Chick Corea

Corea's debut as a leader was recorded when he was twenty-four and had been playing around New York as a sideman for a few years, absorbing the hard bop vocabulary while already showing the inclination toward something more open-ended. The quintet he assembled includes two musicians who would remain important collaborators: Joe Farrell, whose saxophone playing has a searching quality that fits Corea's harmonic approach perfectly, and Woody Shaw, already one of the most harmonically advanced trumpeters in post-bop jazz.

The compositions are Corea's own, and they have the signature quality that would characterize all his best writing: a melodic clarity that makes the music immediately attractive even when the harmonic content underneath is complex. The title track, written for his friend Joan Conover, has a straightforward lyrical quality that coexists with the more angular material elsewhere on the record. Steve Swallow's bass and Joe Chambers's drumming provide the elastic rhythmic support that the compositions need without pinning them down.

The record was initially released on Atlantic's short-lived Vortex imprint and received little attention at the time. Heard now it sounds like exactly what it is: the beginning of something important, a musician who knows where he's headed even if the final destination is not yet visible.

The masterpiece of Corea's early period and one of the great piano trio records in jazz, full stop. The trio of Corea, Miroslav Vitous, and Roy Haynes finds a collective language in the space of a single session, the three musicians operating with an independence and a mutual attentiveness that makes the record sound simultaneously composed and spontaneous. Vitous's bass is as melodically active as the piano, rarely functioning as mere harmonic support, and Haynes plays with the loose-limbed precision that had made him one of the most sought-after drummers since the 1950s.

The compositions here represent a step beyond the debut: more rhythmically complex, more harmonically adventurous, structured in ways that leave more room for the improvised interaction. "Steps, What Was" opens the record with a burst of energy that establishes the trio's collective approach immediately, all three musicians contributing equally to the forward motion. "Now He Sings, Now He Sobs" itself is a ballad of genuine emotional weight, Corea finding a register of tenderness that he would visit again and again in subsequent years.

The album was largely overlooked on its original release and took years to find the audience it deserved. It is now recognized as one of the canonical piano trio recordings, the equal of Bill Evans's Village Vanguard work in the quality of collective interaction, though entirely different in emotional temperature: brighter, more extroverted, less melancholy. Corea was twenty-seven when this was made. He had been in New York less than a decade.

The pivot into free jazz was abrupt and deliberate. Corea had just left Miles Davis's band, where he had played electric keyboards on the In a Silent Way sessions, and he arrived at the studio with a completely different agenda: extended improvisation without predetermined harmonic frameworks, collective sound exploration, the abandonment of the chord-melody-rhythm hierarchy that organized the earlier records. Is is the most challenging record in this survey and the most divisive, loved deeply by some listeners and genuinely difficult for others.

The septet format, with Woody Shaw, Hubert Laws, and Bennie Maupin joining Corea, Holland, and two drummers, gives the free playing a density and range of color that a smaller group couldn't have achieved. The musicians listen to each other with extraordinary attentiveness, responding to gestures rather than structures, building and dissolving textures in real time. Shaw's trumpet and Laws's flute create contrasting timbral layers that give the improvisations structural variety even when the harmonic frameworks dissolve.

The three-star rating reflects its difficulty more than any judgment about its ambitions, which are admirable. It is the necessary bridge between the accessible brilliance of Now He Sings and the more refined free playing of A.R.C., and it deserves attention on those terms. Come to it after the other records in this period, not before.

Running concurrently with the more experimental Blue Note work, Sundance finds Corea in a different frame of mind: a larger ensemble, a more compositional focus, and a willingness to write for specific instrumental personalities rather than seeking collective abstraction. Woody Shaw returns from the debut, and his partnership with Corea's piano is as natural as it was three years earlier. Hubert Laws's flute adds a distinctive color to the front line, and Bennie Maupin's tenor rounds out a reed and brass section of genuine variety.

