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.”

In the fall of 1973, when I was 20 years old, I had the chutzpah to strut into the offices of the Syracuse New Times in Syracuse, NY, and inform them that I should be their new jazz critic. Although I was a journalism major at the Newhouse school, I had never published anything before in my life, not a word in my high school paper, not a syllable in my college newspaper. Not even an exclamation point anywhere! It was only by sheer luck that I was in the journalism school at all. My first two years in college were mostly a total waste. I didn’t get in to any of the schools to which I applied, so I had to go to Queens College, which was a couple of bus rides from my home in Bayside. I was still living with my parents for those two years, sharing a tiny room with my younger brother and sister, spending a lot more time at the race track and the poker table than in school, or anywhere else for that matter.

The luck was this: An English professor named Russ Fowler. I had him for one class in my freshman year and I liked him so much I signed up for a second class in my sophomore year. One day in year two he handed me back a paper and said this:

“You know, you’re a good writer.”

I was shocked. I looked at him as if he had just landed from Mars.

“What?” he said. “Nobody ever told you that before?”

I shook my head no.

“Well,” he said, “You are. Maybe you should do something with it.”

That was it. That was all the encouragement I needed to get out of the bad situation I was in. If Professor Fowler said I was a good writer, that was good enough for me. Within a week I had researched all of the journalism schools in the Eastern part of the U.S. and Canada and sent out a bunch of applications to transfer. Somehow, I was accepted in several schools and decided on Syracuse.

I started at Syracuse in the Fall of 1972, but my time there was interrupted because I broke an ankle slipping on some steps while cutting class in a snowstorm. Before I knew it I was back at Queens College, in a cast up to my waist, either hitchhiking to classes or taking the buses. No fun at all. In the fall of 1973 I returned to Syracuse and I pretty quickly made my fateful decision to strut into the offices of the Syracuse New Times and begin my career in journalism.

The New Times was an alternative weekly in the spirit of the Village Voice. It was pretty successful at the time and was read by most of the people on campus and just about everyone in the Newhouse school. I had no credentials at all, no clippings to look at when I approached the managing editor, Mike Greenstein. He looked me up and down. I was ready to be rejected outright. But that’s not what happened. Instead, Mike told me that they didn’t actually have anyone on staff who knew anything about jazz.

“What are you doing next weekend?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Okay,” he said. “Chick Corea is coming to play on campus with his band Return to Forever. You can cover the concert and we’ll set you up to do an interview with Chick.”

And that was it. My very first professional journalism assignment anywhere. Interview Chick Corea. Does it get any better than that?

Why am I telling you this story?

I’m clearing stuff out, as you know. I have 600 or so records on the current Carolina Soul eBay auction. I have another 3,000 or so records sitting in my living room committed to a local dealer. I’ve been poring through old files. For at least 20 years, since I started Jazz Collector, I’ve been looking for a copy of this Chick Corea profile. I had already found and posted two other articles from my early career, one on Charlie Parker and one on Charles Mingus. I have always wanted to post the Corea article, even if just to transform it in a digital format. But for all these years the article was nowhere to be found.

Until today. It was in a box with hundreds of other articles from my early career. Somehow it had gotten buried in there and I hadn’t seen it. I just finished reading it. Not too bad, especially considering it was my first article anywhere. I remember going to the club, Jabberwocky, and then meeting Corea in his room at a small motel near campus. He sat on his bed, I sat on a chair. Nothing very fancy at all. I remember taping the interview, and I can see that I used a lot of direct quotes in the article that I wrote. Do I still have a tape from the interview? It’s possible, maybe sitting somewhere in another box of memorabilia. Will it still be viable after 50 years? Who knows. If I ever find it, and it’s still viable, I’ll make sure to digitalize it and post it here  for posterity.

In the meantime, I’ll be sitting down at my computer this weekend copying the original article from 1973 and posting it on Jazz Collector. Stay tuned.

The post An Early Adventure in Jazz and Journalism first appeared on jazzcollector.com.]]> https://jazzcollector.com/features/an-early-adventure-in-jazz-and-journalism/feed/ 2 9166 https://jazzcollector.com/features/chick-corea/ https://jazzcollector.com/features/chick-corea/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2021 15:58:46 +0000 https://jazzcollector.com/?p=8666 When I was 20 in 1973 I had the balls to walk into the offices of the Syracuse New Times and tell them I should [...]

