A Conversation with Return To Forever’s Chick Corea & Stanley Clarke – HuffPost 6.10.11

A Conversation with Chick Corea

Mike Ragogna: How are you, Chick?

Chick Corea: I’m doing good.

MR: Hey, your new album, Forever, is a two-disc set, with the first disc being acoustic, and the second disc with a full band and guests. For the first disc, was this a return to Return To Forever?

CC: I don’t know. The word “return” doesn’t really apply to the music itself–it’s just sort of a poetic title. I know what you mean, though, it’s a return to my relationship with Stanley and Lenny, that’s for sure. When we toured a lot in the ’70s, and even when we did a couple of reunions, Stanley, Lenny and I would play some acoustic trio music. We always enjoyed that because that’s the kind of heritage that we come from, musically. After we did the ’08 tour, we decided that it would be a really cool idea to explore that a bit, and we did a bunch of concerts with the trio.

MR: That was your ’09 tour, right?

CC: That’s right, yeah.

MR: And from that, you culled the first disc, revisiting a lot of wonderful classics from Return To Forever. You do a version of “On Green Dolphin Street,” “Señor Mouse,” and “No Mystery.” You have a reverence for that period that is more than just nostalgia.

CC: Oh, absolutely. The music of Miles and Coltrane, Horace Silver, Joe Henderson, Ornette Coleman, and Sonny Rollins–this is the music that Stanley and I both cut our teeth on. Stanley was also into the funk and blues side of things more than I was back then. Point in fact, when Stanley and I met, we met in Philadelphia on a Joe Henderson sextet gig in this little club. We played together for a week, and that’s how we got to know each other.

MR: I was going ask that–what were the early days like?

CC: After Stanley and I met on Joe’s gig, we took a real liking to one another, and the way we played together was fun. So, we began to put trios together and do some gigs, and the ideas just bounced around real quick. That led into the idea that I had come to New York to explore, which was to put a band together. So, I asked him to join me, and we finally ended up with Flora Purim, Airto Moreira and Joe Farrell, and that was the first version of Return To Forever.

MR: And that’s the album Return To Forever, right?

CC: Yeah, that was the first recording on ECM–the one with the blue cover and the bird flying around.

MR: And then there was Light As A Feather and the progression of albums that came after that, but you had a couple of line-up changes along the way.

CC: Well, many actually–it was an evolving thing. Stanley was my partner through the whole thing, and he still is, but he was the one collaborator that remained. Without Stanley, I don’t really consider Return To Forever to be–to be able to use the name, you know what I mean? That’s why, for this new band that’s coming out this summer, I’m giving it a number, so that it differentiates versions. That first version was version one, version two was the electric version with Billy Connors, Al Di Meola–actually in the second version, Steve Gadd was the first drummer, and then Lenny came on and took the chair over, and has been a great contributor to the band since then. The third version was short lived, but it was a lot of fun. During the third version, we released the album, Music Magic.

MR: When you moved from the Polydor to Columbia with Romantic Warrior, you had already established yourself as a great experimental jazz group, but it seems like when you got over to the new label, there was an elegance–you guys took on yet another persona.

CC: That was a good final recording to that quartet because all of the things that we had been working toward during the years we were touring and the several recordings that we did culminated in that one. A lot of work went into that one, and that recording was very well planned out, as far as the contribution of compositions. I think it was just a secondary thing–what record label it was on–it had more to do with it being our final effort.

MR: Now, on the second disc of Forever, that’s the prep for Hollywood Bowl concert, right?

CC: Yeah, that’s right. It’s actually the rehearsal because the concert wasn’t recorded. We rehearsed at Mad Hatter Studios, and had the luxury of having microphones and a recording studio as we were rehearsing, so we turned on the tape recorders.

MR: Mad Hatter is your favorite recording studio?

CC: My friends own and run it, and it’s my favorite studio in the world.