Jack DeJohnette had recently completed his own stint with Miles Davis, and his drumming in 1969 was at a specific peak: he had absorbed the rhythmic freedom of the electric period while retaining the structural clarity that made his work readable in a more conventional group context. The rhythm section of DeJohnette and Dave Holland gives the sessions an authority that lifts the compositions beyond their already considerable written quality.

The record was released on the small Groove Merchant label and had limited distribution, which meant it fell between audiences: too composed for the free jazz camp, too adventurous for those who wanted another Now He Sings. Heard now it occupies a satisfying middle ground, a reminder that the experimental years produced accessible music too.

A year after Is, the trio of Corea, Holland, and Altschul had developed its collective language to the point where the earlier record's rougher edges were smoothed without losing the commitment to freedom. The Song of Singing is the most refined of the three Blue Note trio records, the three musicians now listening to each other with enough familiarity that the group decisions seem to arrive from a single consciousness rather than three separate sources. There are moments on "Sundance" and the title track where the trio achieves a collective flow that is rare in any kind of jazz.

Holland was simultaneously playing with Corea in Circle, the free jazz group that also included Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul, and that experience of sustained collective improvisation had deepened his ability to function without a fixed role. His bass on this record moves freely between rhythmic grounding, harmonic commentary, and melodic independence, sometimes within a single phrase, and Altschul's drumming has acquired a similar flexibility.

The Song of Singing came out shortly before Corea made the decision to dissolve Circle and move toward the more accessible musical language of Return to Forever. It stands as the culmination of the free jazz period, a demonstration of how far the trio had traveled from the exploratory Is and how much was being given up in the pivot that followed.

The first ECM recording and, many listeners feel, the greatest achievement of Corea's free period. The move to Manfred Eicher's label brought with it the recording quality that distinguishes ECM from virtually every other jazz label of the era: the piano has a presence and a clarity, the bass a warmth, the percussion a specificity of attack that makes the music audible in ways that earlier recordings of similar material did not always achieve. Hearing A.R.C. is partly hearing what good sound does for music that depends on texture and nuance.

But the music itself would be exceptional in any sound quality. The trio had by this point developed a collective language as complete and personal as any in jazz, and A.R.C. documents it at peak fluency. The extended improvisation "Nefertiti/73° A Kelvin" builds over twenty-five minutes through zones of density and silence, the three musicians navigating changes of atmosphere with the ease of people who have been having the same conversation for years. Corea's piano here has a percussive directness that places it in a different universe from the romanticism of Bill Evans: he plays with the full weight of the instrument, not just its upper register.

Corea would shortly make the pivot to Return to Forever, and A.R.C. was effectively the last statement of the free period. It closes that chapter with as strong a statement as anyone could have asked for.

Recorded at the same sessions as A.R.C., the solo piano recordings represent a completely different mode of inquiry. Without the trio's collective context, Corea is alone with the instrument and his own musical thinking, and what emerges is the most direct document of his pianistic sensibility available: the touch, the harmonic language, the relationship between structure and spontaneity that would inform everything he did over the next decade. The ECM recording is, again, extraordinary, the piano sound warm and present without being exaggerated.

The improvisations move between reflective slow passages and bursts of rhythmic energy, the transitions between modes happening without warning in ways that feel both spontaneous and necessary. Corea's left hand in the solo context is particularly revealing: no bass player to provide the harmonic foundation, so the left hand does more of the work, and you hear the stride and bebop influences that the trio settings tend to obscure under the more modernist surface.

The two volumes of Piano Improvisations, heard back to back, constitute one of the most complete and revealing documents of Corea's inner musical life. Volume 1 is perhaps the stronger of the two, the improvisations more varied and more consistently surprising. Both are essential for anyone who wants to understand how he thinks.

The second volume, drawn from the same recording sessions, has a somewhat more meditative quality than the first. Corea's improvisations here lean toward longer, slower developments, the melodic material given more room to breathe before being transformed or abandoned. There are pieces that sound like miniature compositions, complete with introduction, development, and conclusion, and others that are more purely exploratory, following an idea wherever it leads without concern for formal arrival.

