Alfred McCoy Tyner was born December 11, 1938, in Philadelphia, the eldest of three children of Jarvis and Beatrice Tyner. His mother ran a beauty salon and encouraged his piano study; he began formal training at 13 at the West Philadelphia Music School and continued at the Granoff School of Music, studying theory and harmony. A neighbor in his own North Philadelphia block was bebop pianist Bud Powell, whose playing left a direct mark on the teenager, alongside the percussive attack of Thelonious Monk. At 17 Tyner converted to Ahmadiyya Islam and took the name Suleiman Saud, continuing to perform professionally as McCoy Tyner. As a teenager he led a group called the Houserockers and began working around Philadelphia with Lee Morgan and Jimmy Heath.

Tyner met John Coltrane in the summer of 1955; Coltrane, twelve years older, became what Tyner later called "like a big brother," and the two had an understanding that Tyner would join any group Coltrane eventually led. In 1960 Tyner spent roughly six months with the Jazztet, the co-led group of Benny Golson and Art Farmer, appearing on Meet the Jazztet, before Coltrane called him to join his newly formed quartet, replacing pianist Steve Kuhn. With bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones rounding out the group by late 1961 and early 1962, Tyner became the pianist of what is now known simply as the classic Coltrane Quartet, the most influential small group in jazz's modal era. The quartet toured almost continuously between 1961 and 1965 and recorded a run of albums now considered foundational: My Favorite Things (1961, Atlantic), Coltrane "Live" at the Village Vanguard (1962, Impulse!), Ballads (1963), John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman (1963), Live at Birdland (1964), Crescent (1964), A Love Supreme (1964), and The John Coltrane Quartet Plays (1965). Of A Love Supreme Tyner later said the band "had reached a very high level by that time" and that Coltrane "wanted to dig deep and bring us up to another level." Through the same years he was already recording as a leader for Bob Thiele's Impulse! label: Inception (1962), with Art Davis and Elvin Jones; Reaching Fourth (1962-63), with Henry Grimes and Roy Haynes; Nights of Ballads & Blues (1963); Today and Tomorrow (1964), which folded in a horn section including Thad Jones and John Gilmore; Live at Newport (1963), on a various-artists bill that put him alongside trumpeter Clark Terry; and McCoy Tyner Plays Ellington (1965).

Coltrane's music moved toward increasingly free, atonal textures in 1965, adding a second drummer and dense group improvisation that Tyner felt was crowding out the quartet's interplay. "I didn't see myself making any contribution to that music," he said years later. "All I could hear was a lot of noise. I didn't have any feeling for the music, and when I don't have feelings, I don't play." He left before the end of 1965 and was replaced by Alice Coltrane, Coltrane's wife. The following two years were lean ones financially; Tyner has said he briefly considered driving a taxi to support his family. The turn came at Blue Note, where he re-established himself as a bandleader on his own terms: The Real McCoy (1967), with Joe Henderson, Ron Carter, and Elvin Jones, is now regarded as one of the defining post-bop piano albums of its decade; Tender Moments (1967) and Time for Tyner (1968) followed, and Expansions (1968, released 1969) brought in Wayne Shorter, Gary Bartz, and Woody Shaw. Extensions followed in 1970.

Signing with Orrin Keepnews's Milestone label in 1972 opened Tyner's most commercially successful period. Sahara (1972), on which he doubled on koto, flute, and percussion alongside Sonny Fortune, sold beyond typical jazz numbers, was named DownBeat's Album of the Year, and brought his first two Grammy nominations. Nineteen albums for Milestone followed across the decade, among them Echoes of a Friend (1972, a solo-piano tribute to Coltrane), Song for My Lady and Song of the New World (both 1973), Enlightenment (1973, recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival with Azar Lawrence), Sama Layuca (1974, with Bobby Hutcherson and Buster Williams), Atlantis (1975), Trident (1975, on which he played harpsichord and celesta), Fly with the Wind (1976, a large orchestral date arranged with strings and Hubert Laws on flute), and Supertrios (1977), a studio summit pairing him separately with the rhythm sections of Ron Carter/Tony Williams and Eddie Gomez/Jack DeJohnette. He turned briefly to major labels in the early 1980s, recording La Leyenda de la Hora (1981) and Looking Out (1982, featuring a guest appearance by rock guitarist Carlos Santana) for Columbia.

Tyner spent the 1980s and 1990s leading working trios, most often with bassist Avery Sharpe, and recorded Blues for Coltrane: A Tribute to John Coltrane (1987, Impulse!) with Pharoah Sanders, David Murray, Cecil McBee, and Roy Haynes, which won the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance in 1988. Further Grammys followed for Blues for Coltrane itself, The Turning Point (1992) and Journey (1993), both with his own big band, and Infinity (1995). A run of Telarc recordings from 1998 to 2003 explored Latin jazz, trio, and solo formats, and Illuminations (2004), with Christian McBride, Lewis Nash, Gary Bartz, and trumpeter Terence Blanchard, won a fifth Grammy. His final recordings, for his own McCoy Tyner Music/Half Note imprint, appeared between 2004 and 2007, after which he continued touring and performing without releasing further studio albums. He was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2002 and received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music. McCoy Tyner passed away at his home in Bergenfield, New Jersey, on March 6, 2020, at age 81.

Tyner built a piano vocabulary that reshaped how jazz pianists voice harmony: stacked fourths and quartal chords in place of standard tertian harmony, a low, percussive left hand that could function almost like a second bass, and a right hand capable of both hard-driving pentatonic runs and long, singing melodic lines. Jazz historian Kevin Whitehead described his sound as "heavy, but buoyant, billowing like blue smoke," noting that "his piano could toll like church bells." That vocabulary, forged inside the modal freedom of the Coltrane Quartet, became one of the most widely copied piano languages in jazz; pianists including Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, John Hicks, and Kenny Barron all absorbed elements of it, and it continued to shape younger players such as Vijay Iyer decades later. Tyner drew his own harmonic curiosity from Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky as much as from jazz, and later in his career folded in instrumentation and rhythms from Japan, Africa, and Latin America, doubling on koto, harpsichord, and celesta on his 1970s Milestone albums; he was notably resistant to electronic keyboards, saying "emotionally I couldn't function on them." He remained a Steinway artist for fifty years, recognized by the company with a gold medallion, and DownBeat and the broader jazz press consistently ranked him among the small handful of pianists, alongside Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk, who defined the instrument's postwar vocabulary.