Chick Corea -The Downbeat Obituary by Ted Panken

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Corea probably did more to expand the role of alternative keyboards in Jazz than any other pianist. A sensitive player with a singing tone and crisp technique, Corea successfully adapted himself to the electric piano and synthesizers, using them in a way that preserved his jazz feeling and personal voice. 

Corea epitomized the "keyboardist," a term that began to replace "pianist" on record jackets and in jazz criticism during the mid-1970's. There were even critics and press agents who, for emphasis, coined the mouthful "multi keyboardist." While several other individuals warrant the title of keyboardist - for example, Ramsey Lewis, Herbie Hancock, and Josef Zawinul - these jazz pianists gravitate to rhythm-and-blues or rock with a synthesizer at their fingertips. Corea fits the description of (pardon the expression) "Jazz multi keyboardist" better than anyone else.

Like his music,  Corea was energetic, extroverted, and fun-loving.

The following Obituary of Chick by Ted Panken appeared in the February 11, 2021 edition of Downbeat.

© Copyright ® Downbeat - Ted Panken, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Chick Corea, one of the most beloved and decorated jazz artists in history, passed away Feb. 9 [2021]. He was 79.

In a post on his Facebook page, representatives of the family reported that the legendary keyboard artist died from a rare form of cancer that had been discovered very recently.

“Throughout his life and career, Chick relished in the freedom and the fun to be had in creating something new, and in playing the games that artists do,” the post stated. It went on to say that Corea had relayed a message to his fans before passing.

“I want to thank all of those along my journey who have helped keep the music fires burning bright,” Corea said. “It is my hope that those who have an inkling to play, write, perform or otherwise, do so. If not for yourself, then for the rest of us. It’s not only that the world needs more artists, it’s also just a lot of fun.

“And to my amazing musician friends who have been like family to me as long as I’ve known you, it has been a blessing and an honor learning from and playing with all of you. My mission has always been to bring the joy of creating anywhere I could, and to have done so with all the artists that I admire so dearly —this has been the richness of my life.”

It’s quite possible that no jazz musician ever conceived, composed and/or performed with more top-notch bands than pianist-keyboardist-composer Armando Anthony “Chick'' Corea, who was born on June 12, 1941. An NEA Jazz Master who won 23 Grammy awards, and a treasure trove of Downbeat Readers and Critics poll honors, Corea’s conception of jazz was, as he told Downbeat in 2017, “a spirit of creativity.” He continued: “Great art is made when the artist is free to try whatever techniques he wants, and combine things anyway he wants. That makes life interesting and a joy. I try to live that way as best I can. I don’t always succeed. I would like others to acknowledge my freedom to be myself and try new things anytime I want to, and I try to treat other people that way.”

Corea once said of himself, “I was, and still am, a blotter for creative music and new ideas in music.” He created a hybrid vocabulary all his own that embodied a global range of reference—Bach and bebop coexisted with Bartók and the blues, Mozart and montunos, Ravel and rumba, Stravinsky and samba, all tempered with the Spanish tinge. He was master of his instrument, able to caress a lyric passage with the delicacy of a bel canto singer or articulate a wide array of grooves with the precision and grace of a tango dancer. His hands were completely independent, and he tossed off fleet embellishments with no apparent effort, though he never showed off, never deployed his enviable technique as an end unto itself. In any context, Corea was above all a musical storyteller, deploying whichever keyboard he used as a sound carrier, a tool of his imagination.

Corea’s music was the sum total of his personal journey, which began in Boston, where his father Armando, a trumpeter, led a successful dance band. Coming of age, he soaked up the radical stylistic and compositional strategies of Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver. He applied these lessons on jobs with his father’s band and with Boston’s community of progressive musicians. He moved to New York in 1959. While studying Bartók and Stockhausen at Juilliard, he played Afro-Cuban music with legendary conguero Mongo Santamaria and funky bebop with trumpeter Blue Mitchell. He made his first recording, Tones For Joan’s Bones, in 1966, the same year he started touring internationally with tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, who recorded his compositions “Litha” and “Windows” on Sweet Rain. In 1968, after a summer tour with Sarah Vaughan, Corea recorded more original music with bassist Miroslav Vitous and drummer Roy Haynes on Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, a modern classic that became a signpost for every subsequent generation of pianists.

Soon after, Corea replaced Herbie Hancock in the Miles Davis Quintet on the recommendation of drummer Tony Williams, a Boston friend. During the next eight months he participated on the transitional albums In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, which established the template within which, over the next decade, the fusion movement took shape. In performance with Davis, Corea experimented with electronic instruments barely out of the beta-testing stage, and stretched form to the limit within the band’s freewheeling flow. Then he spent a year exploring ways to improvise freely on atonality and timbral extremity in the collective acoustic quartet Circle, which included Anthony Braxton, Dave Holland and Barry Altschul.

