Chick Corea - composer

Chick Corea (b. June 12, 1941 – d. February 9, 2021) was an American jazz pianist, keyboardist, and composer.

Many of his compositions are considered jazz standards. As a member of Miles Davis' band in the 1960s, he participated in the birth of the electric jazz fusion movement. In the 1970s he formed Return to Forever. Along with Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, and Keith Jarrett, he has been described as one of the major jazz piano voices to emerge in the post-John Coltrane era.

Corea continued to pursue other collaborations and to explore various musical styles throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He is also known for promoting and fundraising for a number of social issues, such as eradicating social illiteracy.

Life and career

Armando Anthony Corea was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He is of southern Italian and Spanish descent. His father, a jazz trumpet player who had led a Dixieland band in Boston in the 1930s and 1940s, introduced him to the piano at the age of four. Growing up surrounded by jazz music, he was influenced at an early age by bebop and stars such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Horace Silver, and Lester Young. At eight Corea also took up drums, which would later influence his use of the piano as a percussion instrument.

Corea developed his piano skills by exploring music on his own. A notable influence was concert pianist Salvatore Sullo, from whom Corea started taking lessons at age eight and who introduced him to classical music, helping spark his interest in musical composition. He also spent several years as a performer and soloist for the St. Rose Scarlet Lancers, a drum and bugle corps based in Chelsea.

Given a black tuxedo by his father, he started playing gigs when in high school. He enjoyed listening to Herb Pomeroy's band at the time, and had a trio that played Horace Silver's music at a local jazz club.

He eventually decided to move to New York City, where he studied musical education for one month at Columbia University and six months at Juilliard. He quit after finding both disappointing, but liked the atmosphere of New York, and the music scene became the starting point for his professional career.

Early career

Corea's first major professional gig was with Cab Calloway. Corea started his professional career in the 1960s playing with trumpeter Blue Mitchell and Latin musicians such as Herbie Mann, Willie Bobo and Mongo Santamaría. One of the earliest recordings of his playing is with Mitchell's quintet on The Thing To Do. This album features his composition "Chick's Tune", a retooling of "You Stepped Out of a Dream" that demonstrates the angular melodies and Latin-and-swing rhythms that characterize, in part, Corea's personal style. (Incidentally, the same tune features a drum solo by a very young Al Foster.)

His first album as a leader was Tones for Joan's Bones in 1966, two years before the release of his album Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, with Roy Haynes on drums and Miroslav Vitous on bass.

He made another sideman appearance with Stan Getz on 1967's Sweet Rain (Verve Records).

Avant garde period

From 1968 to 1971 Corea had associations with avant garde players, and his solo style revealed a dissonant orientation. His avant garde playing can be heard on his solo works of the period, his solos in live recordings under the leadership of Miles Davis, his recordings with Circle, and his playing on Joe Farrell's Song of the Wind album on CTI Records.

In September 1968 Corea replaced Herbie Hancock in the piano chair in Davis' band and appeared on landmark albums such as Filles de Kilimanjaro, In a Silent Way, and Bitches Brew. In concert, Davis' rhythm section of Corea, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette combined elements of free jazz improvisation and rock music. Corea experimented with using electric instruments, mainly the Fender Rhodes electric piano, in the Davis band.

In live performance he frequently processed the output of his electric piano with a device called a ring modulator. Using this style, he appeared on multiple Davis albums, including Black Beauty: Live at the Fillmore West and Miles Davis at Fillmore: Live at the Fillmore East. His live performances with the Davis band continued into 1970, with a touring band of Steve Grossman, tenor sax, Keith Jarrett, additional electric piano and organ, Jack DeJohnette, drums, Dave Holland, bass, Airto Moreira, percussion, and Davis on trumpet.

Holland and Corea left to form their own group, Circle, active in 1970 and 1971. This free jazz group featured multi-reed player Anthony Braxton and drummer Barry Altschul. This band was documented on Blue Note and ECM. Aside from soloing in an atonal style, Corea sometimes reached in the body of the piano and plucked the strings. In 1971 or 1972 Corea struck out on his own. In April 1971 he recoded the sessions that became Piano Improvisations Vol. 1 and Piano Improvisations Vol. 2 for ECM.

The concept of communication with an audience became a big thing for me at the time. The reason I was using that concept so much at that point in my life - in 1968, 1969 or so - was because it was a discovery for me. I grew up kind of only thinking how much fun it was to tinkle on the piano and not noticing that what I did had an effect on others. I did not even think about a relationship to an audience, really, until way later.

Jazz fusion

Bobby McFerrin and Chick Corea, New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 2008
In the early 1970s, Corea took a profound stylistic turn from avant garde playing to a crossover jazz fusion style that incorporated Latin jazz elements with Return To Forever. Named after their eponymous 1971 album, the band relied on both acoustic and electronic instrumentation and drew upon Latin American musical styles more than on rock music. On their first two records, Return to Forever featured Flora Purim's vocals, Corea's Fender Rhodes electric piano, and Joe Farrell's flute and soprano saxophone, with Stanley Clarke rounding up the group on acoustic bass. This group later included Tony Williams on drums. Drummer Lenny White and guitarist Bill Connors later joined Corea and Clarke to form the second version of the group, which expanded upon the earlier Latin Jazz elements with a more hard-edged rock and funk-oriented sound inspired by Corea's admiration for his Bitches Brew bandmate John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra. This incarnation of the group recorded the album Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy, before Connors' departure and replacement by Al Di Meola, who would be present on the subsequent releases Where Have I Known You Before, and the best selling Romantic Warrior.

Corea's composition "Spain" first appeared on the 1972 Return to Forever album Light as a Feather. This is probably his most popular piece, and it has been recorded by a variety of artists. There are also a variety of subsequent recordings by Corea himself in various contexts, including an arrangement for piano and symphony orchestra that appeared in 1999, and a collaborative piano and voice-as-instrument arrangement with Bobby McFerrin on the 1992 album Play. Corea usually performs "Spain" with a prelude based on Joaquín Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez (1940), which earlier received a jazz orchestration on Davis and Gil Evans' Sketches of Spain.

In 1976, he issued My Spanish Heart, influenced by Latin American music and featuring vocalist Gayle Moran (Corea's wife) and electric violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. The record was somewhat misunderstood at the time, but it is considered nowadays as a true example of Corea's ability to write fusion material. The album combined jazz, flamenco, supported by Minimoog backup and a powerful horn section.

Duet projects

In the 1970s Corea started working occasionally with vibraphonist Gary Burton, with whom he recorded several duet albums on ECM, including 1972's Crystal Silence. They reunited in 2006 for a concert tour. A new record called The New Crystal Silence was issued in 2008 and won a Grammy award in 2009. The package includes a disc of duets and another disc featuring the Sydney Symphony.