MR: Yeah, it’s a beautiful sounding studio. Now, on this rehearsal recording, you’re running through “Captain Marvel,” “Space Circus,” and an amazing version of “500 Miles High,” but you also have “Armando’s Rhumba,” which is from my favorite album by you, My Spanish Heart. Since you’re seventeen Grammys into your career at this point–maybe even more by now–and you’ve got a catalog that is incredibly vast, it’s got to be challenging to come up with a set list at this point, right?

CC: Well, I guess when you look at a website or list of recordings, tours and stuff, it might make your head swirl a little bit, but in fact, it’s just one thing at a time. When I immerse myself in a project, I’m in it. Right now, I’m actually immersed in two projects–I’m recording my six movement piano concerto in New York in a couple of weeks, and then right on the heels of that, I’m going to dive into the seven concert Return To Forever tour. We’ll have a week of rehearsals, but I’m preparing for that too. Each project that I do, that’s the project I’m doing–it’s great, and I’m in it totally. So, it’s not like I’m doing all of these things at once.

MR: Getting back together with Bill Connors and having Chaka Khan and Jean-Luc Ponty prepping for the concert, what was the studio experience like?

CC: It was a lot of fun. Getting together with Billy Connors, for instance, who is beloved by all of us–Stanley, Lenny and all of us in the band–as the original guitarist in the band, and set a really wonderful sound for the band. So, he came back on after not having played with us for many years, and that was really exciting. Jean-Luc, whose family has played a lot through the years, but I’ve not done a project with Jean-Luc aside from him sitting in on the My Spanish Heart album, years ago. I love his performance, his violin sound, and his playing. Plus, he came from that growing era in the ’70s, when all those bands were out on the road–he was playing with the Mahavishnu Orchestra–so we have a track together there, you know? Having him in the mix just added a lot of beautiful energy. Then, Chaka–we all love Chaka–she’s just my favorite jazz singer living today. She’s a little younger, so she’s a Return To Forever fan too. She loved the idea of coming to join us to do some stuff.

MR: Chick, what advice do you have for new artists?

CC: You know, I occasionally get asked to give talks and do clinics or workshops, and I always answer that question that you just asked me with one very basic simplicity, which is what I try to encourage everybody in life to do. As it applies to music, my little piece of advice is for a person to be true to his own goals, and for him to think for himself–be his own judge. Also, be strong about what he loves, what he likes and what his own tastes are. That’s not an easy thing to do in life, but it’s very rewarding, and all of my heroes that I’ve ever been inspired by have done that. That’s the one amazing thing that shines through–their strength of conviction, and courage to use their imagination and make it become real to others.

MR: Nice. You know, I always ask everyone I interview who has ever worked with Miles Davis this question–do you miss Miles?

CC: I do. We have photos of him around, and it was such a rich period of my life–not only the time I performed with him, which was a quick three years, but the run up to that. I was listening to his recordings since he was a young man playing with Charlie Parker, and I followed everything that he and his bands did through the years. So, Miles is a part of my life.

MR: Chick, I so appreciate you talking to me today. I want to wish you a lot of luck with the new album, Forever, and in all your other ventures.

CC: Well, thanks man. Come on by one of the shows we’re doing.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney

 

A Conversation with Stanley Clarke

Mike Ragogna: Stanley how are you?

Stanley Clarke: I’m doing good. I’m out here in the hills of Topanga in California. It’s a good day today.

MR: Nice. Stanley, gee, why is the album called Forever?

SC: Well, you know, obviously people know that we had a band called Return To Forever, but in a lot of ways, it’s a metaphor for the relationship between me, Chick, and Lenny, and actually, it should go back even further than that. I met Chick back in 1969 or 1970, and we’ve been playing music on and off since then, but it’s been a consistent connection, you know? Even the years that went by where we didn’t actually appear on the stage or on a record together, there was surely a spiritual connection. Chick is, in a lot of ways, a musical brother to me. We’ve done a lot of things, a lot of records, and made a lot of music together, and I’m sure we’ll do a lot more in the future.

MR: Well, it sounds as if no time was lost when you listen to this new album. How would you say it’s different recording with these guys now as opposed to back when you first started together?