While in Los Angeles with Circle in 1971, Corea assimilated the precepts of Scientology, left the group and transitioned abruptly to a populist conception, making a permanent commitment to melody, structure and consonance, as documented on two intensely meditative solo albums for ECM (Piano Improvisations, Volumes 1 and 2) and on the ECM albums Crystal Silence—an extraordinary duo recital with vibraphonist Gary Burton—and its 1979 follow up, Duet. In 1972, he recorded the eponymous album Return To Forever, named for the Latin-inflected fusion super-group for which he composed such enduring favorites as “Spain,” “La Fiesta'' and “500 Miles High.”

Inspired by McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, Corea formed a second, plugged-in version of Return To Forever that included Bill Connors and then Al DiMeola on electric guitar with which he recorded the funk-rock inspired Hymn of The Seventh Galaxy, Where Have I Known You Before, No Mystery and Romantic Warrior. In 1976, Corea presented his personal jazz-flamenco hybrid on My Spanish Heart, which included Jean-Luc Ponty on electric violin, vocalist Gayle Moran and drummer Steve Gadd, who also propelled Corea’s hit LPs The Leprechaun, The Mad Hatter and Friends.

As the ’70s and ’80s progressed, Corea continued to contribute consequentially to the canons of plugged-in fusion and acoustic hardcore jazz. In 1981, he recorded Three Quartets with tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker, bassist Eddie Gomez and Gadd, as well as Trio Music, on which he reunited the trio with Vitous and Haynes to play a suite of collectively improvised trios and duos along with seven Thelonious Monk compositions. 

In 1982 he recorded three double piano improvisations with Friedrich Gulda, the Austrian jazz virtuoso and Mozart specialist on The Meeting. Between 1986 and 1991, Corea recorded six albums with the Elektric Band, whose members included bassist John Patitucci, guitarist Frank Gambale and drummer Dave Weckl.

As the 1990s progressed, Corea transitioned into the inclusive mindset that would inform his voluminous musical production in the 21st century, when he spent large blocks of time on the road, consistently navigating multiple stylistic environments, moving back and forth between electric and acoustic feels, writing books of music for various duo projects with old and new friends, re-contextualizing iconic units from his distinguished past and also creating new ensembles.

In 1997, he assembled a group with Kenny Garrett, Joshua Redman, Wallace Roney, Christian McBride and Roy Haynes to play his arrangements of music by Bud Powell, his early hero, as documented on the album Remembering Bud Powell. In 1999, he formed the Origin Sextet with members of bassist Avishai Cohen’s band, which included saxophonist Steve Wilson, trombonist Steve Davis, drummer Jeff Ballard and Cohen. The group also included woodwind players Tim Garland or Bob Sheppard. This setting motivated Corea to compose a new book of harmonically sophisticated music that melded Spanish, North African, and Pan-American flavors with blues and bebop as documented on the studio album Change and the location album Live At The Blue Note.

After 2000, Corea recorded solo piano CDs of standards and original music; piano duos with Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Béla Fleck, Hiromi Uehara and Stefano Bollani; and trios with Cohen and Ballard, McBride and Steve Gadd, Patitucci and Antonio Sánchez, Gomez and Jack DeJohnette, McBride and Ballard, Gomez and Airto Moreira, Hadrien Feraud and Richie Barshay. In 2013, he convened Gomez and Paul Motian for an homage to Bill Evans titled Further Explorations.

In 2001, Corea celebrated his 60th birthday by presenting nine bands in two weeks at New York’s Blue Note documented on the double-CD, 9-DVD package, Rendezvous In New York. In 2011 he observed his 70th birthday with a 10-band extravaganza at the Blue Note from which Corea culled material for The Musician, a 3-CD release that includes a penetrating DVD documentary by Norwegian director Arne Rostand. In 2016, he Corea again returned to the Blue Note, marking his 75th birthday by interacting with 15 different personnel configurations over an eight-week span.

