Light As A Feather - Chick Corea

Aug

21

Light As A Feather - Chick Corea

≡ Category: 1970s, Essential, Latin Jazz, Reviews |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING

Rating:

If you put on Light As A Feather at a party for the average group of people, this is what’s going to happen (I know — I tried it once). They’re going to accuse you of trying to put them to sleep. When you ask them why, they’ll tell you that it’s fuzak, that they feel like they’re on hold calling a software support line.

That’s the typical reaction to one of the most joyful, incredibly exciting dates ever to be waxed. Here’s the problem — it’s unforgiveably pretty. What grit there is — and it’s there, make no mistake — is in the note choices, the harmonies that pianist Chick Corea uses. And there’s a reason for that.

Only two years before, Chick Corea had been playing avant guarde music with his band Circle, and before that, advanced post bop under his own name. Somewhere around this time, Corea became very involved with the Scientology religion. One of the tenets of that religion is that communication on a broad scale is a very desirable thing, and the best way to do that is to increase affinity (the degree of liking) and/or reality (a basis of agreement). It’s called the ARC triangle, where A stands for affinity, R for reality, and C for communication. The idea is, you raise any one corner of the triangle, you tend to raise the other two.

Chick Corea interpreted that to mean that his music needed to be more pleasing to the ear, thereby raising the affinity level, and that the melodies and harmonies he explored had to be somewhat familiar to listeners, raising the level of reality, or agreement. To this end, he formed Return to Forever, which trafficked in a Brazilian flavored pop fusion.

The band’s members were all master musicians (with the possible exception of Flora Purim, who nonetheless was at her absolute peak on Light As A Feather): Stanley Clarke on bass, Airto on drums and percussion, the great Joe Farrell on saxes and flutes, and Corea himself on electric piano.

Somehow, the simpler materials unleashed an amazing flow of melodicism from Chick Corea and Joe Farrell. I remember seeing a book of transcribed Chick Corea solos from Light As A Feather, and that tells the whole story. Corea’s solos were so consistently fabulous on this record that someone took the time to transcribe and publish them. I don’t know if anyone did the same for Joe Farrell’s work on the date, but it deserves to be immortalized every bit as much. The improvisations on this record are so impressively constructed that they almost sound like they were composed.

Then there’s the band performance. This is a rock solid unit. A more gorgeous, joyful group sound you will never find. It makes you a little sad that Airto hasn’t done more work in the drum chair, electing to stick mostly to percussion. Stanley Clarke exudes a youthful brio that I believe inspired the rest of the band. These guys are on fire. There’s no other way to put it.

Every song but one is a classic. The exception, Children’s Song, stretches Corea’s interpretation of the ARC triangle as it applies to music to the breaking point. The apparent simplicity of the tune is a letdown after the killer track 500 Miles High, which is surely one of the Chick Corea’s best compositions. Perhaps it was meant as a sort of a grapefruit sorbet between courses before the exuberant closing track, Spain. In any case, Children’s Song irritates me so much that I’m deducting half a star from my rating of Light As A Feather.