He was respect­ful through­out, shar­ing the lime­light, clearly tuning into Tyner’s voicings and even taking time to move a mis­placed micro­phone on Tyner’s piano.
That said, Scott’s play­ing was regal, ref­er­en­cing the tra­di­tion of bebop without fall­ing back on licks, work­ing the whole range of the trum­pet, includ­ing exten­ded pas­sages in the lower registers and main­tai­ing a high level of artic­u­la­tion and intens­ity. There’s now doubt that the next time Scott visits Hong Kong he will be head­lining in his own right.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 12:54 pm. It is filed under Hong Kong, Jazz, Music Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.