Chick Corea: his 10 greatest recordings
The jazz pioneer Chick Corea died last week at the age of 79, leaving behind one of the most garlanded and wideranging catalogues in the genre’s history. He played with Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock; he could be showboating and sensitive, and traversed the distance between experimentation and accessibility. Guardian jazz critic John Fordham survey’s the best of them.
Chick Corea – Spain (1972)
This is Chick Corea’s best-known original – composed as he turned 30, by that time recognised alongside Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett as a rising piano star, already hired by Stan Getz, Mongo Santamaria and Miles Davis. But Spain tapped Corea’s most enduring passions, in jazz and Latin music – a mix he would draw on all his life. It’s been performed as a soul anthem by Stevie Wonder, as flamenco by John McLaughlin, as bluegrass by Bela Fleck, and in many other versions – but nobody plays it with Corea’s gleeful bounce, in a vivacious band here including singer Flora Purim and percussionist Airto Moreira.
Chick Corea Trio – Tones for Joan’s Bones (Atlantic, 1967)
On Corea’s debut album as a leader, recorded in late 1966, with the hitmaking jazz-rock flautist Herbie Mann as producer, the 25-year-old reflected the soulfully punchy hard bop jazz style that the rock-dominated 60s were already displacing. But since he was partnered here by such savvy experts in the method as trumpeter Woody Shaw, saxophonist Joe Farrell and bassist Steve Swallow, and he was unveiling his signature fusion of direct, songlike lyricism and driving swing with a side order of formal classical elegance, it was a memorable entrance just the same.
Chick Corea – Now He Sings, Now He Sobs (1968)
The pianist’s musical mind was a fascinating hothouse in the 1960s. He had grown up listening (mostly in pretty loose and self-educational ways) to street-bands, the bebop of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, Latin and classical music. Aged 27, Now He Sings, Now He Sobs found him at a crossroads, pulled between the swing of the classic acoustic jazz-piano trio and the more free-associative future he would soon briefly explore with such outliers as the jazz/contemporary-classical reeds player Anthony Braxton. Two powerful and intuitive partners, Czech double bassist Miroslav Vitous and legendary drums pioneer Roy Haynes, follow his every move here.
Miles Davis – Miles Runs the Voodoo Down (live) (1969)
Miles Davis’s 1969 Bitches Brew album was a turning point in his own career, as it was in the evolution of jazz. Alerted by his new partner Betty Mabry’s awareness that late-60s audiences were listening to Motown, James Brown, Hendrix and Sly Stone more than to orthodox jazz, he searched for a bridge between jazzcool and a blues-funk intensity, using electric keyboards, layered sound effects and a Latin-rock feel. His brilliant synthesis became Bitches Brew, with Corea dropped seamlessly into the melee. Playing Fender Rhodes electric keys, he resembled an extra percussionist in his chordwork, around partners including Wayne Shorter, and the free-improviser he was drawn to be in much of his soloing.
Chick Corea – Captain Marvel (1973)
Corea became a Scientologist in 1968 and the cult had a seismic effect on his priorities, drawing him away from experimental forms, whether from free-improv or Davis’s freefusion, toward more accessible repertoires. But his musicality rose above every rival preoccupation, so his first foray into more popular territory with Return to Forever still glowed with seductive tunes and irresistible grooves. Bass star Stanley Clarke and percussionist Moreira were powerhouses on this buoyant session, and singer Purim’s playful lyricism perfectly complemented Corea on the vivacious and much-covered Captain Marvel.
Chick Corea – Glass Enclosure (1996)
Bud Powell was one of Corea’s first heroes: the most influential pianist of the 1940s bebop era and a visionary who came as close as was conceivable to representing Charlie Parker’s saxophone methods on a keyboard. The Parker connection might be why Corea opted to feature two superb saxophonists – Kenny Garrett and Joshua Redman – on his 1996 genuflection to Powell, rather than the piano-centred trio the venture might have invited. There’s one original Corea tribute on the tracklist; the other pieces are all Powell’s – including a superb version of the complex Glass Enclosure, a piece mirroring the troubled composer in its shifts from the vivacious to the sinister.
Chick Corea – Children’s Songs No 6 (1983)
They weren’t a huge hit with Corea’s straight-jazz or fusion fans, but the piano miniatures inspired by Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos series that ECM released as the Children’s Songs collection brought the pianist a new audience – crossing over into contemporary-classical music, while retaining his telltale mischievousness, flexibility of rhythm, and sense of narrative shape. They also reflected his wider musical life, with the first of the series echoing one of his 1972 duets with vibraphonist Gary Burton, and an ensemble version on Light as a Feather. The driving, hooky
No 6 is one of the session’s most dynamic pieces.
Chick Corea and Gary Burton – Armando’s Rhumba (1997)
Corea and elegant vibraphone pioneer Burton began their playing partnership in the 1970s – at the other end of the dynamic spectrum to much of the flat-out, high-energy fusion some Corea groups were thumping out that decade. Armando’s Rhumba originally came from the album My Spanish Heart, a 1976 big-band session that some felt reflected too much of the leader’s occasional inclinations to showboating. But in the hands of this close-attuned pair – both master improvisers with big techniques but flawless awareness of when to leave spaces and implications – the reasons for its future as a much-played jazz standard become unmistakable.
Return to Forever – Space Circus (1973)
Here is where many longtime Corea fans joined the club. The pianist’s music shifted from airy Latin-jazz glides to rockish and guitar-wailing on Return to Forever 2 (with only bassist Clarke remaining from the group’s first instalment). Full of turn-on-a-dime compositional tricks and buoyant, hooky themes often reminiscent of John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, this album defined the 1970s sound of jazz-rock fusion. Corea’s mercurial inventiveness on keys, Bill Connors’ raw guitar sound, Clarke’s dazzling basslines and Lenny White’s implacably propulsive drumming do the rest on a track that starts deceptively wistful but snaps into swaggering funk.
