14. “Rebirth,” McCoy Tyner, from Sahara (1972)

After leaving John Coltrane, pianist McCoy Tyner spent a year touring with Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers, then embarked on a series of post-bop records for Blue Note that turned back the clock on his career. Starting with The Real McCoy (1967)—featuring former bandmate Elvin Jones on drums, Miles Davis’s then-bassist Ron Carter, and Joe Henderson on tenor sax—Tyner recorded a half-dozen albums that resisted not only the experimentation of Coltrane’s late period but also electric instruments and the ascendancy of funk and psychedelic rock. In Tyner’s band, the playing was rhythmically charged; the music was reliably smart and harmonically compelling—but every session sounded a bit like 1964.
 
By the end of the decade, Tyner became increasingly restless, toying with African percussion, wooden flutes, and soaring female vocals on his 1970 album, Asante. In 1972, with his career flagging somewhat, Tyner finally left Blue Note and signed a new contract with producer Orrin Keepnews’s west coast label, Milestone Records—and created the album regarded by many as his very best.
 
Despite consisting mostly of tunes from his band’s standard repertoire, Sahara featured some of Tyner’s most inspired-sounding playing in years. The cover photo reflects the album’s mood: The pianist sits on a wooden crate in a vacant urban lot, surrounded by bare trees, piles of industrial scrap, and chunks of masonry; in his lap is a Japanese koto. As Tyner plays, he looks to his left, contemplating the bleak facades of distant buildings. The image suggests both an expanding world cultural consciousness and the harsh realities of Nixon-era disinvestment in Black communities.
 
That koto on the cover would appear on one track: “Valley of Life,” an exotic-sounding composition that includes reverb-drenched flute melodies and layers of hand percussion. Tyner was not a trained koto player; his approach is intuitive and textural—and seems to echo somewhat the way Alice Coltrane swept and plucked her Lyon and Healy concert harp for albums like A Monastic Trio (1968) and Journey in Satchidananda (1970).
 
“Rebirth,” meanwhile, is Tyner in peak form on piano. Against the frenzied attack of future Weather Report drummer Alphonse Mouzon and the ever-climbing bass lines of Calvin Hill, he delivers crashing salvos of chords with his left hand as his right generates trilling flurries—an ever-shifting wall of sound. Alto saxophonist Sonny Fortune steps in roughly halfway through the five-and-a-half minute running time, parrying with Tyner until the pianist brings the track to its thundering lower-register conclusion.
 
With Sahara, Tyner balanced meditative stillness against waves of fortissimo bomb-throwing, and brought non-western instruments into his traditional quartet. As a result, he created jazz that felt anchored in its historical moment—not aesthetically cutting edge, but not mired in nostalgia, either; just top-flight, intense, personal music, played as if the world might soon burst into flames.