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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.

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Articles
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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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