During his 2016 Blue Note residence, Corea revisited and re-contextualized the Elektric Band, the Three Quartets band (with saxophone wunderkind Ben Solomon), and his Leprechaun Band of the 1970s. He honored his Miles Davis tenure in highbrow flow with Kenny Garrett, Wallace Roney, Mike Stern, Marcus Miller and Brian Blade. He reprised a project with Gary Burton and the Harlem String Quartet and reimagined Return To Forever in two iterations—acoustic, with Hubert Laws, Ravi Coltrane and Cohen; electric with McLaughlin, Victor Wooten and Lenny White. He played duos with McLaughlin, Rubalcaba, Herbie Hancock, and Brad Mehldau; engaged Marcus Gilmore, Tyler McFerrin and Yosvany Terry in four tabula rasa “experiments in electronica”; navigated Erlend Skomsvoll’s phantasmagoric arrangements of his pieces with the 13-piece Trondheim Orchestra; and presented the recently assembled Flamenco Heart, with maestros Jorge Pardo and Nino Josele.

In a conversation for a 2017 article framed around the Afro-Caribbean focused album Chinese Butterfly, a DownBeat correspondent asked Corea how he kept up with his exhausting schedule.

“I don’t know how to answer other than to say that it’s a joy,” Corea said. “If I could avoid commercial airlines, I’d stay on the road the whole year. Most of the guys who played with me are friends I’ve played with before, either a little or a lot. The way a lot of us play together, the tune doesn’t matter. We’ll have a short rehearsal at soundcheck, and not worry about how perfect the music sounds. What matters is that we know what we’re doing, and then just get off into never-never-land.”

Still at the top of his game well into his 70s, that project earned him the Jazz Artist and Jazz Album of the year in the 2018 DownBeat Critics Poll. Corea was voted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame by its readers in 2010.

Survivors include his wife, the vocalist, keyboardist and songwriter Gayle Moran Corea. DB”

Chick Corea - Music Without Limits - The Economist Obituary

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved

Chick Corea died on February 9th

The jazz pianist, improviser and composer was 79

Obituary

Feb 20th 2021 edition

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“The instrument was new and shiny, trailing black cables across the stage, and Chick Corea did not much like the look of it. Nor, as he sat down and tapped the keys in his clear, springy style, did he much like the sound of it. The year was 1968, he was in trumpeter Miles Davis’s band, and he was sitting at a Fender Rhodes electric piano.

This was the future, though. He and Miles had been wondering for a while whether jazz could move authentically from acoustic instruments to electric, fuse with rock and rhythm ‘n’ blues, and thus bring in audiences of thousands. A few more notes and runs, and he began to like it fine. They tried it out together on an album called “Filles de Kilimanjaro”; then, by the early 1970s, he was playing a Rhodes in his own band, called Return to Forever, with Stanley Clarke and Bill Connors (later Al di Meola) on electric guitars and Lenny White on drums. They looked like any other shaggy tight-trousered rock group of the time. But when they launched into his “Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy” in 1973 he began to realise what they had done. This jazz was so new and so exciting that it made the hairs stand up on his arms. Under his wiry control at the keyboards, challenging, beaming, wriggling his shoulders with delight (“Chick” came from “Cheeky”, which he was), the band became his Mothership, adventuring in the limitless space where all musical styles flowed round each other.

That adventure was to last a lifetime. Over the decades he won 23 Grammys and 67 nominations for his reinvigoration of jazz. He played to packed houses the world over, touring with barely a break. Yet he found it odd to be celebrated as a jazz-fusion pioneer, as if you could say where one sort of jazz ended and another began. He treated music more like a swimming pool, where he just jumped in and had fun.

Fusion, in any case, went on all the time. As soon as you played a piece with anyone, you exchanged ideas. As a young player in New York in the 1960s he had learned from everyone he gigged for: from Stan Getz, who tamed his wildest side and taught him melodic simplicity, to Mongo Santamaria, who shaped his African-Cuban instincts with the beat of a conga drum. (He felt so passionately Spanish, or Cuban, by the end of his gigs in Harlem that it was odd to think his ancestry was Italian.) Even the “older guys”, Mozart, Chopin, Scriabin, were still teaching him, his kindred spirits. He once wove Mozart’s Sonata in F major into Gershwin’s “The Man I Love”, and was amazed at how well they went together.

In music, jazz especially, one exploration naturally led to another. He had only to think how he composed, hearing a tune in his head, playing off it, adding on, doodling with crayons to jog his creativity along. Sometimes he wrote phrases down, or composed at a keyboard so they were stored. All too often, though, he couldn’t catch them. Music, like a waterfall, never stayed still, and nor did bands. But that was good. Every change of players brought in something fresh. An Egyptian snare drum sent his music in one direction, a flute in another. He tried duos with a vibraphone-player, Gary Burton, and a banjoist, Bela Fleck, to see what strange, thrilling sounds came through. When he set up an online academy later and asked the young to send in questions, it was at least partly to provoke new thoughts. He welcomed wrong notes, didn’t much mind miscues: they could pitch him down a different path.

