[msb-alumni] Chick Corea, Innovator Of '70s Jazz-Rock Fusion And Pianist, Dies at 79 on February 9, 2021
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2021 18:02:03 -0500
BlankChick Corea, Innovator Of '70s Jazz-Rock Fusion And Pianist, Dies at 79.
By Giovanni
Russonello.
When jazz and rock fused in the 1970s, he was at the forefront of the movement.
But he never
abandoned his love of the acoustic piano.
Chick Corea, an architect of the jazz-rock fusion boom of the 1970s who spent
more than a
half century as one of the foremost pianists in jazz, died on Tuesday at his
home in Tampa,
Fla. He was 79. The cause was cancer, said Dan Muse, a spokesman for Mr.
Corea's family.
Mr. Corea's best-known band was Return to Forever, a collective with a rotating
membership
that nudged the genre of fusion into greater contact with Brazilian, Spanish
and other
global influences. It also provided Mr. Corea with a palette on which to
experiment with a
growing arsenal of new technologies. But throughout his career he never
abandoned his first
love, the acoustic piano, on which his punctilious touch and crisp sense of
harmony made his
playing immediately distinctive. A number of his compositions, including
'Spain,' '500 Miles
High' and 'Tones for Joan's Bones,' have become jazz standards, marked by his
dreamy but
brightly illuminated harmonies and ear-grabbing melodies. By the late 1960s,
Mr. Corea,
still in his 20s, had already established himself as a force to be reckoned
with. He gigged
and recorded with some of the leading names in straight-ahead and Latin jazz,
including
Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Mongo Santamaria and Sarah Vaughan. His first two
albums as a
leader, 'Tones for Joan's Bones' (1966) and 'Now He Sings, Now He Sobs' (1968),
earned rave
reviews. Both are now thought of as classics. But it was playing in Miles
Davis's ensembles
that set Mr. Corea on the path that would most define his role in jazz. He
played the
electric piano on Davis's 'In a Silent Way' (1969) and 'Bitches Brew' (1970),
the albums
that sounded the opening bell for the fusion era. Soon after leaving Davis's
group, he
helped found Return to Forever, and he spent much of the 1970s touring and
recording with
the band, which became one of the most popular instrumental ensembles of its
era. Reviewing
a performance at the Blue Note in New York in 2006, the critic Nate Chinen,
writing in The
New York Times, recalled the innovative sound that Mr. Corea had honed with
Return to
Forever three decades before: 'His Fender Rhodes piano chimed and chirruped
over Latin
American rhythms; female vocals commingled with the soothing flutter of a
flute. Then the
ensemble muscled up and morphed into a hyperactive fusion band, establishing
pop-chart
presence and a fan base to match. To the extent that there is a Return to
Forever legacy, it
encompasses both these dynamic extremes, each a facet of Mr. Corea's
personality. By the
time of that Blue Note show, Mr. Corea's career was entering a chapter of happy
reminiscence, full of reunion concerts and retrospective projects. But he
continued to build
out from the groundwork he had laid. In 2013, for instance, he released two
albums
introducing new bands: 'The Vigil,' featuring an electrified quintet of younger
musicians,
and 'Trilogy,' an acoustic-trio album on which he was joined by the bassist
Christian
McBride and the drummer Brian Blade. He kept up a busy touring schedule well
into his late
70s, and his performances at the Blue Note in particular often combined
reunions with
longtime associates and collaborations with younger accompanists, mixing
nostalgia with a
will to forge ahead. Those performances often found their way onto albums,
including 'The
Musician' (2017), a three-disc collection drawn from his nearly two-month-long
residency at
the club in 2011, when he was celebrating his 70th birthday in the company of
such fellow
luminaries as the pianist Herbie Hancock, the bassist and Return to Forever
co-founder
Stanley Clarke and the vocalist Bobby McFerrin. By the end of his career Mr.
