Posthumous Release of Chick Corea Album

Readers may recall that I learned about the death of Chick Corea on February 9, 2021 a few days after the event, which was when my feed for The Guardian informed me. While I did not follow Corea’s work closely, I had the good fortune to attend his From Mozart to Monk solo recital in Davies Symphony Hall in November of 2019. While my personal collection of Corea albums is too small to constitute a “useful statistical sample,” I feel it is still worth noting that only one of those albums was a solo performance. That was Plays, which was a live recording of an earlier performance of that From Mozart to Monk program.

Chick Corea, John Patitucci, and Dave Weckl on the cover of the new Akoustic Band album (courtesy of Concord Jazz)

As a result, it did not surprise me that there would be at least one posthumous release of either a concert performance or a recording session. Towards the end of last September, I learned that Concord Jazz had released such an album of a concert that brought Corea back together with his Akoustic Band colleagues, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Dave Weckl. To be honest, I had not known about this trio; but it was a relatively short-lived group, performing and recording between 1987 and 1989. The new album, entitled simply Chick Corea Akoustic Band LIVE, thus captures a “revival” performance, which took place in St. Petersburg, Florida at the St. Petersburg College (SPC) Music Hall on January 13, 2018.

The album serves up about two hours of music divided across two CDs. Corea balances his own compositions against an impressive survey of the works of others. Personally, in the spirit of his Davies concert, I tend to get drawn to his approaches to the music of Thelonious Monk. There is only one Monk track in the collection, “Monk’s Mood.”

I have to confess that this is a personal preference with its adventurous approaches to harmonic progression and serpentine melodic lines. Corea complements these attributes with rhythms that often suggest groping at recollection (a trope that one encounters often on recordings of Monk performances) and ultimately succeeding. His trio partners generously allow him all the “interpretative space” that he needs; and it almost feels as if they are providing “punctuation marks” to facilitate the attentive listener’s attempt to “parse” Corea’s improvisations.

The Corea originals, on the other hand, were (to the best of my capacity for recollection) new to me; and I look forward to many future listening experiences, which will allow them to establish more effective roots in my memories.