SC: The only difference, to be quite honest, is that our bodies are a little older. But I really know how to play with Chick and Lenny, you know? We have a kind of sixth sense where we always kind of know what the other one’s going to do. I really know Chick very well as a musician and he knows me just as well, and Chick is the kind of musician that loves to keep the portals open. He’s not the type who is introspective with his music, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but he loves to communicate and I love that too. When I met Chick, we both recognized that about each other. I’m just very interested in the other musicians when I play with them. I’m very interested in what they’re playing, as well as what I’m playing, but I’m really interested in the other guy because for some reason, the music is just better when there’s a high interest on stage for the other players. When everybody does that, there’s just this synergetic effect that’s tremendous. There’s just a lot of great energy onstage when we’re together. That’s what I like about it.

MR: How did you guys get together as a group?

SC: Well, it’s a really interesting story. I was playing with a great saxophonist, Joe Henderson, in my hometown of Philadelphia, and our keyboardist couldn’t make it. He told me he was bringing a guy down from New York to play keys for that week. I remember we were going to be playing at a club called The Blue Horizon. (laughs) Now, I had heard of Chick Corea–I think he had an album out at the time, and I knew that he played with Miles Davis after Herbie Hancock, but I didn’t know much more about him. He came down, and to be quite honest, we kind of took over the stage that night. It was one of those things, you know? We really connected harmonically, emotionally, and spiritually. Then, later that night, we hung out and talked about music–we talked about music on a social level, we talked about life, so many things. We realized that we had a lot of things in common, and what’s funny is that the backdrop of this whole conversation was this Coltrane record calledCrescent. In a lot of ways, those were the seeds that were planted and became Return To Forever and the stuff that Chick and I did together. We had that conversation and then didn’t get together until maybe a little over a year later. But that was a very powerful week in my life.

MR: The original sound was a little bit more acoustic and then it gets a little more electric, right?

SC: That’s true. I mean, the first album was called Return To Forever and that was released on a German label called ECM. That was acoustic for the most part, but Chick always played electric piano, so there was always some sort of electronics going. And that configuration included the Brazilian musicians–Airto Moreira on percussion, and Flora Purim singing. That band went through two records–Return to Forever and Light As A Feather. Light As A Feather had “Spain” and some of those other really nice tunes on it. Then, we did one called Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy and that was a complete shift for us. That record was heavily electric.

MR: Return To Forever’s jazz-fusion.

SC: Yeah. We also had a personnel change and decided to get a guitar player. That’s also when Lenny White joined the band because prior to that, Airto was playing drums, and that was a great time for us, because I grew listening to Coltrane followed immediately by a Jimi Hendrix record. I think many of the musicians that spearheaded fusion music had a lot of the same tastes as mine. It used to crack me up when I would see reviewers write that we weren’t being honest with out music, when in actuality, we were being a little too honest, I think. We were playing music the way we grew up listening to it. It was a combination, you know? I listened to Jimi Hendrix, then Coltrane. Just the combination of those two together create something kind of strange and loud, but interesting. So, we actually started experimenting with electrical music and really, really enjoyed it. We loved the feeling of playing and being able to fill big spaces with our music. But at the same time, our music was very compositionally oriented, we spent a lot of time composing our songs. We also had something that separates jazz from most other forms of music–improvisation. So, we had the framework in our compositions, but we had the spirit of improvisation as well. Actually, we did a couple of records where we brought the acoustic element back in. That was a great time for us because it felt like we had come full circle. I think that was around the album No Mystery.

MR: I also feel like that same sound carried over to Romantic Warrior, do you agree?

SC: Yeah, absolutely. Because for me, there was some sort of culmination when we arrived at the Romantic Warrior album. That was our biggest selling record at the time. We weren’t really looking for that, but it happened. A lot of people liked it. That was our best sounding record as well, very interesting music, and our acoustic music was just as significant as our electric music on that album. I think in the early days when we did Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy, people didn’t quite understand why we were playing electric music because they knew that I had played with Stan Getz, and Chick had played with Blue Mitchell and Miles Davis and Lenny had played with Jackie McLean. So, it was fair for reviewers to question why we played so much electric music. I understood that. Sometimes, I questioned that too, you know? But when you look at the whole history of most groups, they have an arc in their careers. Most serious musicians aren’t just focusing on one of their records, they’re modular, and moving forward. The beautiful thing that happened with this group is that we arrived at a point where if we played an acoustic tune like “Romantic Warrior,” it was received with just as much enthusiasm as “Medieval Overture,” which was completely an electric basher. That was really a great discovery and it still holds true today. I am really grateful for the group that we were able to start and help bring together all of the music that we loved to play. It was a real honest effort because we really put everything we had out there. It was really great. That was a tremendous ride.