Corea had
recorded close to 90 albums as a bandleader or co-leader and raked in 23
Grammys, more than
almost any other musician. He also won three Latin Grammys. In 2006 he was
named a National
Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, the highest honor available to an American
jazz
musician. Though he had become symbolic of the fusion movement, Mr. Corea never
put much
stock in musical categories. 'It's the media that are so interested in
categorizing music,'
he told The Times in 1983, 'the media and the businessmen, who, after all, have
a vested
interest in keeping marketing clear cut and separate. If critics would ask
musicians their
views about what is happening, you would find that there is always a fusion of
sorts taking
place. All this means is a continual development -- a continual merging of
different
streams. Mr. Corea's first marriage ended in divorce. He met Gayle Moran, who
became his
second wife, in the 1970s, when he was in Return to Forever and she was a
singer and
keyboardist with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, another top-flight fusion band. She
survives him,
as do a son, Thaddeus Corea; a daughter, Liana Corea; and two grandchildren. In
the early
1970s, Mr. Corea converted to Scientology, and the religion's teachings
informed much of his
music from then on, including his work with Return to Forever. Armando Anthony
Corea was
born on June 12, 1941, in Chelsea, Mass., near Boston. His father, also named
Armando Corea,
was a trumpeter and bandleader in Boston, and his mother, Anna (Zaccone) Corea,
was a
homemaker. He began studying piano when he was 4. He picked up his nickname
from an aunt,
who often pinched his big cheeks and called him 'cheeky. The name eventually
morphed into
the pithier 'Chick. He moved to New York City to study at Columbia University
and Juilliard,
but that lasted only a few months. As Miles Davis had a generation before, when
he arrived
at Juilliard from East St. Louis, Ill., Mr. Corea quickly found himself lured
out of the
classroom and into the clubs. Some of his earliest gigs came in the bands of
the famed Latin
jazz percussionists Mongo Santamar? a and Willie Bobo, as well as with the
swing-era
vocalist and bandleader Cab Calloway. In 1968 he assumed the piano chair in
Davis's
influential quintet, replacing Mr. Hancock. The band quickly went into the
studio to record
the final tracks that would round out 'Filles de Kilimanjaro,' Davis's first
album to
feature an electric piano. It signaled the trumpeter's growing embrace of rock
and funk
music, a move encouraged by his second wife, the vocalist Betty Davis. (One of
the two
tracks featuring Mr. Corea is a tribute to her, the 16 ? -minute 'Mademoiselle
Mabry.') The
group gradually expanded in size as Davis wandered deeper into the murky,
wriggling sound
world of his early fusion albums. He brought a version of the 'Bitches Brew'
band to the
Isle of Wight festival in 1970, the largest gig of his career, before an
audience of
600,000. Soon after playing that concert, Mr. Corea and the bassist Dave
Holland left
Davis's ensemble and joined with the drummer Barry Altschul and the saxophonist
Anthony
Braxton to found Circle, a short-lived but influential group that embraced an
avant-garde
approach. Mr. Corea founded Return to Forever in 1971 with Mr. Clarke, the
saxophonist and
flutist Joe Farrell, the percussionist Airto Moreira and the vocalist Flora
Purim. The
following year, the band released its Brazilian-tinged debut album, titled
simply 'Return to
Forever,' on the ECM label. Also in 1972, Mr. Corea teamed up for the first
time with the
vibraphonist Gary Burton to record another album for the same label, 'Crystal
Silence. The
two became longtime friends and collaborators. Taken together, the two ECM
albums
represented something close to the full breadth of Mr. Corea's identity as a
musician --
ranging from the serene and meditative to the zesty and driving. 'We made that
record in
three hours; every song but one was a first take,' Mr. Burton said in an
interview,
recalling the 'Crystal Silence' sessions. They would go on to record seven duet
albums, and
they continued performing together until Mr. Burton's recent retirement. 'I
kept thinking,
'Surely it's going to run out of steam here at some point,' Mr. Burton said.
'And it never
did. Even at the end, we would still come offstage excited and thrilled by what
we were
doing. Return to Forever changed personnel frequently, but its most enduring
lineup featured
Mr. Corea, Mr. Clarke, the guitarist Al Di Meola and the drummer Lenny White.
That quartet
iteration released a string of popular albums -- 'Where Have I Known You
Before' (1974), 'No
Mystery' (1975) and 'Romantic Warrior' (1976) -- that leaned into a blazing,
hard-rock-influenced style, and each reached the Top 40 on the Billboard albums
chart. Mr.
Corea released a number of other influential fusion albums on his own,
including 'My Spanish
Heart' (1976) and a string of recordings with his Elektric Band and his
Akoustic Band. Later
in his career he also delved deeply into the Western classical tradition,
recording works by
canonical composers like Mozart and Chopin, and composing an entire concerto
for classical
orchestra. 'His versatility is second to none when it comes to the jazz world,'
Mr. Burton
said. 'He played in so many styles and settings and collaborations. In 1997,
delivering a
commencement address at Berklee College of Music, Mr. Corea told the members of
the
graduating class to insist on blazing their own path. 'It's all right to be
yourself,' he
said. 'In fact, the more yourself you are, the more money you make.
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