A Conversation with Chick Corea – HuffPost 8.26.13

Mike Ragogna: Hey Chick, how are you doing?

Chick Corea: I’m doing pretty good, I’m doing really well, thank you. I’m out on tour, I’m in Albuquerque, the sun is nice and hot and dry, and I’m getting ready to do ten days at a classical chamber music festival up in Angel Fire.

MR: Beautiful. Of course it’s your material, right?

CC: Yes, mostly my stuff. I didn’t have any time to prepare any Mozart. They wanted to play Mozart but I didn’t have time to get it together. But I did write a brand new piece of music for the lady whose festival it is. Her name’s Ida Kavafian. She’s a great violinist and an old friend of mine.

MR: Beautiful. Relationships are important to you and inspiring as far as your creativity with music, aren’t they.

CC: Oh they’re everything. They are the richness of my life, man. My musician friends and the great people that I play with, that’s my life. That’s what it is. I particularly have stayed right in that area as a composer. That’s what I do; I write for myself and the musicians that I play with. I’ve yet to take commissions to write for other people or movies or anything like that. I’d like to try that, but that’s not what I’ve done.

MR: Chick, your new album, The Vigil, features, basically, a new band configuration though it’s mainly “Chick Corea.” This is the first time you’re playing with these Vigil cats. Can you go into how this particular ensemble of new musicians came together?

CC: Of course. It’s a long story, but it maybe starts back ten years or so when I first stopped having a steady group of my own. I think one of my last groups was Origin, a sextet that I had with Avishai Cohen on the bass and Jeff Ballard and three horns. I started doing a lot of collaborations with friends–with Gary Burton, Bobby McFerrin and Bela Fleck–and trios with Christian McBride and Brian Blade. A lot of different stuff. It was all very exciting and interesting, but ten years went by real quick and I realized I didn’t have this platform that I really like to have as a basis for my music, which is a band of musicians that play my compositions. I decided that I needed to put that together again for my mind and my soul and so forth. That was the general impetus. And then 2013, that was the year that I said to my manager and my agent, “This is what I want to do,” and then I started going around trying to assemble a band. I put together this first group, the one that you hear on the recording, with Hadrien, Charles, Jim and Marcus.

MR: This project represents a certain amount of improvisation. What was the process like when you created the material for it?

CC: Well, a lot of it happened in my own mind because as the idea developed, I started to cull music together from stuff that I had written already. I had written a bunch of pieces for the reunion of Return To Forever, which we never used. I took one piece, the piece called “Galaxy” from there. I wrote a couple of new pieces–“Portals To Forever” is a new piece, and “Planet Chia” is a new piece. But because I wanted to have a recording out before the tour so that people could see when we say, “Chick Corea and The Vigil” what the heck that is. The idea of the record was to show them, “Well, this is a band and the first attempt to put music together for it.” What I did was I sent the music to the guys after I got their commitment to do the tour and everything and we got together in the studio for five days and just recorded it straight down. There wasn’t any prep time. I would have liked to have been able to take the band on the road and then record, but there wasn’t time to do it. They’re all such consummate musicians, they were able to play the heck out of the material.

MR: Why “The Vigil?” Why that moniker?

CC: You know, I wanted to give the band a name rather than just “Chick Corea.” I wanted to give it a name so that our label would show that this is my music, this is the music that I’ve put together, it’s not a collaboration yet, anyway. “The Vigil” was the concept that came to mind because that’s what I find that I’m trying to do. I’m trying to keep my attention focused on the quality and beauty of the culture of the music that I come from. The jazz music, the classical music, the Spanish music, all the various contacts I’ve had with the great musicians in my life, and thus one of the pieces is called “Legacy” after that kind of flow. So that would be the idea of “Vigils”–to keep the attention strong on high quality music.

MR: Yeah, and I can hear that it doesn’t only represent a lot of your newer approaches, but also in a legacy-ish way, revisits the vibe of the stuff you’ve done in the past. For instance, “Planet Chia,” to me, ended up like material on My Spanish Heart. Would it also be fair to say that this would be one of your legacy projects?