That encounter with the Rhodes piano had, nonetheless, been dramatic for him. It came just after he had taken up Scientology and, with it, began to wonder about the effect he could have in the world. He had never wondered about it before. Growing up in Chelsea, Massachusetts, he spent hours experimenting on the piano, alone in his bedroom into which the piano, like a spacecraft, had had to be hoisted by a crane. His father was a Dixieland trumpeter; music sang round the house, and the joy it gave him did not seem to need sharing. Now he thought it did. Music was a story he could tell, to fill people’s imaginations. He noticed, too, how stars like the Beatles sold themselves as entertainers to huge crowds, while jazz-players still haunted their smoky clubs. He wanted to play innovative, heart-lifting jazz on a rock-star scale, too.

To the fury of purists (people with no curiosity, he thought) jazz fusion became a great commercial success. But he was still exploring. Even as fusion arrived he was playing avant-garde acoustic stuff, indulging his wild, atonal, piano-string-plucking side with a group called Circle. Later on, with fusion all the rage, he played sessions with his friend Herbie Hancock on a couple of concert grands, duels of improvisation on anything from Duke Ellington to Bartok’s “Mikrokosmos”. He loved the family rapport of bands, but also needed every so often to check out the world alone. Synthesisers quickly followed the Rhodes piano, but he seldom gave up the chance to commune with a Steinway—even if sometimes in trainers, or in one of his Hawaiian shirts.

In short, he was not to be tied down, not even to success. His most famous and popular song was a number called “Spain”, from 1973. It had come to him in the usual random way, as he was trying out the second movement of Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez”. He added this and that, put in other rhythms, and the piece rolled out from there. Yet its very popularity, once it was recorded, froze it in place. Anxiously he rearranged, reinvented, and in 1999 scored it for the London Philharmonic Orchestra. But in the end it was not a piece for free adventuring any more.

That was the vital thing. As late as 2014 he astonished one critic by saying, as he strolled onstage for a two-hour solo concert, that he had no plan. That was usually the case. No plan or, if he was with a band, only last-minute rehearsals. He wanted to be surprised by what would happen if, say, he started improvising from the hesitant first bars of Chopin’s Mazurka in A minor. Even if he felt at home with the venue and the crowd, he wanted to approach with his sharp, searching fingers a world he had never visited before. And with his first note, like that first note on the Fender Rhodes, spring over any doubt, and take the audience with him.” 

Chick Corea - The Chameleon by Mike Zwerin

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Chick Corea is one of the most prodigious performers and prolific composers of our time. The recipient of 15 Grammy Awards and nominated a total of 51 times, Chick Corea is best known for his work with Return to Forever, Origin, the Elektric Band, his duo with Gary Burton and his numerous super trios and quartets. Corea has been a transformative force in music for over 50 years and has worked in many styles and genres, with musicians from the jazz, classical and pop music worlds.

The late Paris-based jazz musician and International Herald Tribune writer Mike Zwerin posted a 41-week series entitled Sons of Miles to Culturekiosque Jazznet. In this series, Zwerin looks back at Miles Davis and the leading jazz musicians he influenced in a series of interviews and personal reminiscences. Here is the Chick Corea piece in that series. It was published on May 14, 1998 so add 20 years to any math in the article. 

“Chick Corea likes to meet his targets. Controlling his own destiny is essential to him. He's sort of like a corporation that way. He is a corporation. A hip one, but still...

If he decides in advance to start a piano solo with a certain kind of feeling, but then for some reason, right or wrong, objective or subjective, finds something else at the last minute, he feels he let himself down somehow. Like he didn't have the nerve or the energy or the smarts to see it through. Weird? This may sound over-disciplined for a jazz musician, but he is in fact anything but predictable. 

Since the early '70s, when he recorded "In A Silent Way" with Miles Davis's first rock-oriented band, and right after that his own jazz-rock fusion group Return to Forever (RTF) launched him into the big time, he has grown into one of the most eclectic, influential and respected figures on the scene.

There are, it should be noted, people who do not approve of his being a Scientologist, and working for their cause. But he tends to keep his beliefs to himself. It would be difficult, in any case to preach to jazz musicians, who can make a religion out of Devout Skepticism. His flutist and reed player the late Joe Farrell once told him: "Hey, man. Don't lay that Scientology shit on me." 

As a leader and soloist, Corea has switched between electric and acoustic bands, acoustic and electric keyboards, solo improvisational concerts, and post-bop, Latin, electro-pop and funk styles. He also writes and records children's songs and records and presents recitals of classical music. 

