This magazine's purpose is to focus intelligent discussion on directions in music since 1968. When Miles Davis was asked the name of the 38-minute tune he and his band had just performed for the 600,000 people gathered at the Isle of Wight, he said "call it anything." Literal-minded discographers have persistently entitled the tune "Call It Anything" ever since... So a secondary purpose for this blog is to give me a place to write about anything I have on my mind, and call it anything.
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A few hours ago Chick Corea tweeted and facebooked an announcement that he and friends Lenny White and Stanley Clarke will be joined September 2nd at the Hollywood Bowl kick-off gig of their fall tour by Jean-Luc Ponty, Chaka Khan and Bill Connors.
That's right. Jean-Luc Ponty, the great violinist.
Chaka Khan, the wonderful song stylist.
And Bill Connors. The preeminent guitarist Corea originally chose to bring into the band in 1973 so that Return To Forever could "make your hair move" musically like his friend John McLaughlin was doing with Mahavishnu Orchestra. Connors will join his former band mates when they open their tour at the storied Highland Ave. venue in Los Angeles.
At least for one night. When pressed for details of whether he would join them for what has recently grown into a world tour, a man-sized little birdie told me it isn't known yet. Implying that if everything clicked, it could happen.
It could also not happen. It's been 35 years since they last played together. That plus the fact that Connors has made a career out of never making a predictable career move, beginning with leaving Return To Forever just as their stars were rising. They had recently recorded what is arguably their finest electric album, Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy (Polydor, 1973) and were engaged on a successful worldwide tour when he announced he was going to depart. He may well have harbored various disagreements with the direction the band was taking, but his immediate immersion in an intensive study of classical guitar was far and away his aim and the most significant clue to how he conducted himself over the next decade, as he literally re-trained himself to use all his fingers in ways utterly alien to the picking methods used with an electric guitar. Other jazz guitarists like John McLaughlin, Paco de Lucia and Al Di Meola have all advanced their technique and stretched and extended their stylistic limitations over the years, but Bill Connors stands alone in his tireless pursuit of greater and greater skill. Over the course of his career his constant determination has taken him through technical realms most guitarists never imagine. Celebrity and its accompanying paycheck have not so much eluded him as they have been ignored by him; artistic growth has been his raison d' etre.
So this is good news, very good news.
If you live in Los Angeles, treat yourself and see Bill Connors perform with Corea, Clarke and White on September 2nd. It may well be your only chance to see this most lyrical and soulful guitarist play again with these fine musicians, but no matter what actually happens after September 2nd, it will certainly be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Get your tickets soon.
09/02 - Hollywood Bowl - Los Angeles, CA
09/04 - Detroit International Jazz Festival - Detroit, MI
09/05 - Lehigh University - Zoellner Arts Center - Bethlehem, PA
09/07 - Dakota Jazz Club - Minneapolis, MN
09/08 - Dakota Jazz Club - Minneapolis, MN
09/10 - Anthology - San Diego, CA
09/11 - Anthology - San Diego, CA
09/12 - Anthology - San Diego, CA
09/15 - Yoshi's - Oakland, CA
09/16 - Yoshi's - Oakland, CA
09/17 - Yoshi's - Oakland, CA
09/18 - Yoshi's - Oakland, CA
09/20 - Monterey Jazz Festival - Monterey, CA
09/22 - Humboldt State University - Van Duzer Theater - Arcata, CA
09/25 - University at Buffalo - Center for the Arts Mainstage - Buffalo, NY
09/26 - The Royal Conservatory Telus Centre for Performance and Learning Koerner Hall -Toronto, Ontario CANADA
09/29 - Bergen Performing Arts Center - Englewood, NJ
10/22 - Turcoing Jazz Festival - Turcoing, FRANCE
10/24 - Palace Hall - Bucharest, ROMANIA
10/26 - Skopje Jazz Festival 2009 - Skopje, MACEDONIA
10/27 - 50! Jazz Festival Ljubljana - Ljubljana, SLOVENIA
Wolf & Rissmiller's Country Club, April 7, 1982. Walking forward to the front of the stage, producer/drummer Lenny White held a microphone to his lips to announce the members of the band, beginning with "I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce you to the world's greatest musicians..." A subjective statement, yes, but he had a point.
Four days earlier this same mutually evolved, once-in-a-lifetime band--trumpeter/ flugelhornist Freddie Hubbard, tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, pianist Chick Corea, bassist Stanley Clarke, and White himself--had brought down the house with their show at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos, California, now reissued on the 2-disc Griffith Park Collection 2--In Concert (Wounded Bird, 2008). This after having recorded two studio albums with the same personnel in the eight preceding days.
