Thoughts on the Death of Chick Corea

Learning about the death of Chick Corea yesterday through my feed for The Guardian was a bit of a shock. Corea’s albums never figured significantly in my personal collection, but my attention tended to be consistently piqued whenever I had a chance to listen to his music. I suppose that is why I decided to cover his visit to Davies Symphony Hall in November of 2019, which turned out to be my only opportunity to listen to him in performance. As I realized from the many obituaries I have encountered over the last 24 hours, Corea was not just a highly-skilled pianist but also prodigiously eclectic. That eclecticism distinguished his visit to San Francisco, whose program was entitled From Mozart to Monk.

It turned out that the content of that program could be traced back to a two-CD solo album he had released entitled Plays. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was on that album, but so were Domenico Scarlatti, Frédéric Chopin, and Alexander Scriabin. Ironically, Thelonious Monk never showed up on Corea’s San Francisco program; but three Monk tunes can be found on Plays.

More interesting, however, were what I called the “wine pairings” encountered on the Plays album. These basically involved some highly imaginative segues from one source to another. What began as the second movement of Mozart’s K. 332 piano sonata in F minor ended up as George Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me.” On the other hand Domenico Scarlatti’s K. 9 sonata in D minor was both on Plays and in the Davies program. On the album it transitioned into Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays,” while in Davies Corea took it into the territory of Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Desafinado.” On Plays “Desafinado” picked up at the end of Bill Evans’ “Waltz for Debbie,” while in Davies the Evans tune picked up at the end of the fourth (E minor) prelude from Alexander Scriabin’s Opus 11 collection of 24 covering all major and minor keys.

Then, of course, there was the “fun content” of Plays, which was recorded during a performance. Two members of the audience were invited to “sit for musical portraits” that Corea improvised. Then, two other members of the audience were each invited to engage in four-hand improvisations with Corea. These spontaneous acts of music making were all included in his Davies program; and “being there” was decidedly a lot more fun than listening to a recording from another venue.

None of that adventurism seemed to register with Ryan Reed’s “12 Essential Performances” article for The New York Times. On the other hand, “Spain” shows up twice; and, in neither of those instances is there the slightest mention of the influence of Joaquín Rodrigo. I was not sure whether to be amused or annoyed, since that thematic influence had also signified, at great length, in the “Concierto de Aranjuez (Adagio)” track on Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain album. Perhaps I differ from Reed because my perspective was shaped by such a recent encounter with Corea in performance, while Reed’s world was more populated by his record collection!