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Chick Corea

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Here’s to freedom in music.

Chick Corea

Few musicians have embraced as many stylistic viewpoints in pursuit of their artistic goals as Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea (1941-2021). The pianist summed up his creative philosophy in an interview with Mike Zwerin: “Music is a process...One offering is only a part of a stream of offerings.” As it flowed into multiple tributaries, that stream left behind some sparkling jewels, some revealed only recently, such as Chick’s composition The Visitors, written for classical pianist Kirill Gerstein and jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton, and released in June 2025.

Here’s to freedom in music.

Chick Corea

An important presence from ECM’s earliest days, Chick Corea contributed to Marion Brown’s experimental tone poem Afternoon of a Georgia Faun in August 1970. Three weeks later, he played to an audience of half a million at the Isle of Wight rock festival, with Miles Davis’s group. And then, restlessly, he was on the move again, with a self-declared mission to “stretch the boundaries of improvisation” in projects with fellow Davis alumnus Dave Holland: “We shared interest in the music of John Coltrane, Béla Bartók, John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Edgar Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The atmosphere seemed charged with desire for new sounds and new ways. Not really a rebellion against tradition, but almost.”

The exploratory drive found expression in trio music with Holland and Barry Altschul on A.R.C., and in the influential quartet Circle, completed by AACM multi-reed player Anthony Braxton: “All acoustic, all improvised, Circle was the furthest from the fusion movement that you could possibly imagine,” Chick would later reflect. A short-lived band, its impact was nonetheless profound, and its Paris Concert recording of February 1971 remains one of the definitive classics of open-form creative music.

In April 1971, Corea recorded two volumes of solo Piano Improvisations in Oslo. “I took the next idea that came to mind and played it down – then titled it later. This was a new way to create for me at the time. I wasn't sure what the outcome would be – but just got into the joy of trying it out to see what would happen.”

One of the titles featured on Piano Improvisations Vol. 1, “Sometime Ago”, would soon resurface as a theme song for Corea’s next band, Return To Forever which, in its early incarnation featured bassist Stanley Clarke, saxophonist and flautist Joe Farrell, singer Flora Purim, and drummer-percussionist Airto Moreira, with whom Chick had worked in Miles’s band. The group’s debut album – recorded in February 1972 - swept listeners away with its infectious enthusiasm. Its emphasis on Latin rhythms was less a stylistic departure than a reaffirming of one aspect of Corea’s roots. Some of his earliest playing, as a professional musician, had been with the bands of percussionists Mongo Santamaria and Willie Bobo, in the early 1960s.

Chick’s tunes, meanwhile, proved adaptable for multiple contexts, and “Crystal Silence”, introduced on Return To Forever, was also perfectly suited to the glistening duo interplay of Corea and vibraphonist Gary Burton. Of all Corea’s line-ups, the duo with Burton – established in 1972 - was to prove the most enduring. In their lightning-quick exchanges Chick and Gary were able to anticipate each other’s improvisational responses, phrasing, and rhythmic accentuation. The result was often breathtaking: an effervescence of melody and countermelody, with synchronized cascades of sound in continually changing harmonic movement. In addition to their albums as a duo, Burton and Corea recorded Chick’s Lyric Suite for Sextet, joined by a string quartet.

Compositional priorities came to the fore in the early 1980s. Chick’s Children’s Songs featured a set of twenty solo piano pieces of beguiling simplicity. Reviews drew comparisons with Bartók’s Mikrokosmos. As an addendum for the album, extending the spirit of the solo tunes, Corea wrote a trio piece for piano, cello and violin. The featured cellist was Fred Sherry, then best-known as a member of the Messiaen-inspired Tashi quartet. Sherry had played on the Lyric Suite and would also contribute to 1984’s Septet, the half-hour long title work of which was commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Chick: “Writing the Septet was my first venture as a composer into creating a through-written piece of this length and complexity. I must say I had great fun doing it.” The album was completed by “The Temple of Isfahan”, a chamber music resetting of a piece originally written for Al DiMeola, but now foregrounding flautist Steve Kujula, with whom Chick recorded the duo album Voyage in 1984.

In parallel and in contrast to the compositional activities, Chick relaunched his freewheeling jazz trio with Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes, the group that had recorded the highly-regarded Now He Sings, Now He Sobs back in 1968. “It was as if no time had passed at all,” said Corea of their “comeback” album, Trio Music, which juxtaposed spontaneous playing with pieces by Thelonious Monk. Roy Haynes had played extensively with Monk, one of Chick’s great heroes, in the early days of bebop, and was a crucial link to that first revolution of modern jazz. Forty years after Trio Music, Corea would guest on an album under bassist Vitous’s direction, as Universal Syncopations (2002) rounded up some major voices of the era including Jan Garbarek, John McLaughlin and Jack DeJohnette.

Always generously supportive of younger players, Chick duetted with fellow pianist Stefano Bollani on Orvieto, recorded live at the Umbria Jazz Winter Festival in 2010, and warmly received by critics: “A masterpiece,” declared Peter Rüedi in Switzerland’s Weltwoche. “Corea and Bollani improvise, sometimes completely freely, sometimes over compositions by one or the other; three tracks are drawn from the repertoire of Brazilian music, three from jazz standards. The degree of empathy the two achieve in this exchange of ideas is astonishing and at times can only be explained by telepathy.”

Chick Corea wrote The Visitors for Gary Burton and Kirill Gerstein, who premiered it at the 2012 Gilmore International Piano Festival, in Kalamazoo. Corea: “Composing this duet piece was a happy challenge. To have a pianist of Kirill’s accomplishment play my written piano notes inspired me to compose. The Visitors is constructed in small sections with a final section that vamps, jazz-style, over a piano ostinato. I wrote it so that there would always be a choice of whether to play the written notes exactly as written or play variations of the phrasings. I conjured encounters with unfamiliar phenomena and wrote a kind of ‘soundtrack’ to that idea.”

The recording of the premiere performance was mixed by Manfred Eicher and Kirill Gerstein in Spring 2025, and issued on what would have been Corea’s 84th birthday on June 12.