Chick Corea Interview, 50 Years Later

As promised, here is the digitalized version of the article I wrote on Chick Corea for the Syracuse New Times in 1973. My first published article. I see some flaws but, overall, not bad.

Smiling, Urging, Playing as He Comes, Chick Corea Rides the 7^th Galaxy on His Return to Forever

Syracuse New Times, October 21, 1973

By Alan Perlman

Sitting down and talking with Chick Corea is like watching him perform on stage. For Corea, communicating, especially communicating happiness, is a major force, influencing everything he says and does.

When he talks about his music he exhibits the same assurance that marks everything he plays. His eyes stare straight and deep and the pixyish smile disappears—yet he glows.

“The audience may applaud a lot or a little, but when the vibes are there I know,” he said after a particularly inspired set.

At 32, Corea has ascended the musical ranks, earning his stripes with Elvin Jones, Willie Bobo, Mongo Santamaria, Herbie Mann, Blue Mitchell, Stan Getz and, most importantly, Miles Davis, the George Patton of jazz. Now he is leading his own band and playing the music he wants to play.

The warmth Corea feels in communicating can be seen whenever Return to Forever perform. On stage he looks like a little boy banging on a piano for the first time. He bounces around, smiles perpetually—in short, he has a great time. Taking bassist Stanley Clarke, drummer Lenny White and guitarist Billy Connors with him, he seems to transcend this world, reaching a level of sublime spiritual happiness.

Corea’s Spiritualism

The audience cannot help but be uplifted, and those fortunate few able to become totally immersed in the music can travel with the group as they journey through the “Seventh Galaxy.” Return to Forever’s last album (due for release in a few weeks) is entitled Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy. Corea discussed the spiritual meaning of the album for him.

“First of all, let me clear the word ‘spiritual’ with you. I find a lot of misunderstanding about the word ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritualism.’ There isn’t anything which isn’t spiritual. The cause of environments and the cause of life are people—and what a person is, Is a spirit. He doesn’t own a spirit, a spirit isn’t off in the next heaven, it’s you and it’s me. That’s a basic fact—that’s the most basic fact—everything is spiritual.

“In that sense, Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy of course is of a spiritual nature. It is the symbol for a dream that I find everybody shares—the dream to want to create a beautiful, beautiful space, to live and play and grow and create in. It definitely isn’t planet earth. But it’s a nice symbol for the kind of space we’d like to create and to be free in.”

Return to Forever, like Corea, is a conglomerate of influences. Lenny White prefers to call it “contemporary music.” Most artists resent it when someone tries to label their music, or categorically restrict it—but not Corea.

“Fortunately, I haven’t had the feeling of resentment about anything for about a year and a half now. I feel really good about things,” he explains. “The purpose of categorization is to verbally communicate something to someone—you need a word. There’s a differentiation I’d like to make clear, the difference between categorizing something in terms of its form and in terms of its intent. These are two different things that very often get buttered together.

“You can categorize music in terms of its form, which means the kind of sound that it produces—the way that rhythm, melody and harmony are used. If I really analyze our music objectively, as a musicologist, I would say form-wise it is rock, jazz, Latin, Avant-garde, pop, classical.

“It becomes very vague to categorize because there is no new nomenclature in the field of music. You’d call it the ‘new hybrid.’ As a culture develops you always get ‘new hybrids’ because you get people who have learned all the standard ways and they melt the influences together to get a hybrid form.

Beauty or Trash

“Intent is more important because you can take any form and use it in any way. You can take a rock form and you can communicate beauty through it or you can communicate trash through it.

“We have an intent with our music to bring something beautiful and understandable to people. Our intent is to make people feel good, and to get an agreement on the fact that creating something beautiful is a groovy thing to do—as opposed to creating a mystery or an awesome effect or a political opinion. Our intent is very simple, which is just to create games and lovely, beautiful, light things with people. We don’t intend to put audiences off, so they never don’t like it.

“This is how I feel all the time. It’s what my intent in life is. I don’t have to think about it, I just do it, ‘cause it’s what I feel like doing. I usually don’t think about anything. Thinking is a very slow way of coming to conclusions. I observe and then I very quickly make conclusions.

“I consider what I do to be the best I can, but the proof of it is what the people feel. It’s an ideal scene to be able to render one communication that communicates to everyone. That’s an absolute, an impossibility. There will be those form whom the communication goes over their heads, and there will be those who feel the communication isn’t sophisticated enough. My intention is to get that communication which is in the middle—that can satisfy those who like sophisticated music and those that like something simpler and coarser.