A man with a mission, White had selected these veteran players from his own experiences playing alongside them. Not only had he performed with each in a multitude of settings, but each of them had also played with each of the others in various groupings over the years. All were itching to play again in a straight-ahead hard bop context. This was no hastily assembled all-star band. Instead, it was a gathering of five star-crossed collaborators capable of supporting each other so well that they anticipated producing some of the hottest work any of them had ever done. They did not disappoint.
First up was a studio album, Echoes Of An Era, a selection of well-chosen standards done the old-fashioned way with mics on everybody, no more than two takes of anything, no overdubs--but departing from the norm by featuring the vocals of R&B siren Chaka Khan. To many in the jazz world's amazement (and delight, for it earned the singer a Grammy nomination) Khan skillfully runs through the paces on a series of Corea's athletically demanding arrangements. First, the Pinkard/Tracy/Tauber standard "Them There Eyes," then the Ella Fitzgerald-esque swoop-and-scat "All Of Me," followed by a galloping romp through Thelonious Monk's "I Mean You" that is full of unison jumps and masterful comping and soloing from Corea, as he does some of the best interpreting of Monk since Monk. The titles are all familiar--George Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy," Billy Strayhorn's "Take The 'A' Train," Frank Loesser's "I Hear Music"--but Khan's fresh approach is anything but familiar.
Realizing the wealth of talent that had assembled, Bruce Lundvall at Elektra/Musician asked for an album featuring just the instrumentalists. The reissued Griffith Park Collection opens with White's "L's Bop," a 60's Blue Note paean showcasing some vintage Hubbard hornwork that evokes those sunny days when Blue Note producer Alfred Lion was repeatedly capturing the blinding brilliance of an era. Clarke's "Why Wait" is a blues that sneaks up barefooted as the bassist strums a slow amble of a walking rhythm, White riding a cymbal step-for-step, Hubbard and Henderson blowing sweet unison notes and somehow managing to create the additional harmonic of a trombone between them, when Corea's aggressive comping style finally gives the meter a push and Henderson punches a full-throated solo with his thick, unmistakable copper-and-zinc tone. A little over a minute into it when White bounces a snare roll that introduces the chorus' arrival like the low roar of an incoming tide, the boys are swinging so hard that you can feel it in your body.
This is a stunning live recording of these same tunes. Magically resurrected from a soundboard cassette of one of the shows during the group's five day California tour, Griffith Park Collection 2: In Concert starts with "Why Wait," this time at a slightly slower tempo that seems to open up the arrangement and allow the soloists room to swing even harder. Like wanderers returning to their home hearth, they play with a mounting sense of urgency and passion as the night wears on, pursuing the music like it was the source of life itself.
Stalwart rhythm aces White and Clarke could both have turned in longer and more frequent solos, but this particular night they were largely content to lay down strong-shouldered support for the incendiary energies of Hubbard, Henderson and Corea--three players bursting with energy and clearly in a mood to solo on some unrestrained bop. Especially Hubbard. (In January 2009, multi-reedist Bennie Maupin got a roar of laughter from a church full of mourners with the opening line of his eulogy for the departed legend. With his trademark Cheshire grin, Maupin said: "Every musician knew that if you were going to play with Freddie Hubbard, you had to be ready to be humbled.")
These guys were certainly ready for something. Without preamble Hubbard starts by blowing a series of runs that sound like cascades of sparks sprayed from an arc welder's torch (it's tempting to imagine the other players wearing protective goggles as they watch him intently.) No question, Hubbard's unbridled, over-the-ramparts approach might have had a daunting effect on another stage, but on this spring evening it leads the charge and sets a standard. Each player's solo invites the next until it is clear that each is ready to take full advantage of this rare opportunity. White's "Guernica" is an unforgettable, hair-raising blowing session that evokes the passionate emotional landscape of that war-torn Spanish city. Hubbard's flashy, headlong bopper "Happy Times" is followed by Corea's tone poem "October Ballade," and then it's back to the races with a hard-driving "I Mean You," and finally a gently swaying "Here's That Rainy Day" with a handful of lyrical flourishes from Hubbard to close things out.
