Piano Improvisations Vol. 2 - Chick Corea

Sep

24

Piano Improvisations Vol. 2 - Chick Corea

≡ Category: 1970s, Avant-Guarde, Free Jazz, Music Reviews, Post Bop, Recommended, Worth A Listen |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

WORTH A LISTEN

Rating:

Chick Corea’s career path in the decade between 1965 and 1975 is one of the most fascinating in jazz. As a leader, he started out playing advanced post bop. Then he played with Miles Davis when Miles was transitioning from post bop to fusion. Once Corea left the Davis group, he formed an avant guarde group called Circle. Piano Improvisations Vol. 1 and 2 come right after he dissolved that group, citing a desire to communicate to a larger audience.

Not surprisingly, Piano Improvisations Vol. 2 (on the ECM label) straddles the fence between accessible and melodic tunes and pointillistic free jazz, getting more difficult as it goes along.

Piano Improvisations Vol. 2 opens with After Noon Song, a tuneful but by no means simplistic ditty which has a distinct Celtic feel. Thank goodness, coming off of the years with Miles Davis and Circle, Corea had no particular urge to explore his Latin roots. I find he has a tendency to play and compose abnoxiously cutesy phrases when he is in Latin mode.

The next two tunes follow along a similar path with different source materials. These tunes aren’t hugely impressive the way the numbers on Keith Jarrett’s contemporary recording Facing You were, but they are radiant with Corea’s intelligence and pleasant enough.

Things start to change with Corea’s cover of Monk’s Trinkle Tinkle, which Corea uses as material for a deconstruction rather than a straight cover.

Similarly, Wayne Shorter’s Masqualero starts out as a simple cover, but as it goes along, it too becomes material for free jazz musings before resolving back into Shorter’s composition.

Preparation 1 and Preparation 2 are largely studies in contrapuntal stacatto scalar phrases.

Things get really unmoored with the aptly titled Departure From Planet Earth which begins with impressionistic piano washes using the sustain pedal and sweeps up and down the piano keyboard with occasional crashes of chord clusters disturbing the waves of sound like so many asteroids. Then we start to get repetitive staccato phrases fading in and gradually supplanting the sustained chords. These are accented by the occasional percussive and treated dissonant stab. The staccato phrases diminish and are gradually replaced by great crashing chord clusters. I could go on, but you get the point. Departure From Planet Earth is a virtual compendium of avant guarde piano techniques.

A New Place is Corea’s attempt to reconcile the tuneful nature of the opening numbers with his avant guarde musings. Oddly, it has a similar feel to some of Bartok’s Microcosmos series, in that some very complex ideas are communicated in a very simple context.

Now, the question is, should you own Piano Improvisations Vol. 2? That depends. If you have only a casual interest in Chick Corea and you don’t care much about the avant guarde, definitely not. If Chick Corea is one of your favorite pianists, this is a missing link between Circle, his most uncompromising music, and Return to Forever, his initial attempt to connect to the broader public.