Even if you'd offered me tickets to the Cubs opening day game in Houston last night, I would have turned them down to see the jazz concert of the year at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. Chick Corea and John McLaughlin, together for the first time since landmark Miles Davis sessions 40 years ago, are two of my musical heroes, and I never dreamed I'd be able to see them play as band-mates. They brought a mind-boggling group: Christian McBride on bass, Kenny Garrett on sax and Brian Blade on drums, who in some ways stole the show with his freedom, his dynamics and his micro-surgical cut beats. It was a stunning, electrifying show - musicians working telepathically and at the highest levels of technical ease. They reharmonized traditional 12-bar blues in Jackie McLean's "Dr. Jackal" until the chords darkened and stretched into a sort of infinite and beautiful dissonance. Chick's long, multi-layered Hymn to Andromeda sent everyone on a journey.
I was fortunate to write the program notes, so my preview essay is posted after the jump and on the String Theory TEXT page.
Fusion Jazz, Re-fused
Two legends of jazz-rock, Chick Corea and John McLaughlin, reunite and bring their world tour to Nashville
BY CRAIG HAVIGHURST
In the fall of 1968, 27-year-old John McLaughlin got the phone call that would change his life. The bass player Dave Holland, a fellow Englishman, was on the line from the United States urging his guitar-playing friend in the U.K. to come to New York to take a band job with drummer Tony Williams.
By February of the following year, McLaughlin was in Manhattan, the Mecca of the jazz music he loved so dearly. And thanks to Williams, he would soon find himself in a recording studio with the world-famous trumpeter Miles Davis, along with a very heavy cadre of other musicians, including saxophonist Wayne Shorter and keyboard players Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul and one Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea.
It would overstate the case only a little to call the sessions that ensued — which yielded Davis’ landmark albums In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew — the birth of jazz-rock fusion. With these two records, Davis broke the taboo on electric instruments in jazz more brazenly than anyone before him, while the players he assembled would go on to lead their own bands. Among them, Corea and McLaughlin would launch two of the most influential of those ensembles, the former with Return to Forever and the latter with Mahavishnu Orchestra.
Both Corea and McLaughlin have assumed their rightful place in popular music history. They are frequently invoked in the same breath by fans and music historians — and yet, remarkably, these two men haven’t collaborated since their late-’60s explorations with Miles Davis. Not until now, that is. Four decades after they first met, these fathers of fusion have fused their muse once again, reuniting as a touring and recording unit called the Five Peace Band. Since last spring, they’ve played concerts in the U.S., Asia, Australia and Europe, where audience reaction overwhelmingly suggests that the shows measure up to the anticipation of this long-hoped-for summit.
Now they arrive for a special one-night performance at Schermerhorn Symphony Center on April 6, in which is sure to be the event of the year for local jazz fans. (This concert will be presented without the Nashville Symphony.)
Auspicious beginnings
When Miles Davis first encountered McLaughlin and Corea, he must have sensed that they were ready to go as far out as he was. And indeed they were. In a Silent Way pioneered an ambient, groove-heavy sound that has since became a staple jazz subgenre, while Bitches Brew set a new standard for the avant-garde, with a jagged, funky and often atonal edge. The former was serene, the latter tempestuous, even controversial, but Bitches Brew sold like a hit record and kept jazz in a place it never seems to be today — the mainstream spotlight.
Despite the 40 years between sharing gigs together, McLaughlin and Corea will always be bound by history and a musical point of view. They are daring, blazing players of almost exactly the same age, who share a spirit of searching modernism. Both openly defy convention while demonstrating respect for and command of jazz tradition. (They may well play “Stella By Starlight” in their show at Schermerhorn Symphony Center.) They’ve borrowed liberally from Latin, Middle Eastern and Asian traditions and tonalities. They have both embraced the power chords, psychedelia and thundering drumming of rock. And both are master technicians with the gift of jaw-dropping speed, though McLaughlin takes more liberties with showy technique.
When he comes to Nashville this month, McLaughlin will be playing a solid-body electric guitar, one hallmark of a rock-leaning jazz guitarist. Corea will play piano and electronic keyboards. They’ll be backed by a younger but equally stellar band including Christian McBride on bass and Brian Blade on drums. Rounding out the quintet is the dynamic saxophonist Kenny Garrett, himself an alum of one of Miles Davis’ bands. Each of these players’ accomplishments could fill pages, but McLaughlin and Corea arrive as the stars of the bill.
Corea, in particular, seems to be on a bit of a late-career nostalgia trip. Coincidentally or by design, he recently reassembled and toured with Return to Forever, the band most closely tied to his reputation as a fusion founding father. Return to Forever’s biggest album, Romantic Warrior, from 1976, went gold and helped bring younger audiences to jazz. It was in this group that Corea worked with a guitarist of similar fire and technical ability in Al Di Meola, a flamenco-influenced speed-meister who made hit solo albums and who has played a lot over the years with McLaughlin.
McLaughlin’s career analog was the Mahavishnu Orchestra. It had two very different lineups during its sometimes tempestuous five-year run. Not as large as it sounds, the five-piece band featured McLaughlin’s double-neck electric guitar with electric violin, at one point played by Jean-Luc Ponty. The rhythm section could go anywhere stylistically, from Memphis funk to the Far East. They drew rapturous audiences of young people, who had no problem with the cacophony and volume of some of Mahavishnu’s more searing tunes, while traditional jazz critics had fits. Nevertheless, that band’s 1971 debut, Inner Mounting Flame, has held up as an essential album of 20th century jazz.
A lasting influence
Here in the 21st century, we can look around and see legions of bands and artists working in the idiom established in part by McLaughlin and Corea. The popular Medeski, Martin and Wood and The Bad Plus offer echoes of Corea’s percussive, piano-based world rock. McLaughlin’s influence is everywhere, from the jam band movement to contemporary guitar trailblazers like John Scofield and Fareed Haque.
“What John McLaughlin did with the electric guitar set the world on its ear,” Corea once told Downbeat magazine. “No one ever heard an electric guitar played like that before, and it certainly inspired me. John’s band, more than my experience with Miles, led me to want to turn the volume up and write music that was more dramatic and made your hair move."
McLaughlin recently told Australian journalist John Shand that he and Corea “have this common heritage where we were both searching existentially. And this breeds a certain kind of complicity. So to play with Chick is a very special kind of pleasure for both of us.”
The Five Peace Band’s repertoire balances the old and the new, the borrowed and the original. Most nights have featured two songs from McLaughlin’s most recent studio album, Industrial Zen. They’ve begun some shows and concluded some shows with “In a Silent Way,” a tune flexible enough that it will undoubtedly bear little resemblance to the original Miles Davis album track (and of course that’s the fun of it). Listen for “The Disguise” and/or “Hymn to Andromeda” to hear Chick Corea’s distinctive composing voice in two tunes he wrote specifically for this band.
Reunions can be contrived, or they can, like Led Zeppelin’s one-night-stand of late 2007, be truly historic. For a certain and very passionate slice of the jazz and rock fan base, this reunion promises to have that kind of gravity.
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