74 The Economist February 20th 2021
Obituary Chick Corea
T
he instrument was new and shiny, trailing black cables
across the stage, and Chick Corea did not much like the look of
it. Nor, as he sat down and tapped the keys in his clear, springy
style, did he much like the sound of it. The year was 1968, he was in
trumpeter Miles Davis’s band, and he was sitting at a Fender
Rhodes electric piano.
This was the future, though. He and Miles had been wondering
for a while whether jazz could move authentically from acoustic
instruments to electric, fuse with rock and rhythm ‘n’ blues, and
thus bring in audiences of thousands. A few more notes and runs,
and he began to like it fine. They tried it out together on an album
called “Filles de Kilimanjaro”; then, by the early 1970s, he was
playing a Rhodes in his own band, called Return to Forever, with
Stanley Clarke and Bill Connors (later Al di Meola) on electric gui-
tars and Lenny White on drums. They looked like any other shaggy
tight-trousered rock group of the time. But when they launched
into his “Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy” in 1973 he began to realise
what they had done. This jazz was so new and so exciting that it
made the hairs stand up on his arms. Under his wiry control at the
keyboards, challenging, beaming, wriggling his shoulders with
delight (“Chick” came from “Cheeky”, which he was), the band be-
came his Mothership, adventuring in the limitless space where all
musical styles flowed round each other.
That adventure was to last a lifetime. Over the decades he won
23 Grammys and 67 nominations for his reinvigoration of jazz. He
played to packed houses the world over, touring with barely a
break. Yet he found it odd to be celebrated as a jazz-fusion pioneer,
as if you could say where one sort of jazz ended and another began.
He treated music more like a swimming pool, where he just jump-
ed in and had fun.
Fusion, in any case, went on all the time. As soon as you played
a piece with anyone, you exchanged ideas. As a young player inNew York in the 1960s he had learned from everyone he gigged for:
from Stan Getz, who tamed his wildest side and taught him melo-
dic simplicity, to Mongo Santamaria, who shaped his African-Cu-
ban instincts with the beat of a conga drum. (He felt so passionate-
ly Spanish, or Cuban, by the end of his gigs in Harlem that it was
odd to think his ancestry was Italian.) Even the “older guys”, Mo-
zart, Chopin, Scriabin, were still teaching him, his kindred spirits.
He once wove Mozart’s Sonata in F major into Gershwin’s “The
Man I Love”, and was amazed at how well they went together.
In music, jazz especially, one exploration naturally led to an-
other. He had only to think how he composed, hearing a tune in
his head, playing off it, adding on, doodling with crayons to jog his
creativity along. Sometimes he wrote phrases down, or composed
at a keyboard so they were stored. All too often, though, he
couldn’t catch them. Music, like a waterfall, never stayed still, and
nor did bands. But that was good. Every change of players brought
in something fresh. An Egyptian snare drum sent his music in one
direction, a flute in another. He tried duos with a vibraphone-
player, Gary Burton, and a banjoist, Bela Fleck, to see what strange,
thrilling sounds came through. When he set up an online acade-
my later and asked the young to send in questions, it was at least
partly to provoke new thoughts. He welcomed wrong notes, didn’t
much mind miscues: they could pitch him down a different path.
That encounter with the Rhodes piano had, nonetheless, been
dramatic for him. It came just after he had taken up Scientology
and, with it, began to wonder about the effect he could have in the
world. He had never wondered about it before. Growing up in
Chelsea, Massachusetts, he spent hours experimenting on the pi-
ano, alone in his bedroom into which the piano, like a spacecraft,
had had to be hoisted by a crane. His father was a Dixieland trum-
peter; music sang round the house, and the joy it gave him did not
seem to need sharing. Now he thought it did. Music was a story he
could tell, to fill people’s imaginations. He noticed, too, how stars
like the Beatles sold themselves as entertainers to huge crowds,
while jazz-players still haunted their smoky clubs. He wanted to
play innovative, heart-lifting jazz on a rock-star scale, too.
To the fury of purists (people with no curiosity, he thought)
jazz fusion became a great commercial success. But he was still ex-
ploring. Even as fusion arrived he was playing avant-garde acous-
tic stuff, indulging his wild, atonal, piano-string-plucking side
with a group called Circle. Later on, with fusion all the rage, he
played sessions with his friend Herbie Hancock on a couple of
concert grands, duels of improvisation on anything from Duke El-
lington to Bartok’s “Mikrokosmos”. He loved the family rapport of
bands, but also needed every so often to check out the world alone.
Synthesisers quickly followed the Rhodes piano, but he seldom
gave up the chance to commune with a Steinway—even if some-
times in trainers, or in one of his Hawaiian shirts.
In short, he was not to be tied down, not even to success. His
most famous and popular song was a number called “Spain”, from- It had come to him in the usual random way, as he was trying
out the second movement of Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez”.
He added this and that, put in other rhythms, and the piece rolled
out from there. Yet its very popularity, once it was recorded, froze
it in place. Anxiously he rearranged, reinvented, and in 1999
scored it for the London Philharmonic Orchestra. But in the end it
was not a piece for free adventuring any more.
That was the vital thing. As late as 2014 he astonished one critic
by saying, as he strolled onstage for a two-hour solo concert, that
he had no plan. That was usually the case. No plan or, if he was
with a band, only last-minute rehearsals. He wanted to be sur-
prised by what would happen if, say, he started improvising from
the hesitant first bars of Chopin’s Mazurka in A minor. Even if he
felt at home with the venue and the crowd, he wanted to approach
with his sharp, searching fingers a world he had never visited be-
fore. And with his first note, like that first note on the Fender
Rhodes, spring over any doubt, and take the audience with him.
Music without limits
Armando “Chick” Corea, pianist, composer and pioneer of
jazz fusion, died on February 9th, aged 79