Post by Admin on Feb 13, 2021 10:01:20 GMT -4
Chick Corea, the pioneering keyboardist and bandleader who died on Tuesday at 79, will be forever regarded as a crucial architect of jazz-rock fusion.
It’s a fitting one-line tribute. Whether on his own, leading the collective Return to Forever or accompanying giants like Miles Davis (on landmark albums including “In a Silent Way” and “Bitches Brew”), Corea helped enrich the lexicon of jazz — merging its harmonic language with the heaviness (and amplification) of rock and funk. But no description, even one this broad, can encompass a vision so limitless.
“After all, formal styles are only an afterthought — an outgrowth of the creative impulse,” Corea told The New York Times in 1983. “Nobody sits down and decides to specifically write in a predetermined style. A style is not something you learn so much as something that you synthesize. Musicians don’t care if a given composition is jazz, pop or classical music. All they care about is whether it is good music — whether it is challenging and exciting.”
For more than five decades, Corea modified his sound to follow that simple maxim — chasing whims from bebop to free jazz to fusion to contemporary classical. He recorded close to 90 albums as a bandleader or co-leader. And he always prioritized melody and musicality over empty-calorie showmanship (though few could rival his raw skill on the Fender Rhodes).
Corea and Joe Zawinul form a wall of Rhodes on this slinky, funky cut from Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew,” punctuated by John McLaughlin’s ice-pick guitars and Davis’s sighing trumpet. The rhythm section is so dense, it’s hard to savor it all: two electric basses (Dave Holland and Harvey Brooks), two drum sets (Don Alias and Jack DeJohnette) and the congas of Juma Santos. Good thing it lasts 14 minutes. The keyboardists shift from question marks to exclamation points — one moment prodding against the groove, the next soloing in colorful bursts of noise. “Trust yourself,” Corea said in 2020, was Davis’s philosophy. “When he says, ‘Play what you don’t hear,’ he means, trust your imagination. Trust yourself to say, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I’m just going to do it because it’s fun. Because I love it.’”
RIP Chick Corea
