Live: McCoy Tyner & Marc Ribot @ Yoshi's, San Francisco

About halfway down the half page of scrawl I took home from last night’s performance of the McCoy Tyner trio with Marc Ribot is a note that made perfect sense at the time. It says, “This is the difference between what is and what should be.” In the clear light of the morning, the stoner epiphany of that sentence seems exactly like the kind of thing you write down during a drug experience -- something so urgent, that life’s needle comes scratching off the record and you have to write it down immediately, fearing that your square, sober self will let the newly discovered answer to life’s mystery slip away. When you wake up the next day, head pounding and tongue thick, it’s happened again: the sagacious wisdom has melted into a bit of nonsense like “this is the difference between what is and what should be.”

My best guess about the note’s origin lies somewhere in the midst of McCoy Tyner’s delicately constructed solo on “Peresina,” a modal tune based on a simple left-handed strut, buried near the end on the appropriately titled 1988 album Revelations. From our side stage, in the very of the front row (a seat which, amazingly, sadly, can be had just by walking in to the late show on a Wednesday), you couldn’t see Tyner’s hands while he played it, only his face, framed by the arm of the propped-up piano lid, and the lid itself, showing the instrument’s hammers in its polished reflection. At 69, Tyner’s playing remains as agile and surprising as it ever was -- chiming clusters of chords and lacework lines that ascend the keyboard one second and are hammered down with a punctuated bass line the next. Even if the sentiment of the note from the performance doesn’t make sense later, it’s a powerful reminder that a great performance can be a transcendent, mind-expanding trip, illusive and impossible to fully revive the day after.

When “Peresina” got done, with verses for Ribot and the rest of the trio, Tyner spoke right up close to the microphone, his voice sounding like a bag of gravel being dragged down a dirt road. “Now I’d like to do a blues I wrote about people hanging on the corner,” he said. “I grew up in Philadelphia where people did that kind of thing. The City of Brotherly Love. People cared for each other, that’s what was going on.”

Maybe he was inspired by this theme or the twisting melody, but Ribot stretched far out on “Blues On the Corner” when it his turn came up, pushing hard against of the driving, bone dry clang of the ride cymbal, playing less like the slightly awkward fourth wheel in a post-bop master class and more like the most inventive, genre defying guitar player of his generation. His playing, like his presence, added a fascinating tension to the set, a meeting artists from backgrounds which contrast as plainly as their outfits -- Ribot in a black leather jacket and Tyner in double-breasted pin stripes.

It certainly didn’t always work. There were times when the unlikely quartet would step on each other's toes while trading solos or stagger to the ending of a tune awkwardly. (Maybe Ribot himself even seemed the most at ease during the encore when he had the stage to himself for a second, when he let loose and went way out, bending the neck of his guitar, improvising lines that were, at times, based wholly on  whispering fret noise.) But, when the hour-long set ended, it there was little question that we’d just witnessed something that rarely happens: artists of different generations, races and musical cultures challenging their personal and aestetic conventions. Maybe therein lies the difference between what is and what should be.