How to get tickets to see RTF this summer

As I said in my last post, no tour dates have been announced as of yet for the upcoming Return To Forever tour. Neither Chick's well-maintaned website chickcorea.com nor the one for Ted Kurland Associates (Chick's long-time Boston-area booking agency that is booking tour dates for RTF) shows anything booked for Chick past early May, and nothing at all yet for RTF. This could mean a number of things, including that there might be an announcement and ensuing ticket-agency/scalper gold rush, but speculation is a waste of time.

Here is something that is not a waste of time. At the bottom of the chickcorea.com web page showing tour dates is a message saying "Sign up for Chick’s elist and be among the first to be notified when the official RTF tour dates are announced. (click here) ." The link takes you to another web page where you can get your email address added to the list. I've been on this mailing list for years and suspect it will be the very best way of getting your tickets. They've never spammed me.

I'm getting pumped. This is going to be the must-see jazz event of the year.

Return To Forever Redux - LIVE!

The last Friday before Christmas I went to see Chick Corea and his Elektric Band play at Catalina's in Hollywood. It was a good show that featured, even for Chick, a uniquely different musical approach. The traditional solo instruments - Chick's pianos, Gambale's guitars and Marienthal's saxes - transformed as the night progressed into playing support for the rhythm section. I couldn't really tell if the reversed roles were planned or even anticipated. It looked to me as though the musicians had yielded to the hot hand when the improvisational hot spots began to take on a life of their own. They did a number of old Elektric Band standards, including "Silver Temple" (dedicated to pianist Roger Williams, seated at a guest table with Gayle Moran Corea) originally recorded live at one of the very first Elektric Band gigs, at Elario's in La Jolla, California. But the room finally exploded with the standout performance of a fired-up Dave Weckl, who put on a drum clinic worthy of Max Roach at the beginning of the tune "Johnny's Landing" (which Chick introduced wryly as "Dave's Landing") from the CD To the Stars (Stretch, 2004).

After the show, my friend Dave S. and I stood out in the unseasonably cold December night on Sunset Blvd. and reviewed the evening's highlights. He opened with a comment that he had been a bit stunned upon hearing the drummer's impressive solo, because despite all the recordings of the musician's work that he had heard, he never would have suspected that Weckl, known for his distinctive rock-and-roll attack, could play with the dynamic range he had just displayed.

Which made me smile. I remembered experiencing similar amazement when I first heard the Elektric Band live, even remarking once to Chick's long-time production manager that early on I didn't particularly care for the Elektric Band, at which point she'd grinned and gently interrupted me, finishing my sentence by saying: "...until you heard them live. Right?" Exactly. Any quibble I ever had with their studio work has long since been vaporized by the blazing, hotter-than-hot shows I've gotten to see them do. And that evening at Catalina's was no exception. Surprise and invention, the elements I find so intoxicating in jazz, began to be served up like buckets hurled out of a steaming cauldron when funkmeister and guest bassist Vic Wooten finally got his fingers warmed up and started contributing his brand of world-music craziness to the proceedings, taking full advantage of Weckl's hot sticks. When the two timekeepers finally got the whole volcanic confluence boiling along nicely with their killer back-up musicians tearing along with them, we were all treated to the 4/4, 5/4, 6/4 and 7/4 times of our lives.

Live music. You never know what you're going to hear. My friend Bob W. was just telling me last night about a Clapton performance he once saw, during which the guitar wizard had improvised a slowed-down acoustic version of "Crossroads", a la his swinging shuffle version of "Layla" or the Beatles' "Revolution 1". Bob said that as he listened to EC's re-constructed rendition of the old Cream tune that night, he kept thinking: "Oh my God, I hope they're recording this, because it's probably the only time he'll ever do it."

Live music is alive!

As I listened to Chick's endlessly creative work on his array of keyboards that night, the most noteworthy thing for me was hearing him re-working some of his trademark Return To Forever licks. It was quite apparent he is looking forward to the upcoming reunion tour... http://www.chickcorea.com/player_temp.php I could hear it in the way he was affectionately incorporating and rehearsing a small handful of the scores of compositional modules (like the various Children's Songs) that he's been writing and re-writing and re-inventing since the mid-60's, those melodic and harmonic matrices he began improvising, composing, refining in his days before and during his stint with Miles, modifying them as the occasion called for on his early solo piano improvisations, the harmonically ascendant Fender Rhodes riffs and ecstatic synthesizer peals on tunes like "Song to the Pharoah Kings" on Return To Forever's album Where Have I Known You Before (Polydor, 1974), and so many of the hard-bopping, post-bopping, Spanish-hearted concertos, psalms, tangos, ditties and songs-of-singing that have followed.

Return To Forever is returning (with a promise to do their hits). Chick Corea on the world's most elaborate collection of pianos (rumor has it he just bought another vintage Rhodes), synths and other assorted keyboards, Stanley Clarke on bass, Lenny White on drums and Al DiMeola on guitar. This is the jazz Fab Four from back in the day. In my mind they were the undisputed heavyweight champions of jazz-rock/fusion/prog rock, the mind-blowing band of virtuosi that set the scene on fire. In fairness, they shared the stage with a few other heavyweight contenders that weren't too bad, either -- Chick's friends and ex-bandmates John McLaughlin (Mahavishnu Orchestra), Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul (Weather Report) and Herbie Hancock (Headhunters). What a time that was. Miles was in the middle of a 5-yr. hiatus to do some boxing and cook some fish. He almost had to lay out after starting all that trouble when his proteges began picking up the gauntlet and slapping sense into the jazz world's auditory nerves. Nothing before or since rivals the phenomenon that occurred, so if you didn't experience the spiritual vibe of thousands upon thousands of fans filling a skating rink in Central Park to hear jazz... it might be hard to imagine.

