This is a not-so-artfully expanded, video-enhanced variant of my report in today's Citizen.
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When Chick Corea was go in Ottawa, the jazz-piano legend`s all-star group drew the TD Ottawa International Jazz Festival`s largest herd in its three-decade history.
On that June 2008 night, more than 11,000 people filled Confederation Park to enjoy in high-energy, highly electric music as Corea and his Recall to Forever group reprised their circa-1975 jazz-rock hits.
This Sunday, however, Corea returns to Ottawa with a wholly different project, in a totally different setting. This time, the 69-year-old will get to performing acoustic music, in a lots more intimate setting - Dominion-Chalmers United Church - with two jazz stars from a younger generation.
The sole thing that`s typical for Corea is that his projects and collaborators keep changing - just as the man has evolved in the 5 decades he`s been on the love scene.
"I just try and prevent it as creative and as fun as possible," Corea said in a recent phone interview. "It keeps me sort of light and fresh. I can kind of motion and consider and do music and business, and keep adapting myself to a changing world. Which is a phenomenon that`s never going to change . I don`t see the universe becoming static and fixed."
Joining Corea in Ottawa will be bassist Christian McBride, 38, and drummer Brian Blade, 40. In the low half of 2009, the two famous musicians played with Corea in another all-star project, the Five Peace Band, that like Take to Forever was a rocking, electric affair.
"We had so much fun," Corea recalls. "There was a rapport and a synergy that happened with the 3 of us that I felt I really precious to explore some more."
He singles out the musical contributions from Blade, who has drummed with pop music stars such as Joni Mitchell, Seal and Daniel Lanois as good as jazz greats such as Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock.
"Brian is a completely wide open, very, very good and creative musician who brings way more than round to the rhythm section," says Corea, who had not played with the drummer until last year.
Even McBride points to Blade`s musicality as a big motivator for Corea. "I think Chick feel in bed with Brian`s sensitivity," McBride recently told the Charleston Daily Mail. "Brian doesn`t think like a typical drummer; he`s extremely tender and one knock we`ve heard is that he plays too soft. But when he gets loud, it only adds to the drama."
Corea has favoured playing in the classical jazz piano trio format since the later 1960s, when he recorded the brilliant album Now He Sings, Now He Sobs.
"I invariably found that if I got my trio or rhythm section rapport really good, I could do anything with that," Corea says. "There`s a lot of exemption in a trio."
Since the transcription of Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, Corea`s career has been a sequence of dizzyingly diverse bands and recordings that have been top of psyche for jazz fans.
Corea replaced Herbie Hancock in the circle of Miles Davis when the trumpeter blew the seminal sounds of jazz-rock. Soon afterwards he left Davis, he led a more avant-garde, esoteric group called Circle.
Almost as a response to Circle`s abstraction, Corea went in the former way with Proceeds to Forever, which expressly meant to unite with a plurality of listeners. Since the later 1970s, after Return to Forever broke up, Corea has jumped from task to project, playing acoustic and electric music, performing duets with singer Bobby McFerrin or vibraphonist Gary Burton...
or joining forces with younger musicians such as saxophonists Kenny Garrett and Joshua Redman.
He has returned time and again to performing in piano trios. In 2007, Corea released a five-CD boxed set featuring him performing with 5 different trios.
Other pianists - Keith Jarrett most notably - favour playing only with a fixed band. Asked to excuse his taste to continually meet with new bandmates, Corea at first says the question is "unanswerable." Similarly, Corea, it seems, is not one to speculate much on his artistic growth or methods. "The correct way to go and make is good to go and create," he says." I leave all of that thought about my past, or what I`ve done, up to others. I`m not that interested, actually."
He offers, though, that Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, which many a jazz fan would predict a masterpiece, was a prime case of fresh playing.
Corea recalls: "The matter I think most clearly about how that came together was I was running with Stan Getz and Roy Haynes was running with the Getz quartet with Steve Swallow was the bassist. I was fortunate enough to get the piano gig and work with the great Roy Haynes for the start time ever, and the great Steve Swallow as well. It was a deep and drums combination of such quality it surprised me how good Igood I could sound. At first I didn't know. God was waving a particular magic wand. And so I figured out the amazing rapport and accompaniment I got from Roy and Steve made it possible for me to work better.
"So when I got the offering to do the trio recording, I definitely wanted to work with Roy more. Roy's got a wide-open musical mind. He can act so many different ways, he's played so many different kinds of music. Far in and far out and grooving and airy, all sort of ways, you live? He has got the perfect match to complement a rhythm section and a piano. He can turn real light and groove his mind off, and he can play whatever's needed. He's simply a very creative man.
"But then, I thought, you know, I had only met Miroslav in New York and we had done some jamming together. Miroslav had a different approach than the other bass players. It was a looser kind of a thing. Rhythmically he did a lot of unlike kinds of things. And I only set up at night envisioning what it might go like if Miroslav played with Roy.[indeed, Corea has continued to play off and on with Haynes and Vitous over the days since their 1968 masterpiece, as late as a few months below as you can see in the clip below. Corea told me he plans to record with them again in the future.] "So I chanced it and we went in for a day or two years and we recorded all of those tracks.
"There was no rehearsal for that. I may have gotten together with Miroslav for an hour. But as a trio we didn't do anything until we got in the studio."
Last weekend, at the inaugural concert of his turn with McBride and Blade, Corea told the crew in Charleston, West Virginia, that the execution itself was a "rehearsal," a reviewer noted.
"It was a pleasure," the Charleton Gazette`s reviewer wrote. "Rehearsal, performance, concert, ongoing musical conversation, or whatever you need to claim it."
When asked if he is perhaps trying to once again attain that spirit of crust with his different trio projects, Corea offers: "Well, you know, it`s a constant striving.
"Any person just wants to be creative. That particular place where the creativity is really eminent and it`s very spontaneous, it`s very akin to the form of art that I wish and the medicine that I like. You reach for that, you know."BONUS: culled from chickcorea.com, here are the set lists for the last Corea/McBride/Blade concert:Set 1 This is NewOpus #11HomageNow He Sings, Now He Sobs Set 2Piano Sonata - The MoonSister RosaAlpha and OmegaFingerprints
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