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Jazz musician Chick Corea (2014)
Photo: Christian Escobar Mora / dpa
Miles Davis was angry in the late sixties because Jimi Hendrix, James Brown or The Byrds were more successful and interesting than him.
Jazz no longer had a sting against rock, soul or funk.
The pianist Armando Anthony "Chick" Corea, the American grandson of southern Italian immigrants, helped Davis decisively in the transition into the new era.
His electric piano, the Fender Rhodes, shaped the master's first electric and freer albums, especially the world success of 1970: "Bitches Brew".
Corea was 29 years old and a mature musician.
But as a band leader he succeeded several times in his long career in changing the jazz game: as a door opener for Latin music, for jazz rock or fusion, for the crossover to classical music - and yet he never brushed the tradition of bop off the table.
With Corea, who died of cancer at the age of 79, a great American innovator dies.
In spite of all the variability, you could hear the keystroke where it came from.
First from classical music: like his band mate at Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Corea also found jazz through classical piano lessons.
Second, from Latin music, from Afro-Caribbean and South American rhythms.
Corea, born in 1941 near Boston, played in the early 1960s in the band of the percussionist Mongo Santamaria, the Afro-Cuban who had a smash hit in 1965 with Hancock's "Watermelon Man".
The other band leaders of his apprenticeship years were Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Getz, both with an ear for the South American traditions.
Corea played hard on the beat, little connected to legato.
He hit the notes like straight nails, but very quickly if he had to (it had to be often).
This virtuoso tendency to straight instead of constantly swinging phrasing reveals the classical and the Latin sound, which does not hang in triplets, but grooves in quarters, eighths and casually tricky meters until it becomes as light in your head as after a pisco sour.
This delirium is just right for the early seventies, which foresaw a pulsating, globalized future in the electrified, thanks to Corea, Latinized jazz radio.
So easy, as if it were all danceable
Return To Forever was called Coreas Band from 1971, from which many jazz stars emerged.
Stanley Clarke on bass, guitarist Al Di Meola, and on the first two albums the Brazilian couple with singer Flora Plurim and drummer and percussionist Airto Moreira.
Some songs from this period became jazz standards, such as "Spain" and "500 Miles High", suites rather than songs.
In the middle section of »Spain«, jazz students still fail because of cramps, while Corea on the electric piano, Clarke on bass and Joe Farrell on the flute played the intricate accents in unison and as easily as if it were all danceable.
Only after this phase did Corea switch from piano and e-piano to synthesizers.
The funk, the jaggedness, the muscles, the complexity: It is the twilight of fusion jazz, which is often flatly denigrated as pure, onanistic buffoonery as morally as masturbation by the Catholic Church.
Sure, Fusion becomes music for specialists in the 1970s and 1980s, and the claim to penetrate the big pop markets was a brief dream of crossing borders.
But even if you listen to a tech monster like drummer Dave Weckl at Corea, the sheer joy of complexity remains audible, which sounds collective and never like a lone
cumshot
.
Corea's projects were just too playful for hard jazz porn.
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Chick Corea at the Grammy Awards in January 2020
Photo: Mario Anzuoni / REUTERS
Like all really great jazz personalities of the 20th century, Corea never lost the feeling for one of the many origins of this music: the simple melody, which then had to be varied widely and openly without ever losing sight of it.
In 1972 he already played his "Children's Song" with Return To Forever.
For the Munich label ECM he recorded an entire album in 1984 with 20 of these supposed “children's songs”, where a lot comes together: the clear idea, the almost strict variation and form of the classical, the harmonious advancement of jazz.
They are miniatures, each less than two minutes long - material that you can play in your living room even in your living room, which is unfortunately not always jazz-loving.
The »petty call for a cultural police«
Also on Manfred Eicher's ECM label were the three albums that Corea recorded from 1972 in a duo with vibraphonist Gary Burton.
These collaborations have nothing to do with fusion, funk or rock, although they are simultaneous.
At this high level of musical cooperation, styles or time diagnoses are superfluous, they are albums that could have been made yesterday or a hundred years ago.
That makes them beautiful on the one hand, and a bit cold on the other: it's pretty lonely up there and the world is far away.
Despite the professional connections to Munich, Corea was not always a welcome guest in Germany.
The reason: his membership in the Church of Scientology, which is monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in several federal states.
In Stuttgart, Corea should have played in 1993 as part of the framework program for the World Championships in Athletics, but was dismissed again by CDU Prime Minister Erwin Teufel because he was a "propagandist of the Scientology sect".
The US embassy protested, and at the time, Corea's agency wrote: "Today it's Chick Corea, tomorrow maybe a Jew, a colored or gay musician."
In Bavaria, three years later, the CSU got into an internal dispute because the sect commissioner wanted to prevent a Corea concert.
Education Minister Hans Zehetmaier complained that his party comrade's demand was a "petty call for a culture police".
The CSU as a forerunner of the
cancel culture
?
Surprising for some.
Corea, who found Scientology through the science fiction novels and lectures of the cult founder L. Ron Hubbard at the end of the 1960s, commented on the controversy in 2015 in the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”: “I know that I am sometimes attacked for this commitment.
I take it.
I am committed to the teachings of Ron L. Hubbard.
That's why I thank him in the liner notes of my albums.
But I am not a preacher.
I leave everyone their conviction.
I just play on stage.
I never did missionary work there. "
Chick Corea toured all his life, the last time he was in Berlin in 2018, he also played some of the “Children's Songs” in a church.
Each of his creative periods, which sometimes coexisted, he took up again in later years.
Acoustically, electrically, fine, hard, and of course swinging too, because even this gentle devil could do that.
Its clear, distinct touch comes from a time when the future still had contours.
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