Jazz virtuoso opened his eyes and ears to rock after gig at Isle of Wight festival

When Chick Corea was young, he never listened to rock music. ‘‘I missed the wave that others my age were experiencing with Elvis Presley and the Beatles,’’ he said. ‘‘I was off with Bartok and John Coltrane at the time.’’

As a virtuoso pianist, it was a highbrow attitude that by the 1960s had taken him to the pinnacle of the jazz world, playing with the likes of Stan Getz and Dizzy Gillespie and accompanying Sarah Vaughan. However, after joining Miles Davis in 1968, he switched to an electric keyboard and began to open his ears to the more direct and accessible approach of popular music.

A seminal moment came when he found himself playing with Davis at the

Isle of Wight festival in 1970 on a bill that also included Jimi Hendrix, the Doors and The Who. The audience of 600,000 was almost certainly greater than the combined attendance at every gig he had played over the previous decade. ‘‘The thing that interested me about rock and pop music was that communication with an audience appeared to be the entertainers’ sole reason for living,’’ he said. ‘‘And it struck me: ‘Gee, that’s interesting, I never thought of that.’ I no longer wanted just to satisfy myself. I wanted to connect with the world and make my music mean something to people.’’

As a result, in 1971, Corea, who has died of cancer aged 79, assembled Return to Forever. Alongside fellow travellers Weather Report, Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters and John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, Corea’s band spent the rest of the decade forging a new and dynamic form of jazz-rock fusion that incorporated funk rhythms, distorted electric guitars and synthesizers.

Traditional jazz purists hated it and accused Corea of dumbing down. But on such Return to Forever albums as Hymn of the

Seventh Galaxy, the Grammy-winning No Mystery and Romantic Warrior, he took jazz to a new and youthful audience that didn’t know the difference between be-bop and post-bop and cared even less. ‘‘There was a synergy going on between what we were creating and how audiences were digging it,’’ Corea said.

He never disowned jazz’s more abstract and esoteric ambitions. The music he fashioned with Return to Forever was technically demanding, and throughout his career he often returned to acoustic piano and more traditional jazz styles. Yet, he argued, it didn’t matter how virtuosic and high-minded your music was if you weren’t creating an effect. ‘‘When I see an artist using his energies and technique to create music beyond the ability of people to connect with it, I see their abilities being wasted.’’

He had his kooky side. A committed Scientologist, he became an outspoken advocate for the organisation, moving to Florida to be near the church’s headquarters in Clearwater. He was once banned from a concert in Germany because the state authorities would not subsidise an event involving a Scientologist. However, he attributed much of his musical development to its influence. ‘‘Scientology opened my mind up,’’ he said. He is survived by his second wife, the singer Gayle Moran, who appeared on many of his albums and whom he married in 1972, and by two children from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.

Armando Anthony Corea was born in 1941 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, directly across the Mystic River from Boston. His parents were of Italian descent and he received his nickname Chick from an aunt who pinched his cheek and called him ‘‘Cheeky’’.

His father played trumpet in a Dixieland band and taught him piano from the age of 4. He was also a member of a local drum and bugle corps, which he later said helped him to develop a percussive style of piano playing. Influenced both by classical music and jazz pianists such as Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk, by his early teens he was playing at weddings and bar mitzvahs.

He attended Columbia University, but soon dropped out and applied to the Juilliard school for music. For a year he practised eight hours a day in preparation for the audition. Although he was accepted as a piano major, he again dropped out after a matter of weeks. A conventional education was unable to accommodate his mercurial talents.

He began his career playing in Latin jazz combos, and worked as a sideman for Blue Mitchell and Herbie Mann as well as Getz and Gillespie. He was backing Sarah Vaughan when he got the call to sit in with Davis’s quintet because regular keyboardist Herbie Hancock was away on honeymoon. By the time Hancock returned, Corea had been given his job on a permanent basis, although the two pianists remained friends and later toured and recorded together.

Corea continued working prolifically with an eventual tally of more than 90 albums. ‘‘It’s just a lot of fun,’’ he said. –

‘‘The thing that interested me about rock and pop music was that communication with an audience ...’’