4. McCoy Tyner: “Goin’ Home” (from Asante, 1974)
After John Coltrane’s death in 1967, McCoy Tyner became a torchbearer of the spiritual, Afrocentric jazz that the great saxophonist helped create. The percolating “Goin’ Home,” though, finds Tyner laying down a different groove, thanks in huge part to Ted Dunbar’s bluesy guitar riffs. The song is one of the funkiest in Tyner’s deep catalog, yet it retains much of the cosmic improvisational sense associated with ’60s spiritual jazz, especially in Andrew White’s coiling alto saxophone work, and of course Tyner’s granite-hard block chords and spiraling passages. The percussion-enhanced rhythm section drives the tune into soul-jazz territory.
JazzTimes 10: Great Blue Note Tracks from the 1970s
Paying long-overdue tribute to the label’s most underappreciated era
