By Jon Garelick

The McCoy Tyner Legacy Band, in a program called “Blues on the Corner,” had it all: the unrelenting, all-enveloping power that was a hallmark of Coltrane’s bands, but also an attention to dynamics, detail, and, most important, melody.

(l to r): George Garzone, Gerald Cannon, and Francisco Mela, of the McCoy Tyner Legacy Band (not pictured: Benito Gonzalez). Photo: Bota Chen

One tends to think of McCoy Tyner’s music, perhaps unfairly, as a gorgeous torrent: lots of notes played very fast, a sonic shower bath — or to borrow critic Ira Gitler’s phrase to describe the music of Tyner’s old boss, John Coltrane, “sheets of sound.”

But there were subtleties and nuances in Tyner’s music, as there was in Coltrane’s. Ballads and medium-tempo blues were a Coltrane specialty, after all, and Tyner was there for all of it.

Friday’s show (September 12) at the Regattabar by a group calling itself the McCoy Tyner Legacy Band, in a program called “Blues on the Corner” (after one of Tyner’s tunes), had it all: the unrelenting, all-enveloping power that was a hallmark of Coltrane’s bands (and those of his bandmates Tyner and Elvin Jones), but also an attention to dynamics, detail, and, most important, melody. So the music was by turns (and sometimes simultaneously) as forceful as a tsunami and as lyrical as a summer breeze.

The band was organized by drummer Francisco Mela and bassist Gerald Cannon — both longtime members of Tyner’s later bands — along with producer CJ Kelley. They invited Tyner aficionado Benito Gonzalez for the all-important piano chair, and tenor saxophonist George Garzone, Mela’s partner in the Fringe.

The all-Tyner program began with “Fly with the Wind” (from Tyner’s 1976 album of that name with winds and strings), appropriately buoyant in a medium uptempo, grounded by a six-note vamp, and flying via the capacious, anthemic melody line and the fast flourishes in Gonzalez’s right hand. That melody line was never lost in the torrent of arpeggios. Cannon, with Gonzalez and Mela softly comping behind him, began with a fast thrum in the lower register moving into that high-lying melody line, before being rejoined by Gonzalez on the head. Everything spoke to the tune’s optimistic lift and grandeur.

The McCoy Tyner Legacy Band: (l to r): Pianist Benito Gonzalez with George Garzone and bassist Gerald Cannon. Photo: Jon Garelick

Elsewhere, there was a Bud Powell-like boppish glee in the line of the relatively early “Inception” (from 1962). Though Tyner’s “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” has been described in other performances as “pile-driving,” here it had the easy swing of a boogaloo.

With Garzone’s entrance for “Blues on the Corner,” the band assayed its most relaxed tempo yet, and this allowed Gonzalez to take his time, worrying a repeated phrase that unfurled into longer statements. And here Mela’s sensitivity came to the fore: He played his solo in short melodic phrases, playing little figures on his rims as though singing a tune and, in its coda, rubbing his floor-tom’s drum head with his stick to get a more explicit moaning vocal effect. It was a blues solo — you could almost hear the dominant-subdominant chord change in his four-bar phrases and tonal shifts.

The ballad “Search for Peace” also allowed for nice spacious sequences from Gonzalez, breaking up ascending phrases with block chords and a rhapsodic descending phrase that seemed to come out of nowhere, floating and free, which Garzone answered with some soft back-of-the-throat horn yelps and a cracked split tone.

The uptempo “Passion Dance” gave everyone a chance to cut loose, and here Gonzalez (who released a Tyner tribute album in 2018, Passion Reverence Transcendence) was at his high-velocity best, building repeated phrases into explosive climaxes that got the crowd roaring. Garzone responded in kind with broad-toned abandon, and Mela put an exclamation point on the piece with a ferocious hi-hat solo.

An encore of Coltrane’s “Impressions” was another tour de force for the band, a high-proof nightcap, with Garzone turning away from the mic to face Mela for a ferocious sequence that recalled Coltrane with Jones or Rashied Ali — roaring, ecstatic.

Mela told some good stories, too — about the origins of “Blues on the Corner” (it involved the drug dealers who frequented the corner near Tyner’s apartment) and backstage visits from Chick Corea and Cecil Taylor (Tyner was apparently more deeply moved to see Taylor).

It was the kind of one-off “special” show that one hopes can become a regular thing.

Jon Garelick can be reached at garelickjon@gmail.com.