MR: Now, before you guys came back as Corea, Cooke & White, you had another reunion project back in 2008, is that right?

SC: That’s right.

MR: What was it like jumping back into the Return To Forever vibe?

SC: It was really exhilarating. It’s funny because sometimes, you go through your career, and I don’t want to say it gets dull, but you keep going and then it kind of stops. It’s rare to be in a band where when you have a reunion, people get really excited about it. That was the case with our reunion tour in 2008. It was really, really well received. I’ll never forget our first show in Austin. There was a guy who was about 65, because all of our fans are older, and I thought for sure he was going to get carried out in a gurney. He was just jumping around and going wild, and I’m sure he was at one of our concerts 30 years ago acting the same way. It was really a beautiful thing. When we got back together, it was much like any band that’s broken up and then eventually gets back together, each guy kind of inching his way to the door, hesitant about the whole thing. Finally, you get in the door and realize that it’s safe and you start playing. It was a lot like that. It was beautiful, though. It was nice to see Chick, Lenny, and Al again and be together on stage again.

MR: The first disc of this newest album Forever is a representation of that reunion.

SC: Yes, it is.

MR: Then comes disc two where you are back with Bill Connors, but you’ve also got guests like Chaka Khan, and Jean-Luc Ponty.

SC: Yeah, that was an interesting thing. Much of that record happened, kind of, by accident. We went in and rehearsed at a studio that we worked at for many years and they are just always set up to record, so we were rehearsing a lot of stuff and getting ready to play at the Hollywood Bowl when Chick thought it would be a good idea to get our original guitar player, Bill Connors, to come back and pick up his axe again and rehearse with us. So, as we are rehearsing, one of us has the idea to have Jean-Luc come in from Paris, and Chaka is an old friend of mine, so she said she would come in and sing. So, we have all of these great people together in the studio and we were just recording it to listen to it later when Lenny, who is also a great producer, decided that we should listen to a bit of the recording to see what we had. As we listened to it, we realized that it sounded great and really polished. At that time, we were right at the end of our acoustic tour and we were planning to come out with just the trio record and that was it. Then, Lenny and Chick thought it would be a great idea to expand the album and include some of the stuff we recorded in rehearsal because it sounded really good. We even had tunes on there that were only partial tunes that were cut short because it was time for a break or the food arrived or something, and we almost included those because they sounded so good. (laughs) It was a nice thing, Lenny did a great job of putting it together.

MR: It’s hard to believe after listening to the prep recordings that they weren’t intended to be part of the album.

SC: Yeah, it’s pretty great. Let’s put it this way–everyone was plugged in and all of the information was going to some sort of recording source with the intention of just having it. But Lenny is very smart with recordings, and has a very interesting way of looking at music so he was elected to go out to California to put it all together, and he periodically sent things to Chick and I to listen to and we think it turned out great.

MR: Now, you also have that Stanley Clarke original on Forever entitled “La Cancion De Sofia.”

SC: That’s actually an old song that I wrote a long time ago, but I don’t think I ever recorded it. It’s a song to Sofia, my wife, who if from Chile. That’s why the title is in Spanish.

MR: That’s beautiful. Now, I’m such a fan of your solo albums School Days, Journey To Love, and Stanley Clarke. When you look back at that body of work, what thoughts come to mind?

