This 1967 quartet was McCoy Tyner's first for Blue Note as a leader, although he had frequently recorded as a sideman for the label—with Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson, and Grant Green, among others. One of the last recordings produced by Blue Note founder Alfred Lion, and Tyner's first as a leader since leaving the legendary John Coltrane Quartet two years before, the session has a special quality. There's something of the Blue Note sound to the group's concentrated intensity, perhaps Lion's contribution as well as engineer Rudy Van Gelder's, while Tyner, a more conservative musician than Coltrane, was integrating the modal and expressionist forms of the Coltrane quartet into more tightly defined compositional patterns. In tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, Tyner found a true peer, another musician with a strong identity whose style represented a similar amalgam of conventional and innovative elements. Together with drummer Elvin Jones, and bassist Ron Carter, they both reassert the hard-bop mainstream with "Four by Five" and the deep blues of "Blues on the Corner" and extend it with the heightened solemnity of "Search for Peace" and the brilliant rhythmic interplay of "Passion Dance."