Journey

McCoy Tyner takes the thundering block chords that made him famous behind John Coltrane and scores them for a full big band, proving the piano attack that once anchored a quartet can drive fourteen horns without losing its weight.

The proof is in "Blues on the Corner," a tune Tyner first cut solo decades earlier, here reharmonized so the brass swells exactly where his left hand used to fall. His writing keeps the rhythm section's Latin pull front and center, and "Samba Dei Ber" lets the horns ride a groove that never softens into cocktail politeness. What could have been a nostalgia exercise instead sounds like a pianist rethinking his own vocabulary out loud. Tyner never dissolves into the ensemble; the band bends to fit him.