The laudatory band introduction from Lenny White, quoted earlier, was occasioned by their spectacular last performance. Good mobile recording equipment and several cameras recorded the evening's events, so although record company politics/economics have kept Echoes of An Era 2: the Concert (Elektra Musician, 1982) from being reissued on CD, rights acquired from Sony have resulted in two DVDs: Chick Corea--A Very Special Concert and Chick Corea Band with Nancy Wilson--A Very Special Concert (available only as a Japanese import). Re-packaged or hard-to-find imports, oddly titled by front-running labels in pursuit of sales though they may be, these are treasures worth digging for.
In place of Hubbard's horn, singer Nancy Wilson's elastic vocals are added to the mix on six of these tunes. A mature stylist who had sung with everyone from Cannonball Adderley's quintet to the Billy May Orchestra, Wilson's doing tunes so familiar to her that she is able deconstruct and improvise new renditions of them on the spot, achieving a level of slippery bop intensity only possible with musicians of this caliber behind her. Working with the same book of material as they had used with Chaka Khan, these journeymen deftly adapt the songs to Wilson's broader approach and pull them off as self-contained performances.
But as good as they are with Wilson, their fiery explosiveness engages on an entirely new level when these four, limber and lathered as cheetahs chasing a gazelle, tear after a tune at hard bop speed. Henderson comes out of the gate so fast and pours such ferocity into White's "L's Bop" that the pace pulls it out of the station at top speed. Shortly after Corea takes the solo duties from the saxophonist at the half-way point, a camera comes in for a shot over his right shoulder and catches Clarke nimbly flying along the neck while staring across at the pianist, doing a double-take as Corea furiously pummels the keys with an awe-inspiring musicality that is guiding the rhythm section until the moment he can let the drummer take his solo. And what a solo--if White's mentor, Tony Williams, had been in the crowd that evening, he might well have been on his feet. These are monster musicians who had been playing together every day for a month. On this last recorded-and-filmed gig they are pouring everything they have experienced together into a bravura performance that probably could never happen again. And if Flora Purim's 6-octave skydiving on Return to Forever (ECM, 1972) is the definitive vocal version of "500 Miles High," the trio version that Corea, Clarke and White do here could well be the definitive instrumental rendition.
The world's greatest musicians? Who knows... What is certain is that the kind of mastery and dynamic synergism on display in these performances comes from musicians who possess that exceedingly rare ability to listen as well as they blow. As Lenny White said when asked about his composition "Guernica": "When you write for musicians like this, all you need to do is give them a few notes and let them play."
Tracks and Personnel
Echoes Of An Era
Tracks: Them There Eyes; All Of Me; I Mean You; I Love You Porgy; Take The A Train; I Hear Music; High Wire/The Aerialist; All Of Me; Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most.
I received an email a few days ago from Richard Bailey, requesting that the record be set straight re: who did the drumming on Jeff Beck's seminal jazz/rock fusion album, Blow by Blow (1975, Epic/Sony Japan). Simple. It was Richard Bailey. Seems that a rumor has been making the rounds on various blogs and print outlets that the wonderfully intricate, high-octane work on tunes like "Scatterbrain" was actually done by another great drummer from that period, Billy Cobham. This is patently untrue. As Bailey said in his email, he was "the one and only drummer on Blow by Blow", that esteemed work that influenced so much of the rock, jazz and jazz/rock fusion that followed, as well as two other tracks for Beck's subsequent jazz/rock monster, Wired(1976, Epic/Sony Japan) -- the Mingus tune "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" and "Head for Backstage Pass".
Bailey's versatility has made him a first-call kitman for four decades. In addition to the work he did with Beck, he's recorded with ex-Rolling Stone Mick Taylor, Steve Roach and Brian Eno. More recently he has been an integral part of Steve Winwood's two important return-to-form recordings, 2003's About Time (Wincraft) and last year's Nine Lives (Columbia), and he regularly performs and records with the excellent acid jazz/rock/soul fusion collective Incognito.
Corea, Clarke and White to open a fall tour at the Hollywood Bowl Sept. 2
Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White have booked a handful of engagements for later this year, commencing Sept. 2 at the Hollywood Bowl. No, it isn't the Return To Forever Returns II that we were all anticipating. The initial agreement to play together this year was apparently consummated last summer while they were touring as Return To Forever, but their agent Ted Kurland Associates has recently begun to book them aggressively. Guitarist Al Di Meola, who publicly claimed to take severe umbrage at the idea that he hadn't been included, has hopefully moved on. Hell hath no fury like a guitar god scorned.
Note on Corea, Clarke and White's Hollywood Bowl show here in Los Angeles: the Hollywood Bowl was selling subscription tickets only until last week, but single tickets are now available. John Scofield and his Piety Street Band will join them on the bill. http://www.hollywoodbowl.com/tickets/performance_detail.cfm?id=3963. Reasonably priced, I might add.