It is going to happen again this summer. No domestic or European or Asian tour dates have been announced yet. Not even Chick's booking agency has a date scheduled after May, a highly unusual development for a guy accustomed to booking gigs two years in advance.

Stay tuned.

Welcome to Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing)

Welcome, fellow jazzer. It was 40 years ago today (approximately)/ Captain Davis taught the band to play/ They've been going in and out of style/ But they're guaranteed to raise a smile/ So may I introduce to you/ The act you've known for all these years...

This is the maiden voyage of a blog which emphasizes discussion of jazz and jazz-related music since 1968 . In that seminal year, August to be exact, Miles Davis brought Dave Holland over to New York from England (where he had been the bassist in a band with John McLaughlin, John Surman and Tony Oxley) and Chick Corea over from San Francisco (where he had been playing a gig as Sarah Vaughan's piano accompanist), to introduce each (eventually) to a couple new "directions in music", i.e., electronically amplified bass and piano performance, and to record Filles de Killimanjaro in September. Miles had somehow become the de facto captain of the Good Ship Jazz, so he took the helm and began to steer a radically different course. Many other musicians were already contributing to this change and legions of others would follow.

1968 was when Rock & Roll and Jazz came together with a loud bang. Some sort of multi-phase internal explosion occurred throughout music, and the seismic aftershocks continue to be felt right up to this present moment. Record company executives and concert promoters were calling it Jazz/Rock or Fusion, or Progressive Rock. Jimi Hendrix called it "Rainy Day Dream Away" on his Electric Ladyland album and Rod Argent called it "Time of the Season" for the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle. This was the year that James Guercio commuted between the U.S.'s East and West coasts to simultaneously produce Blood, Sweat & Tears & Chicago Transit Authority. The same year that Cream's live recordings on Wheels of Fire revealed that their roots were in the jazz tradition as well as the blues, as they established themselves as the hottest live act in the world.

Not that nothing important occurred in music before 1968 – it's just that a lot occurred then and so much has occurred since, and most of it has been ignored (listen to WBGO in New York or KKJZ in Los Angeles sometime... when was the last time you heard something from Bitches Brew?) So that's where the emphasis will be. But intelligent discussions of music of all kinds, from all eras, will be welcome here. Of course. With your contribution of comments and opinions I guarantee this could soon be one of your favorite blogs. The standards are: smart (intelligent) dialogue; interviews from this millenium; insightful biographies that reveal something about the musician and his music; useful reviews and commentary; accurate discographical information; etc.

Jazz is a living thing. It is performed by and listened to by living beings, and takes many forms. Duke Ellington, a structuralist if there ever was one, made dismissive comments on the wrong-headed attempts to define and limit jazz because he wanted to keep the music free and vital. Jazz is an artistic expression that embraces change. In many ways change is its defining characteristic. It evolves, and has done so many times since those early days in the parlors of New Orleans sportin' houses. But you wouldn't know it from the way it has been chronicled. In my appetite for more on the subject I tried valiantly to watch Ken Burns' 1140-minute documentary Jazz when it was first aired on PBS a few years ago. But every time I tuned it in I felt that soporific mental numbness that accompanies a guided tour through a museum... or mausoleum. If one were from another planet and checking out this thing called jazz as defined by Burns (and his advisor Wynton Marsalis), one might have thought one were watching a film about an art form from the ancient past... not an art form still alive and breathing today. When he reached the tenth and final episode, 1961-present, he had already bottled it all in formaldehyde. The music's last 40 years were then collapsed into a single obligatory segment of vapid commentary. And the revolution that occurred in the mid-1960's? What revolution? Don Ellis, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry? The Miles Davis Quintet(s)? Electrified jazz bands so popular that their records were certified Gold by the R.I.A.A. while they filled sports stadiums with paying fans? Weather Report? Mahavishnu Orchestra? Return to Forever? Headhunters?

Downbeat, despite the limitations of a magazine format, has always done well keeping abreast of things. But in the ensuing 40 years it seems one has been able to count the important books written on the subject on the fingers of one hand: Julie Coryell's book Jazz-Rock Fusion: The People, the Music, a nice collection of photos and interviews; Stuart Nicholson's Jazz-Rock: A History, an openly opinionated but encyclopedic detailing of the high points of the music’s history; and Walter Kolosky's recent Power, Passion and Beauty, a very readable fan's paen to the Mahavishnu Orchestra. To be fair, there have also been useful passages in many biographies, especially ones like Quincy Troupe’s Miles: The Autobiography and Michelle Mercer’s Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter. For its exceptional detail and accurate portrayal of the spirit of the music, although it is ostensibly devoted to a single period in the artist’s oeuvre, Paul Tingen’s Miles Beyond: the Electric Explorations of Miles Davis 1967-1991 is probably the best of the lot. Other than that, it's been crickets.

Trying to be all things to all people is a mistake many an artist and businessman has made, but contrarian jazz critics and historians who have inexplicably sealed up the time capsule and ignored the last 40 years are attempting to be of no use to anyone. They have succeeded in many ways. With the arrogance only a revisionist knows, they have closed their eyes and hoped it all goes away. Their blindness has served their self-fulfilling prophesy better than it should have.

But this music is un-killable. It is full of life. It still has all the potential it ever had, right here, right NOW. I personally would like to hear jazz make some noise again!

That's where we will begin.

Get ready. Exciting things are coming in 2008!

Happy New Year!

Miles Davis, Newport Jazz Festival 1990, photo by Herb Snitzer