Modal Harmony McCoy Tyner Style

A while back, I featured Bruce Hornsby in a Sunday Under the Covers post. In that post, I mentioned that Hornsby's modal harmonies in that song are reminiscent of McCoy Tyner, and it occurs to me that some folks might not know what that means.

The problem is that it's difficult to explain without getting into boring conversations about scales, triads and chords based on fourths rather than thirds and fifths. On the other hand, it's actually rather easy to explain what you want to listen for in order to figure out if a song or performance involves modal harmonies.

Songs using more traditional, or triadic, harmonies involve progressions of chords that sound distinctly different from each other. Each chord has a definite root that's different from the other chords in the progression, and you can tell when the chord changes happen.

Modal harmonies tend to be more ambiguous, where the chord changes sound more like inversions, or different voicings, of the same chord. You don't hear a distinct change in the root. Often, the entire performance sounds as if it's centered in a single note that serves as a grace note for everything else that's going on in the song. Those of you who are fans of Bill Evans, it's likely this tonal grounding that you find so appealing in his music.

You can hear this in McCoy Tyner's version of Monk's Dream. It has a very different feel from the Thelonious origional (and, as such, probably qualifies as a Sunday Under the Covers tune). When Monk did this, his left hand banged out very distinct root notes that followed a more traditional harmony. Tyner's play seems to have far fewer chordal variations, though there are, in fact, more distinct chords in Tyner's version.

By the way, don't be fooled by the opening graphic. George Benson highlighted the concert, but he didn't play in this particular song, which appears to be an opening introduction to the McCoy Tyner Trio before Benson joins in.