CC: The legacy that I’m referring to with the song title is not my legacy, it’s the legacy of the culture of music that I feel like I’m honored to be a part of. It goes back, you could say, to the beginning of the 1900s with Louis Amrstrong and Duke Ellington’s band, and then, actually, if I widen the influence a little bit and take it back into Europe back to the 1800s and 1700s to go back to Bach and Mozart, the legacy ties together that way. To me, that’s the legacy that I’m talking about.

MR: Okay, this to that to that giving birth to that and that.

CC: Yeah, it’s the true look at what a culture is. It’s how a culture gets formed, it’s what we call a culture. I’m part of that. It’s been part of my life. One of the transitions that I took the opportunity to use for the record was the one track with Stanley Clarke. We performed that piece at the Blue Note on a week that we put a band together that had some of the guys that would be in my new band. It had Charles Altura, the guitarist, and Marcus Gilmore, the drummer. We played a week at The Blue Note in New York with Stanley, and that particular piece, we played it one time. It’s called “Pledge For Piece,” and it had such a bite to it that I wanted to include it on the record. Plus having Stanley on the record is really nice to me because he’s part of my flow of music and Return To Forever in the seventies and so forth.

MR: And you had Ravi Coltrane on that track.

CC: Yeah! Ravi’s a favorite of mine, man. I’m going to ask him to come and sit in with the band when we play our date in New York in September. That was another interesting point about that band at The Blue Note. Ravi is, of course, the son of John Coltrane, and Marcus my drummer is the grandson of Roy Haynes. The legacy continues, there they are in front of me, playing great and fifty years my junior.

MR: All uses of the word “legacy,” beautiful. Your new band is pretty young. What’s nice is that, maybe not in any kind of intentional or conscious way, it seems like you’ve taken on the role of a mentor.

CC: Well, it’s hard not to be. These young guys come up. When I first met Marcus, he was twelve years old. I gave him a hug. “When’s your birthday, man?” I think a year later, Laurie brought him by The Blue Note when he was thirteen or so when I was playing with Roy. Roy said, “Man, have Marcus come and play with you. I want you to hear my grandson.” He got up and he played and he knocked me out. He had such a deep feel. That was when he was thirteen. It’s hard not to be a mentor. There’s a little young drummer named Kojo who’s now, I think, eight years old, who is the son of Antoine Roney. Antoine is Wallace Roney’s brother. I met Kojo about a year ago and he came down to The Blue Note with his dad and there he is. Kojo and I talked to each other on email. He sends me the stuff that he does and it knocks me out, absolutely inspires me. It goes both ways. There’s the mentoring idea of I’m the old guy, I’ve been around; but these young guys come with a fresh viewpoint. They may not have studied or know the history of this or that, but they come at it, they have a way in, and I get inspired by that.

MR: Do you see differences between the younger folks coming into it now and younger folks from the past decades? In other words, do you think this generation is any more inspired or gifted than others?

CC: I don’t know. I know that the act of making music and creating art is ancient, the only thing that differentiates it generation after generation is styles. The way you dress, the instruments you play, what rhythms. The act of creation and the emergence in it is the same. It’s that rush of recognition of one another as musicians where you can see that this guy is really in. He’s very interested in what he’s doing and you know that he’s picked up on that flow. That part of it remains the same. Of course, the differences are cultural. To use a word from another subject, they’re topographical. They’re there, you know what I mean?

MR: Yeah. When you were incorporating these guys into your songs and into the new group and doing whatever degree of improvisation plus structure, did you watch them grow as musicians? Did you notice them go from point A to point G?

CC: I tell you, it’s a thrill. It’s an absolute thrill to see that because one of the points about working with real younger guys who know me and I don’t know them so well is they come humble. “Oh, Chick, we’re working with Chick now.” That’s okay, but I want it on an even field, so it takes a little bit for that to blow off. There’s a little reticence at first, but that goes real quick when they see that we can hang together and they stop noticing the white hairs on my head. Then they really take off. We’ve been playing a lot of gigs this year and I wish you could hear the band from the record now. The band is like burning. We’ve got a new bass player and I have since added a percussionist to the band who I really love who works great with Marcus. They’re creating some rhythms that have me all inspired to write the next album. So I’m very, very excited about what’s happening with the band.