09/02/2009 Hollywood Bowl Los Angeles, CA
09/04/2009 Detroit International Jazz Festival - Chase Main Stage Detroit, MI
09/20/2009 Monterey Jazz Festival - Lyon's Stage Monterey, CA
09/26/2009 The Royal Conservatory - Telus Centre for Performance and Learning - Koerner Hall Toronto, Ontario CANADA
10/24/2009 Palace Hall Bucharest, ROMANIA
10/26/2009 Skopje Jazz Festival 2009 - Universal Hall Skopje, MACEDONIA
10/27/2009 50! Jazz Festival Ljubljana - Cankarjev Dom, Cultural & Congress Centre Ljubljana, SLOVENIA
11/13/2009 Oosterpoort Main Hall Groningen, NETHERLANDS
11/27/2009 to 12/02/2009 Blue Note Tokyo Tokyo, JAPAN
L.A.'s Jazz Bakery closing May 31, to reopen soon... Godspeed!
I read the news today, oh boy. The Jazz Bakery, one of the few places in Los Angeles that features national jazz acts, has lost its lease. Not figuratively, as in the landlord has raised the rent to an intolerable price, but literally, as in... the landlord wants to turn the old building into a furniture store? Well, that's what L.A. Times writer Yvonne Villarreal says.
I'm no economics professor, but I'd be shocked down to the ground if anyone in their right mind started investing money in a furniture store. I know people over there on the west side who like to display their wealth and/or earning power by getting themselves a little new furniture something-something, but even they are inclined to sit on their hands in this economy. At any rate, Godspeed to you, Jazz Bakery. For you Angelenos who want a place to see inexpensive live jazz, minus drunks, the non-profit club's proprietor, Ruth Price, says she will sponsor gigs throughout the summer to keep the name alive until she gets new digs. Keep on top of the calendar and go see some jazz this summer!
If you haven't heard of Goldstar, these guys could double the amount of live jazz you hear this year. For taking five minutes of your time to register your email address, you can start getting your live jazz tickets at HALF PRICE. Goldstar appears to be some kind of promotional service that a venue can use to pump up flagging ticket sales. I recently used them to see jazz at Cal State L.A.'s Luckman Theater, and am planning to use them to buy tickets to see more jazz there and at local places like Catalina Bar & Grill, Jazz Bakery and UCLA's Royce Hall. It looks like they have deals with these venues to post a notice on a particular engagement starting about a month before the calendar date. The idea, like I said, is to pump up the advance sales, so their deal expires the day before the performance. You have to not wait until the last minute, but make up your mind to go. And it isn't just jazz tickets. Theater tickets, too. And all the sporting events, the Dodgers and Angels, Clippers, Kings... or in New York, the Yankees and Mets, Knicks and Islanders... or in Chicago, the Cubs and Sox, the Bulls and Blackhawks...
Combined with his abilities as a soloist, Chick Corea's uncanny accompanist's instinct for supporting and focusing the spotlight on another player's efforts has produced celebrated duets with everyone from Gary Burton and Herbie Hancock to John McLaughlin and Bela Fleck. With Hiromi Uehara he has done it again.
Duet captures the two pianists in an engagement at Tokyo's Blue Note club in September of 2007, and finds them repeatedly achieving ecstatic heights of ingenuity and inventiveness. At first blush the opening tracks might feel too quiet as an introduction to the Sturm und Drang of this dynamic pairing, but if the anticipated energy, the bounding, rampaging, red-eyed thunder-and-lightning this partnership promises to deliver is not immediately evident as the first of two discs opens with Bill Evans' "Very Early" and Antonio Carlos Jobim's "How Insensitive," don't touch that dial...
Once these two get their hands warm on "Déjà Vu," the first of Hiromi's contributed compositions, they ignite things with a respectfully deconstructed version of "Fool on the Hill" that hews neatly to the lilting Lennon/McCartney melody line and harmonies right up until the closing three bars, when Corea unexpectedly plucks a few portentous notes inside the piano. The cubist conflagration long-time Corea fans perennially yearn for then flares dramatically on a joyful, abstracted version of his enduring "Humpty Dumpty," ending with his throwing down fistfuls of Cecil Taylor-esque tennis-ball chords, and his protégé enthusiastically throwing them right back. When he next engages Hiromi in some gravity-defying rhythmning on Thelonious Monk's "Bolivar Blues," the first disc's final track, it is plain she's in a mood to play.
A meandering "Windows" opens the second disc, but then it's off again on a stunning steeplechase of a composition, Hiromi's "Old Castle, by the River, in the Middle of a Forest," featuring some vintage unison dressage. By the time the last notes are sounded they are both energized and ready for a quirkily non-traditional distillation of "Summertime," using the Gershwin standard to continue widening the degree of abstraction as they travel through a sublimely ordered track sequence (a good argument in favor of albums, and against selective MP3 downloads). Musically, the end of "Summertime" dovetails into Hiromi's evanescent "Place to Be," which manages to slow the heart rate a few more beats per second before the disc concludes with a free-playing romp on Corea's "Children's Song #12," re-titled "Do Mo," and finally, an off-kilter rendition of "Concierto de Aranjuez/Spain" to provide an insouciantly perfect coda.
In the interests of honesty and total disclosure, I have a small quibble with this album (which may require a couple paragraphs to express): if I had produced it I would have trimmed it to a single CD and kept only the heart-pounding fireworks. There's more than one reason I'd have done it.
One, I think the markets for this U.S. release are the jazz-rockers who have been listening to Hiromi and her band Sonicbloom or have heard about them, plus a smaller secondary market consisting of Corea fans who have heard the buzz about how wild these gigs got. The first group are the same crowd who packed a couple dozen large venues for the Return To Forever Returns tour last summer, the ones who turned out to see Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller and Vic Wooten last Fall and who at this very moment are packing large venues for Chick Corea and John McLaughlin's Five Peace Band tour. The second group have been listening to Corea since his early recordings, and can be won only through word-of-mouth buzz generated by stellar performances. Neither are the same kind of adoring audiences who filled the Budokan in 2007 to see Chick and Hiromi perform this material - the major difference being that those people in Tokyo were devoted Hiromi (and Corea) fans who didn't need to be introduced. Chick's considerable drawing power notwithstanding, they throng to any performance she gives. American fans do need an introduction to her. You know the old saying, "You never get a second chance to make a first impression"? Why would a producer select Bill Evans' "Very Early" and Antonio Carlos Jobim's "How Insensitive" to open the first CD?
The second point is related to the first. The more I listen to the slower material like the Evans and Jobim tunes, and even Corea's "Windows" (which, once again, ill-advisedly opens the second disc) the more dispensible it sounds. These tunes have the feel of warm-up material, the kind of crowd-control music played to settle down the diners and get them involved with the music as the tables are cleared. Even the faithful who have packed the Blue Note can only manage polite applause. Whether it is Chick's restraint or Hiromi's still-developing sense of swing that keeps these tunes from bursting into flame, really doesn't matter. They are pleasant enough and were probably exactly right for the occasion. But why include them on the CD? Trim one more track, say Hiromi's "Déjà Vu," and the remaining 8 tracks would fit nicely on a single CD that would tear along like Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
All that said, I cannot recommend this recording highly enough. My tastes have undergone several overhauls and re-orientations listening to Chick Corea's many musical phases and faces over the years. As he moved through Blue Note bopper, Miles Davis' Rhodes scholar, and Circular logician into the engineer who drove the Return To Forever locomotive, he never strayed too far from being the intellectually curious composer and improvisational pianist who can out-think any harmony and out-play any composition. Through the Elektric Band and Akoustic Band, Origin and the Remembering Bud Powell band, and right up through his current Five Peace Band collaboration with John McLaughlin, he's always kept me listening for those moments of predictability when he changes direction. Tweaking the time-space continuum, he switches directions harmonically and rhythmically from wherever he was apparently going to somewhere else entirely. He has remained faithful to a social contract that only a few jazzers are able to adhere to, the one that promises me that I'll always be surprized. I'll always hear something new and fresh.
This recording with Hiromi lands right in the middle of a 3-day binge of newness. When he invited Hiromi to join him at the Blue Note he knew he was setting up two of those screaming-ass high-speed Japanese trains on the same track, not really knowing what would come of it, whether they would collide head-on or launch each other into space. But he knew it would be new. No matter how may times you have heard Bitches Brew or Circle - Paris Concert or An Evening with Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, you are not prepared for what Chick does with Hiromi on this recording. You most emphatically have not heard it before. This is new.
There has been some confusion about the release date for Return To Forever's 2CD set of material, Returns, recorded during last summer's reunion tour. I just received an email from Chris Hewlett, whose London firm is handling PR and publicity for the release. Here is what he said:
"The CD will be released in the UK on 2 March. The date for the US seems to be the 17th."
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