Chick Corea/Eddie Gomez/Paul Motian – Peri’s Scope (2012)
Corea and Kind of Blue piano legend Bill Evans’s one-time partners Eddie Gomez (bass) and Paul Motian (drums) occupied New York’s Blue Note club for a fortnight in 2010, playing 24 sets that were boiled down to the live double album Further Explorations. Motian was one of the most texturallysensitive drummers ever to play jazz,
I’ve thought about it a lot in the intervening 40 years: why Adam and the Ants? I was a prime candidate for obsessive pop fandom – nine years old, glued to Top of the Pops on a weekly basis, an early adopter of Smash Hits, already spending whatever money I had on records – but why them specifically? After all, I was spoilt for choice. It was 1980, as miraculous a year for singles as Britain has ever seen. I could have alighted on the two-tone movement, or Gary Numan, or thrown in my lot with the Jam and the burgeoning mod revival. But I didn’t: it was Adam and the Ants, the night in October they opened TOTP with Dog Eat Dog.
Maybe they were a band inadvertently designed to appeal to a nineyear-old boy: songs about pirates and Native American tribes and highwaymen, a lot of shouting, a lot of cocky lyrics about how amazing Adam and the Ants were. Maybe because glam rock was the first music I could remember – relatives’ copies of Block Buster! and My Coo-Ca-Choo; Marc Bolan’s kids TV show; seeing Wizzard on television and running screaming from the room, terrified by the sight of Roy Wood – and Adam and the Ants were ultimately a glam rock band: two drummers, like the Glitter Band; makeup; loud guitars; chanting, all of it derived from glam.
Whatever it was, it got me. For the next 18 months, I tied my colours to their mast in a way I never had with any artist before, and never would again. I bought everything: not just the new singles, but the stuff the previous incarnation of Adam and the Ants had put out, which was hastily rereleased in the wake of their success. The fact that it sounded almost nothing like the band did now didn’t bother me at all, perhaps because it occupied me in other ways: I had no idea what the S&M-themed Whip in My Valise was supposed to be about, but I definitely clocked it was something adult, illicit, something I wasn’t supposed to know about, which automatically made it weirdly thrilling.
A lot of other people were clearly doing something similar – from late-1980 to mid-1982, Adam and the Ants were unequivocally the biggest pop stars in Britain, so famous that, at one point in 1981, they had seven singles in the Top 40. Nevertheless, in my case, fandom was an oddly solitary pursuit. Nobody I knew liked them as much as me (the general consensus at school was that Adam Ant’s fondness for makeup made him a “gaylord”), I was too young to go to gigs, and I never thought to contact any other fans via the penpal columns in the pop magazines.
Instead of forming a bond with my fellow Antpeople, my obsession found expression in other ways. Not content with putting posters on my wall, I put up literally anything containing Adam Ant’s name: the text from interviews, news stories, small ads. (“You’re basically just sticking up little bits of paper with ‘Adam Ant’ written on them,” protested my increasingly weary mother.) At one juncture, I bought a box of face paint and made myself up in what must have been a very rough approximation of Adam’s famous white-stripe look. Short in stature then and now, I imagine I looked less like Adam Ant than Ronnie Corbett when he was impersonating Adam Ant on The Two Ronnies. Incredibly, I then went out on my bike looking like that. I came home fairly swiftly, the word “gaylord” once more ringing in my ears.
It ended almost as unexpectedly as it had begun. Primed for its release by the incredible singles Stand and Deliver and Prince Charming – the latter, I think, still the weirdest-sounding song ever to make No 1 – I brought the Prince Charming album home from Boots in a state of excitement. I didn’t like it. Or rather, I didn’t like it anywhere near as much as I liked Kings of the Wild Frontier. That might have been the first time I ever made a proper critical judgment about an album. Up to that point, I’d worked on the principle that pop music was great per se, as evidenced by the bizarre eclecticism of my record collection, where Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps Please by Splodgenessabounds jostled for space with the oeuvre of impossibly smug singer-songwriter BA Robertson, and United by Judas Priest coexisted with Donna Summer’s cover of MacArthur Park.
I stuck it out until 1982’s Friend or Foe, but my affections were waning. When Desperate But Not Serious barely scraped into the Top 40 that Adam and the Ants had dominated 12 months before, I was glumly unsurprised: anyone could tell this was not a single made of the same vibrant, vital stuff as Dog Eat Dog or Kings of the Wild Frontier.
By then, it didn’t matter. I didn’t realise it at the time, but Adam and the Ants buried themselves so deep in my psyche they continue to exert an influence on my music taste today. They were my first love, and, like a lot of first loves, I never entirely got over them: 40 years later, I still like thunderous drums and feedback-laden guitars. I still like bands that dress up and wear makeup in a way that suggests they think ridicule is nothing to be scared of. I love the idea that pop music is a theatre of dreams where people reinvent themselves. And I love artists who also act as curators, whose music functions as a kind of portal into an auxiliary world of visual art and literature and film.
Adam and the Ants were the first band I encountered that did that: in interviews, Adam talked about spaghetti westerns, the artists Allen Jones and Stanley Spencer, Dirk Bogarde and Montgomery Clift, the film-maker John Sampson. I didn’t rush out aged nine and watch Sampson’s documentary on sexual fetishism, Dressing for Pleasure, but I definitely filed all that information away. At university, I wrote a dissertation on the playwright Joe Orton. I did that because I love Orton’s writing, but the truth is that I’d only picked up a book of his plays in the first place because I remembered Adam Ant mentioning him.