SC: You know, we were so lucky. We were, again, musicians who loved playing a lot of different things, you know? We weren’t just bee-bop musicians or rock musicians or funk musicians, we were a composite of a bunch of things. Those first few albums, for me, were at a time when we were spearheading this new kind of music. I think now, they’ve labeled it fusion, but actually, back then they called it jazz-rock, which is pretty much what it was–jazz with rock influences. It was really a great time. The record companies really embraced what we did. I think the best thing for me is to look back and know that I was a part of a really successful movement in the world of music. At the time, I think the big bands out there were the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Weather Report, and of course others. It was a great time in music that emerged from yet another great time in music. I mean, Miles Davis was kind of the grandfather of all of this stuff. Out of him came a lot of people who went on to make groups. The early ’70s was a really powerful time in music. That’s the thing I liked about it…you could feel it, it was something new. I also liked the fact that some people liked it and some people didn’t. It forced people to decide something about it, which is important. There’s a lot of music that you can hear and you just hear it, and that’s not because the music is bad or insignificant, it’s just the way it is. Then, there’s some music that you hear that makes you decide whether you like it or not, whether it was our music or The Clash. (laughs) There was so much music emerging that was controversial and right outside the box, and that made me so happy to be one of those guys. I used to like it when jazz critics weren’t sure about my music because it made me think I was doing something right. (laughs)

MR: Then, years later, there was Pee Wee’s Playhouse.

SC: Yeah! That was another thing that came about by accident. I was actually playing on a TV special that Barry Manilow had put together, which was some sort of jazz special. Then the director, Steve Binder, told me that he directed a Saturday morning kid’s show and that they did special episodes on all sorts of things and wanted to introduce a little more sophisticated music, so he asked me if I would do it and I agreed though I had never really thought much about doing music for TV and Film because the only music that I really noticed in that genre was the James Bond music. (laughs) I got the new computer software for music at the time and went to work. The thing that was funny about that experience was that I got a Daytime Emmy nomination, and I wasn’t really sure what an Emmy was at the time. I didn’t really watch much television, so I had no clue. Then, all of a sudden, I started getting calls from agents asking if I would score movies, so I became a film composer, and 50 films and a couple hundred television shows later, here I am. (laughs) It’s just something that I do on the side that I really love doing. I love the directors and the writers…very interesting people.

MR: Which of those movies became your favorites to work on?

SC: I saw one movie the other day that I scored, The Transporter, and I really like that one. I also like What’s Love Got To Do With It: The Tina Turner Story, and I love every film that I did for John Singleton. I like those because they were all groundbreaking films, especiallyBoyz In The Hood. That movie was finally something to give America a glimpse into an urban neighborhood and the plight of an African-American male growing up there. It was a really good film for that reason, and I was really happy to be a part of it. I do love going to the movies and hearing the scores, but it’s hard because I’ve done so many and sometimes, all I can hear is mistakes or things I would change. The films that I can get into and really just let myself focus on just the movie are the mindless action flicks, you know, where there’s nine-million guys fighting and stuff is blowing up. (laughs) My wife hates it, but I love it. I did do a film, not to say that this one is mindless, but it’s called Romeo Must Die with Jet Li, and I really liked that one. I got a great compliment from Jet, too. He said, “The Chinese music was good. Very good.” (laughs) I dug that.

MR: Nice. What advice do you have for new artists?

SC: You know, the main advice that I have for young people is not to let their instruments define them – you really have to think in terms of being a full musician. You play the guitar? Great. But you also have to learn how to compose and how to read music and to produce. Right now is the greatest time to be a musician because of all of the technology. I mean, I know a lot of people are skeptical about a lot of what technology can do in music, but the great ones will still rise to the top. It just takes time. It’s just a great time to make things out there and a great musician should embrace all of the new opportunities and tools given to them. You shouldn’t be afraid. Just organize your music and try to put a lot of things together because at the end of your study, you prove yourself with an abundance of abilities. It’s just such a great time to be a musician, I think.

MR: That’s very wise. Stanley, thanks for taking time out of your schedule for this interview.

SC: Thanks, Mike. We’ll be around throughout this year, so I want to encourage all the readers and listeners to keep an eye on us and come check us out if we’re in your city.

Transcribed by Evan Tyrone Martin