The contrast with the contemporaneous ECM records by Keith Jarrett, particularly his solo Concert series, is instructive. Both pianists are making solo improvisations in the same label context at nearly the same time, but the emotional registers are entirely different: Jarrett's is more romantic and confessional, reaching explicitly for feeling; Corea's is more objective, more concerned with the musical problem being worked on than with the emotional experience of working on it. Neither approach is superior; they are simply different accounts of what music can do alone with a piano.

Heard alongside Volume 1, the two records form a statement about what acoustic piano can do when freed from the obligations of both the trio format and the composed piece. Together they are among the most important solo piano recordings of the 1970s.

The pivot was decisive and the results were extraordinary. Where the Blue Note free jazz records had reached toward abstraction, Return to Forever pulled back toward melody, rhythm, and the pleasure of communication. The new band brought Brazilian elements into the harmonic language through Flora Purim's vocals and Airto Moreira's percussion, and the effect was an opening-up rather than a selling-out: the music found a warmth and a directness that the free trio, for all its intelligence, did not always have.

Stanley Clarke's bass is the most important single element of the record, his tone and time so distinctive that the album sounds like him as much as it sounds like Corea. He was twenty years old and already playing with a confidence and a technical facility that would make him one of the most influential bassists of the decade. Joe Farrell's saxophone and flute provide the primary melodic voice on many tracks, his playing easy and lyrical, a perfect foil for the more percussive piano.

The critics who had praised the free trio were sometimes cold to this record, but it has aged better than most of the fusion of its era precisely because of the care with which it was made. This is not jazz trying to sound like rock; it is jazz expanding its tonal palette with a specific intention, and the intention is always audible.

The meeting of piano and vibraphone in a duo format is one of the happiest accidents in ECM history, and Crystal Silence is the proof. Corea and Burton had played together casually before the recording, but the session crystallized a musical relationship that would persist through decades and multiple follow-up records. The two instruments share a similar attack-and-decay quality, both producing notes that begin with percussive definition and then sustain and fade, and the overlap between them creates a sound that is paradoxically both sparse and full.

Burton's four-mallet technique allows him to function harmonically as well as melodically, voicing chords that respond to Corea's piano rather than simply tracking the melodic line. The interplay between them is among the most subtle and the most rewarding in this period: neither musician dominates, the music building from the dialogue between them rather than from any predetermined arrangement. Corea's compositions here include "Crystal Silence" and "Senor Mouse," both of which became part of the shared jazz repertoire in subsequent years.

The record was made in the same year as Light as a Feather and the two could hardly be more different in spirit: one electric, tropical, and rhythmically driving; the other acoustic, contemplative, and spare. Both are masterpieces of their kind, and the fact that Corea made both in the same year says something important about his range.

The second Return to Forever record on a major label brought the group to a far wider audience than the ECM debut, and the music justifies the attention it received. "Spain," built on a theme derived from Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, became the most widely recognized of all Corea's compositions, a melody so naturally singable that it immediately entered the jazz standard repertoire. The opening electric piano figure against Airto's gentle percussion is one of the most distinctive sounds in 1970s jazz, and the piece that follows fulfills the promise of that opening completely.

Stanley Clarke's bass on this record is, if anything, more prominent and more inventive than on the ECM debut, his lines melodic and rhythmically independent in ways that push the group forward without the music feeling driven. Flora Purim's vocals have a supernatural warmth, the English and Portuguese lyrics sitting inside the music rather than on top of it. Joe Farrell switches between tenor and flute depending on the material, finding a tone on both instruments that fits the group's aesthetic seamlessly.

Light as a Feather closes this survey at the highest point: a musician who had covered more stylistic ground in five years than most cover in a lifetime, arriving at a synthesis that was entirely his own. The free jazz period was over, the fusion period was at its peak, and the synthesis was both more accessible and more genuinely musical than either camp had expected. The subsequent Return to Forever records went further into electric territory; none of them matched this one.