Discipline even extends to breaking discipline. Moving contrary to ecological currents, Corea started to smoke cigarettes in June, 1993, after years of abstinence. Not that he considered them good for his health; he just remembered how much he used to enjoy smoking. He intended to stop the following June and you better believe he did it. He has been called "The Chameleon." 

"People have their own taste and the basic freedom to change it at any given moment," the Chameleon said. "I do not consider someone who likes one color one day and another the next fickle. That's the challenge when you are presenting people with your ideas. It takes guts and intelligence to change your mind in public. 

"Here's what I have to offer today and here's how I put it across. I don't like to be forced into one bag or another. Music is a process rather than one song or an album. One offering is only a part of a stream of offerings."

John Patitucci, electric bass, and David Weckl, drums, built strong reputations as fusion players with Corea's "Elektric Band." But then they became the battery of his "Akoustic Band," Patitucci having switched to the string bass. Old bags were continually being traded in around Corea.

He likes life "crisp, crystal clear and to the point." Down Beat magazine called him "jazz's most protean and unpredictable character," going on to quote him: "I base everything I do - my whole art of music - on the communication that emanates from me and my group straight to the listener....So whatever [instrument] I'm playing is of very secondary consideration." His friend and colleague the vibraphonist Gary Burton called him "the most prolific and versatile of any modern jazz musician."

Sitting in the lobby of a fancy Parisian hotel, one that is more often host to rich rock musicians, Corea puffed an American Spirit cigarette ("organically grown tobacco, no additives in the paper"). Looking clean, fit and bright he takes enough time to carefully consider what he talks about. 

(For parenthetical example, about John Coltrane: "The reason any of us go into an art form is to find the freedom to create something we like. It was inspiring to hear Trane follow through his creation so consistently and thoroughly on such a high level of finesse and development.")

Corea created Stretch Records - a subsidiary of GRP, a subsidiary of MCA, a subsidiary of Universal (so it goes in the multinational world) - as a showcase for his own bands and also the people who worked with him. It made sense, he had already built a state-of-the-art recording studio. 

He was only a consultant, he had no ambitions to produce. He did not want to change his basic life as a performing musician. Most of all it was about karma: "Every musician of value has in mind where he wants to go with his own creation. If that instinct is ignored within a group, and the members are only allowed to play what is required in the group context, the leader's context, the group becomes stilted very quickly." 

So he always tried to help the guys in his bands with their own projects. His management team was very active dealing with their recordings and tours as well as his own. His self-assurance was impressive - competition was not a threat. All the more so for his utter lack of pomposity. He seemed to be plugged into good sense like a computer with its printer. 

The mechanical implications of that simile may seem a bit simplistic. But machines have been very important in Corea's career. For example, the expression "plugged-in" assumes a literal as well as a figurative connotation in his case.

The image of Corea that somehow stays in the mind of someone who has known him for awhile is in a studio with Keith Jarrett, Joe Zawinul and Herbie Hancock recording on electronic keyboards with Miles. They are producing a veritable cascade of highly reverbed wah-wah spinoffs. Visually, it appears as though the three of them are being sucked into a spaghetti-like tangle of wires connecting a cornucopia of fancy and state-of-the-art hardware. And they are loud. 

They also became popular and expensive. Some people accused them of being, so to speak, expensive hookers - doing what they were doing for money not love. That was partially jealousy of course. Everybody wanted that heavy bread. Those guys left Miles's band with a graduate degree in Pricing. 

In the late '70s, on the basis of RTF's fusion sales record, he was given what Corea called a "big-time advance" by Warner Brothers. But while the company was expecting a sort of RTF2, he was by then interested in making acoustic chamber jazz. The first two records under the deal did not sell well. 

The balance between the money and the product was "way out of whack," he said. "When a record doesn't make its money back, if that goes on for awhile, then a musician is going to feel like his product is no good. The financial reality tends to invalidate the musical value. Eventually it puts the musician in a frame of mind where he uses his energy trying to make music that isn't really his." 

Even though Warners was committed to four more albums - Corea had engaged a "big-time lawyer" to draw up the contract - he offered them a graceful way out. "Look," he said. "Let's just drop it. That way you don't have to pay me and I don't have to deliver something I don't want to do right now." The president wrote him a letter saying what a nice guy he was.

Of course it's easy to be a nice guy when you're giving other people money, which is what it amounted to. But then you must be confident that you have the talent, courage and commercial instinct to make more of your own on your own terms. 

After the interview, on his way out of the hotel lobby, The Chameleon mentioned that he was painting now. It was only a hobby but obviously important to him. Although he didn't seem to realize it, his explanation of what painting meant to him explained his relationship to music as well: 

"I find myself always looking at light and color and shading,. I am always looking for a way to frame the environment, to put it into perspective."