Chick Corea returns to Return to Forever

Confusion reigns, briefly, when the Georgia Straight reaches Chick Corea’s hotel room in Indianapolis, Indiana. The keyboardist and composer’s wife, singer Gayle Moran, is the first to answer, and she seems momentarily taken aback by this writer’s baritone presence on the other end of the line.

“Is your name Georgia?” she asks, tentatively. Once we get that sorted out—it seems her husband’s secretary had said a Ms. Georgia Strait would be making the call—we’re connected to the man himself, and all is well.

“So we figured out your name’s not Georgia?” he says with a laugh, before explaining that he’s in Indianapolis to perform with singer Bobby McFerrin and drummer Jack DeJohnette, and things have been going well.

“This is just kind of a lark that we’re doing for a couple of weeks,” he says. “It’s a lot of fun, working with Bobby. And working with Jack, you know, I haven’t worked with him that much since we played together in Miles Davis’s band in the ’60s, and it’s a ball. He’s a great, wide-open musician.”

Their impromptu trio is so wide-open, in fact, that they’re winging it on a nightly basis, performing without charts or even any prepared repertoire. It’s a far cry from the music that Corea will present in Vancouver next week: here, he’s performing with the reunited Return to Forever band, the chops-heavy quartet that, alongside Weather Report and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, defined electric jazz during the early days of fusion.

Return to Forever went through several different incarnations, but the group that Corea’s convened is the mid-’70s version featuring Al Di Meola on electric guitar, Stanley Clarke on electric bass, and Lenny White on drums. Responsible for the classic Where Have I Known You Before, No Mystery, and Romantic Warrior albums, the group was known for its ambitious virtuosity, often playing complex, episodic compositions at a breakneck pace.

More than 30 years on, that’s still the group’s intent: Corea says that he and his fellow players haven’t slowed down, although they’re now in their 50s and 60s. But fans looking for a faithful recreation of the past might want to remember that these musicians are improvisers as well as virtuosos.

“I don’t think you’re going to get much faithfulness out of any one of us,” Corea notes. “Since we always like to try some new things, I think we’re going to take the old charts as jumping-off points and alter them to our current tastes.”

That’s also the tack he and his bandmates have taken with Return to Forever: The Anthology, the two-CD compilation they’ve released to coincide with their tour.

“Through the years, as I would listen to some of those old records, I would kind of cringe at how bad the sound was,” Corea concedes. “We were not plugged in, recording studio–wise. We’ve all become a lot better at it, and so Stanley and I sat down and did this remix with a really great mixer, Mick Guzauski.

“Mick just has the touch: he made the music come to life again,” the keyboardist continues. “That’s what it seemed like to me. He made the instruments sound huge and clear, so that everything had incredible impact.”

That, he adds, is his reunited band’s aim for its live performances—and one it should easily meet.

Return to Forever plays the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Monday (June 9).

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