When I was 20 in 1973 I had the balls to walk into the offices of the Syracuse New Times and tell them I should be their jazz critic. The New Times was the alternative newspaper in Syracuse, the local version of the Village Voice, and I was a journalism student at the Newhouse School. I had never written anything professionally, nor had I even written anything for a school newspaper. But they didn’t have anybody to write about jazz at the time, so they gave me a shot. I reviewed a couple of albums and must have done OK because I walked into the office one day and the editor said Return to Forever was coming to the local nightclub on campus, called Jabberwocky, and they would like me to review the concert and interview Chick Corea. In fact, they had already set up a time and place for me to do the interview.

It’s hard to describe how excited and nervous I was, interviewing a genuine jazz superstar as my very first real journalism assignment, ever. When the time came, I met Corea in his room in a small motel near the campus. I sat in a chair, he sat on his bed. We talked for about an hour. He was gracious and treated me like an adult, even though I looked and felt like a kid. I didn’t dare tell him I had never done this before. I wish I had saved the tape, but I didn’t. The New Times published a full-page article. It was my real start as a journalist. I remember the lead, or at least the crux of it. It was something like: “Sitting down with Chick Corea is like watching him sit at the piano and perform on stage.” The goal was to capture his passion, enthusiasm and zest for both life and music. He seemed to be having so much fun, when he played and when he talked, even to a 20-year-old starstruck kid like me. The discussion we had was focused primarily on spirituality and music.

I know I saved the article, somewhere, and this morning I went through every possible file up here in The Berkshires and couldn’t find it. I have a feeling I brought it to New York a little while ago with the idea that I would transcribe it and post it on Jazz Collector. I will search the next time I am in New York. I hope I can find it and, if I do, I promise to reproduce it here at Jazz Collector.

That, of course, was my first memory of Corea, other than hearing him on record. My guess is the first record I heard him on would have been Sweet Rain by Stan Getz, but I couldn’t swear to that. Obviously, by 1973 with Return to Forever, Corea had moved into a totally different sphere as an artist, performer and jazz icon, and would remain there for the rest of his life.

My last memory was from 2019 when he played at the local theater here in Great Barrington, the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center.  The Lovely Mrs. JC and I were fortunate enough to get seats in the front row of the center mezzanine. Just as in my first memory, Corea played with the passion of someone who truly loved what he was doing, was totally inspired and acted as if there was no place in the world that he would rather be than on that stage, playing with those musicians for this particular audience. The music was awesome, as you would expect, a mix of standards, originals and experimentations. I walked away with a warm feeling and immense gratitude that he was still so passionate about sharing his gifts. I felt blessed just to be in his presence and felt like he would just go on forever. What a loss.

The post Chick Corea first appeared on jazzcollector.com.]]>

My very first paying job as a journalist was while I was still in college. I was the jazz writer and critic for The Syracuse New Times in Syracuse, New York. It was 1973. I was 20 years old. The job was a blast. I got to interview Charles Mingus, Chick Corea and Larry Coryell when they came through town. I got to write a fun essay on Charlie Parker. I wrote an article on 25 records to get started on jazz. And, whenever the record labels would send over new jazz records, they would come to me. For a vinyl addict, what could be better?

At some point I was sitting in my dorm room and I was doing a review of a new Dexter Gordon album. It was Ca’Purange (Prestige 10051 for those of us who like to keep track of such things). I didn’t think the album was all that great, particularly in comparison to Dexter’s previous Prestige albums, most notably The Panther!, which was one of my favorites. I’m at my typewriter and writing about Dexter being a disappointment on this record, and commenting negatively on the other musicians, who happened to be Thad Jones, Hank Jones, Stanley Clarke and Louis Hayes.

And I look down at the paper, and the realization hits me: Who the hell am I to be criticizing Dexter Gordon or any of these amazing artists?

I can’t play jazz, I have never put the time and effort and dedication into the craft, and these men are all masters, among the greatest musicians of our time. And, because I don’t particularly like this particular album, I’m going to publish an article with my name attached to it and say something negative about them? What gives me the right?

