McCoy Tyner, 1938–2020

When pianist McCoy Tyner died on March 6 at the age of 81, the earth lost one of its most formidable sources of thunder and lightning. Tyner’s thunder, epitomized in the rumble of his left-hand chording and his explosive ostinatos, shook the music of the late 20th century to its core. His lightning, palpable in the flashes of his mercurial right-hand runs, cracked open a divide in the history of jazz piano. As Ethan Iverson, founding pianist of The Bad Plus, put it on his Do the Math blog in 2018, “There was pre-McCoy and post-McCoy, and that was all …