Friends - Chick Corea | Jazzbo Notes

Jul

2

Friends - Chick Corea

≡ Category: 1970s, Post Bop, Recommended, Reviews |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES RECOMMENDED RECORDING

Rating:

Friends might not be profound, but it is legitimate jazz played by master musicians, which is more than you might expect given the idiotic Smurf cover art. To put it another way, Friends is light jazz, not jazz lite.

Chick Corea steers clear of the excesses that can mar his work, like Gayle Moran’s overdubbed chorus on Love Castle or the cheesy Latin fusion of Night Streets, both from My Spanish Heart. Surprisingly, Chick Corea is at his weakest, most sentimental, and just plain silly when he’s exploring his Latin roots. Instead, Friends is mostly acoustic quartet jazz (Corea sometimes plays a Fender Rhodes), as if it were commissioned for the children’s show Sesame Street. The one tune that edges towards Latin jazz, Sicily, is borderline irritating. More on that later.

Corea has instructed Joe Farrell (reeds and flute), Eddie Gomez (acoustic bass), and Steve Gadd (drums) to play pretty. Joe Farrell is in excellent form and always plays with taste, although I do miss the edge that’s usually in his playing. The timbre Farrell gets out of the flute is the most lovely in jazz, never more true than here. Eddie Gomez plays with a piercing intelligence, with little of the embarrassing florid Latinisms which he is prone to when playing explicitly Latin jazz music, which thankfully is almost entirely absent from Friends. The one exception is Sicily, a jazz samba. On tunes like this, Gomez tends to use an abundance of vibrato, which just makes me cringe. Elsewhere, Gomez walks in swing time with an unmatched creativity and authority. Steve Gadd plays with his usual professionalism, but he has a great solo on Samba Song when Chick Corea plays a montuno (repeated rhythmic motif) and Gadd improvises around it in the explosive way we’re familiar with from Steely Dan’s classic track, Aja.

Chick Corea himself plays with his customary elegance, but he definitely is not stretching or playing to the limits of his capabilities. There is a reason why people transcribed his keyboard solos on his release on Light As A Feather. No one will ever bother with transcribing Corea’s keyboard solos on Friends.

Sticking to his Scientology derived dictum to communicate to as many people as possible, Chick Corea makes sure that there are no menacing textures, no dissonance to speak of, and lots of poppy song structures on Friends. The themes are often attractive and rarely cloying, even Children’s Song #5 and to a lesser extent, Children’s Song #15. The one exception, as noted before, is the jazz samba Sicily. (Corea’s cycle of Children’s Songs can be saccharine and condescending — thankfully, that’s not the case here.)

The playing time of Friends goes by rather painlessly, even if you wish a band with players of such fantastic ability had been allowed to dig a little bit deeper.