I pulled the piece of paper out of the typewriter and wrote a brand new review with a completely different perspective, with a lot more respect and appreciation for the time and effort and work that went into the album. Whether I liked it or not was almost beside the point. I felt much better about my work and I’m sure my readers got a lot more value out of my more thoughtful and perhaps more thought-provoking review. From that point on, whenever I wrote a review it was with a sense of respect and acknowledgement of the artistic effort that went into the work. But I also knew that, as much as I loved jazz, I was not really qualified to be the type of critic I thought I should be, because I did not understand the fundamentals of actually creating the music. As I moved on in my journalism career, I moved away from criticism and really never went back. Even here at Jazz Collector, you would be hard-pressed in any of my more than 1,500 posts to find any harsh or dismissive comments about any musician attempting to create art of lasting value.

Which brings me back to the new play “At the Table” by Michael Perlman (see, I did it again). I saw the play three times in previews and was truly impressed with every aspect of it. Of course, I’m totally prejudiced—but, to be fair, Michael’s last play, “From White Plains,” won a prestigious GLAAD Media Award and has subsequently been produced all across the country, including theaters in New York, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Ithaca and San Francisco, among others.

Anyway, the play had previews last week and opened on Sunday and the audiences have absolutely loved the play. So the artistic team was anxiously awaiting the reviews, particularly the one from The New York Times. And it came out on Monday. And it was an embarrassment – not to the play and the artistic team, but to The New York Times and the critic who wrote it. She was basically dismissive of the entire play because it was staged in the round and there were times when characters had their backs to certain parts of the audience when they spoke their lines. Which is what happens in theater in the round. She clearly didn’t like the play, which is her right, but give the readers a real reason, give the play some honest thought and criticism. Don’t just casually dismiss the tremendous effort that goes into producing something like this simply because it was staged in the round.

Honestly, this was as poorly done “review” as I have ever seen. Here, read it yourself. (For contrast, here’s another review of the play.) The unfortunate reality is the poor review was in The New York Times, which carries more weight than every other media outlet combined. With the power that The New York Times carries in determining the fate of artistic endeavors, and particularly non-profit theater, they should be much more diligent, responsible and mindful in what they publish. As a long-time editor and journalist, I am embarrassed for my profession because, in my view, The Times abrogated its most basic responsibility to the artistic community and the theater-going public.

On the other hand, I am tremendously proud of my son and the rest of his talented team. What happened was this: The review was so absurd, uninformed and uninformative, that people who had seen the play began spontaneously commenting on The New York Times site. It seems they are not publishing all of the comments, but at this point there are nearly 40 comments that have been posted, and they are very thoughtful and pointed in their discussion and critique of the work – just as the reviewer should have been. Please, take a look at them.

I’m also proud that Michael hasn’t let the laziness and incompetence of a single individual be too discouraging, although it is The New York Times and a weird review like that one is obviously not what you want to appear when you are trying to attract an audience to a new and very thoughtful (and funny!) play. This is what Michael wrote on Facebook yesterday:

Not gonna lie. It’s been a frustrating day. I’ve been frustrated that we as a community feel as though so much stock is put in what one paper says about our work. Frustrated that that one paper can affect whether people choose to come see the work or not. Frustrated that this particular review doesn’t discuss, for better or for worse, the actual work being done and questions being asked. And frustrated that I felt as though I should be ashamed of the review and hide from social media.

But I got an email this morning from a stranger in Hawaii asking if he could read the play. This review piqued his interest, but the comments, he said, made him really want to see what this play was about. So I took a look at the comments and discovered quite a few thoughtful, complex and beautifully written thoughts on the show. And it reminded me that so much of what we’re trying to ask in this play is what happens when we as a culture are no longer interested in one point of view having the loudest voice. And there are currently about 15 people discussing what this play means to them.

So I’m posting the review. If you’ve seen the show, I hope that you will become part of the conversation that’s happening in the comments section – whether you like what we’re doing or not. Be part of the conversation. And if you haven’t seen it, I hope the comments will make you want to see it and participate in the conversation yourselves. And, of course, I hope that if and when the conversation gets large enough, people who want to go to the theater because it is a social event, and perhaps the last art form that MUST be a social event, will see these comments and say “I want to be part of that.” Perhaps we can make the story about the other voices that want to be heard.

I am so tremendously proud of this show and the team that has created it.”

To my friends at Jazz Collector, thank you for indulging a proud father, and please see the play if you’re in New York. For everyone who does a search and finds this article, if you’re in New York between now and July 19, I urge you to see “At the Table” by Michael Perlman. This is a terrific piece of work and I promise you won’t be disappointed.