“Over the past four years my music has become simpler. I’d like to call it ‘more direct’ because in a lot of ways it’s more complex. Simplicity is the amount of directness in something—complexity is the amount of misunderstanding or confusion in something. We use very simple forms to create our music and within those forms we become very complex with our playing—but that’s the trip of it and that’s what people like about it. They grasp the basic of it and then the complexity becomes fun rather than vagueness.”

No one has more fun than Corea, unless it’s Clark of White. Connors fits in fine musically, but lacks the spirit and unusual empathy enjoyed by the others. They have a gas on stage, laughing, smiling, urging, cajoling—just being together.

After his first set Corea remarked that it was the worst he, personally, had ever played. Told that he didn’t look upset, he said, “I’m happy just digging what the others have to say, and they said some really beautiful things tonight.

“My own goal with the group,” he said later, “is for it to be a group, for everyone in the group to grow as an individual. I prefer to call it Return to Forever, not ‘Chick Corea and.’ Any group operates most sanely when there’s a singular direction and leadership.

“I started the group myself; it was my idea. I knew what I wanted and I got people who shared my goals. The others began to take more and more responsibility and began to originate more and more, involving their lives with the group. This group feels very, very good. I love it!

“In relation to the professional level of performance of musical groups, we’re at a very high level of development. But in terms of what our own ideas are, we’re definitely at a formulative stage.”

The present group was completed in June when White joined. White, 23, first played with Corea on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. “Lenny,” Corea said, “brings a spirit to the group that’s just great. He’s the best drummer I know of; a fantastic, fantastic musician.

Corea met Connors, also 23, in San Francisco last March. “I immediately recognized a very similar view and feeling about aesthetics that Billy and I shared. He’s very sensitive with his instrument and about music. He brings a very melodic feeling into the group.

Clarke, 21, and Corea have been together for a few years. “My relationship with Stanley is one of those rare kinds of relationships in life, where the first time we met we recognized one another to be ‘soulmates.’ We immediately started to plan a future together. Stanley’s as much a part of Return to Forever as I am. He’s grown incredibly as a player and as a composer, too. He gives the group a lot in terms of dedication and commitment to what we’re doing.”

According to Corea, the group will continue to expand, playing acoustically when conditions permit and “I’m gonna get a synthesizer and experiment with it.”

Art and Society

Chick Corea is a master, with a certainty not only in what he plays but what he says. Above all else he is an artist, an artist with a deep concern about the role of artists and art in today’s society.

“Art is the quality of communication. It summarizes communication. Instead of sitting down and rapping something out in everyday words, what you do in an art form is condense it into some organized sound or poetic words. In order to do that one has to know the basic principles of communication—and also have enough understanding of others to know how to communicate to them.

“Art is in degrees. To me, the value of it is communication. If you communicate to yourself, that’s art, but when you talk about the value of it, you talk about what’s the greatest help to the greatest number of people—how many people can you cause a beautiful effect on.

“If you look around and see who does the real influencing, you come up with an amazing thing, ‘cause it isn’t government leaders or education people or the usual ‘authorities’—it’s artists and celebrities. They are the people the influence the thinking of the masses—the Beatles, for instance.

“Artists have a very large responsibility. They can influence people because they’re doing something people want to do—which is to create. The value of an art form is how much truth and honesty an artist communicates, so that he helps people to become more self-determined.

“I don’t try to influence. What I do is continue to improve myself as a person and to help my own immediate environment. I continue to be true to my goals and ideals, and when I play for people all I really want to do is have fun. Life, to be sane, should be fun—it should be light, and airy, and not serious. It should be a very creative activity.”

Corea, an American artist, has not reached the level of acceptance in his own country as he has abroad. His new management, Forever Unlimited Productions, seems intent on rectifying that with a tremendous campaign that reeks of materialistic motives—but that’s okay, he deserves it. Je has done a number of TV specials in Europe and last year tied Elvis Presley as “artist of the year” in a Japanese magazine’s reader’s poll.

“The American people have a certain feeling and lifestyle. At first, the young people tend less towards aesthetic things, towards coarser communications. They like music that’s got a beat as thick as a mountain. In Europe, there’s more of a tendency towards fine arts—maybe because of the tradition of fine art. It was easier to gain an acceptance with experimental music, for when I first started to play there (1970) I was playing very experimental music, soft of ‘modern-classical.’

“I had a desire, after I spend some time in Europe, to communicate to Americans more. I knew that I couldn’t with the art form I had—‘cause it was kind of uncommunicative—so I wrote new music and re-arranged the form of my music. Now our music will probably be liked more by Americans than by Europeans or Japanese.

“I feel I’ve grown a lot. It’s a grown in awareness to be responsible for larger numbers of people. It’s diminishing an awareness to confine oneself to esotericism.”