MR: So this is moving forward? You might say this is a “forever,” excuse the pun, kind of thing?

CC: Yeah, yeah, it’s going to keep going for sure. We’re already booking gigs next year, I’m already toying with different ideas. As soon as I get off the road, I’m going to start writing some new music. We’re thoroughly in touch, so yeah, it’s going to keep going.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

CC: Well, gee… I mean, the advice is always pretty much the same whether they’re new or old. When I’m asked for advice, I usually try to explain that advice is real cheap, you know? It’s kind of true, because there’s a guy there giving advice and he’s saying, “I think you should do this” or “I think it would be better if you do this” or “it’s more important to do this,” and so forth and it’s easy to do that. You can sit there and pontificate all day, and then it’s the guy who you just told who has to be the one to do something and take responsibility for his own actions, you know what I mean? That’s why advice is cheap. I always just encourage–especially young musicians–to trust their own judgment. That’s what I always say to them. The only strength and joy they’re ever going to have in creating their music and their musical styles and whatever else they do in music is going to be when they do what they love to do and what their own particular tastes are. It doesn’t mean to become a loner. It means the final decision of what you play and what you choose to do and how you choose to involve yourself into the musical culture has to be your own choice and up to you and what you love. All of our musical heroes–I would think, the artists who have stayed there through the decades and who others look up to–that’s what they do. Every one of my musical heroes, that’s what they have done. That’s what I try to do. So that’s the advice I give; just think for yourself and create your own music and use your own judgment on things.

MR: Great answer, thanks. Chick, you are a musical hero to many people and I’m afraid to say that you’re also an icon. How do you feel about being that person?

CC: I try and take it as it comes. It’s very uncomfortable to look at myself and to think about myself, so I don’t do it. But when it comes my way, I’m happy that a positive effect has been created and it encourages me to just keep on doing what I’m doing, which is making music.

MR: And what do you think of the state of jazz now?

CC: Oh, I’m no commentator on that. I can tell you one thing that’s an intelligent thing. I travel a lot. I travel constantly and I get to meet a lot of local guys. I hear new bands come around, musicians are all constantly giving me their CDs with their new works and I try to listen, sometimes, as much as I can. I can say one thing, that the creative urge and the creativity in jazz or whatever you want to call creative music that comes from jazz, jazz music, is very, very alive. It’s very there and it’s very strong. The young musicians have universes of new ideas constantly coming. It’s there. That’s the state of things. The thing is, and it’s always been this way, is that the commercial media doesn’t show that. The commercial media will only show certain parts, and you kind of really have to dig to lock into that flow. That’s why you have to go to some of the bigger cities–New York City or London or Paris–and go to the little clubs, because you can search YouTube and find some pretty wild stuff. But the creative spirit is definitely alive and well in our world.

MR: What’s left that you want to achieve?

CC: I’m just on a continuance thing…I just want to continue. In terms of creativity, you know, there is no beginning or end or place where it’s over. You’re a free spirit, you have the choice to say, “Well I’m done with this, I’m not going to become a painter, I’m not going to become a ceramic artist, music is done for me now,” but that’s not true in my case. To me, I’ve just kind of scratched the tip of the iceberg. I’ve realized over these past couple of years that I want to become a pianist. I want to play the piano better. It takes practice to do that. In the life that I lead, it’s interesting to try to cop practice time. So I’m sitting in my little room in Albuquerque and I have my little Yamaha 88-key piano that I carry around with me to practice. I’m working on different things, and that’s the tip of the iceberg for me. There’s lots left to do and there’s lots always to do. It’s just a matter of being healthy and up to be there and do it.

MR: Sweet. Thanks for your time, Chick. I hope to interview you for your next project, whatever that is.

CC: Sure, okay man. You’re quite welcome to and I appreciate your interest and enthusiasm.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne