BN-LA-472-H2

Chick Corea - Circling In

Released - 1975

Recording and Session Information

A&R Studios, NYC, March 14, 1968
Chick Corea, piano; Miroslav Vitous, bass; Roy Haynes, drums.

(tk.2) Bossa
(tk.3) My One And Only Love

A&R Studios, NYC, March 19, 1968
Chick Corea, piano; Miroslav Vitous, bass; Roy Haynes, drums.

Gemini
Fragments

A&R Studios, NYC, March 27, 1968
Chick Corea, piano; Miroslav Vitous, bass; Roy Haynes, drums.

I Don't Know
Pannonica
Samba Yantra
Windows

A&R Studios, NYC, April 7, 1970
Chick Corea, piano; Dave Holland, bass; Barry Altschul, drums.

(tk.2) Blue Connotation

A&R Studios, NYC, August 13, 1970
Anthony Braxton, soprano sax, clarinet, contrabass clarinet, percussion; Chick Corea, piano, celeste, percussion; Dave Holland, cello, guitar, percussion.

Duet For Bass And Piano No. 1
Duet For Bass And Piano No. 2
Dance For Clarinet And Piano No. 1
Dance For Clarinet And Piano No. 2
Chimes, Part 1
Chimes, Part 2

A&R Studios, NYC, August 19, 1970
Anthony Braxton, alto, soprano sax, flute, clarinet, chimes; Chick Corea, piano, celeste, vibes; Dave Holland, bass, cello, guitar, percussion; Barry Altschul, drums, woodblock, bass marimba.

Starp
73 degrees Kelvin
Ballad

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Bossa	C. Corea	March 14 1968
Gemini	C. Corea	March 19 1968
My One And Only Love	G. Wood-R. Mellin	March 14 1968
Fragments	C. Corea	March 19 1968
Windows	C. Corea	March 27 1968
Side Two
Samba Yanta	C. Corea	March 27 1968
I Don't Know	C. Corea	March 27 1968
Pannonica	T. Monk	March 27 1968
Blues Connotation	O. Coleman	April 7 1970
Duet For Bass And Piano No.1	C. Corea-D. Holland	August 13 1970
Duet For Bass And Piano No.2	C. Corea-D. Holland	August 13 1970
Side Three
Starp	D. Holland	August 19 1970
73º-A.Kelvin	A. Braxton	August 19 1970
Ballad	Braxton-Altschul-Corea-Holland	August 19 1970
Side Four
Danse For Clarinet And Piano No.1	A. Braxton-C. Corea	August 13 1970
Danse For Clarinet And Piano No.2	A. Braxton-C. Corea	August 13 1970
Chimes Part 1	A. Braxton-C. Corea-D. Holland	August 13 1970
Chimes Part 2	A. Braxton-C. Corea-D. Holland	August 13 1970

Liner Notes

CHICK COREA

Shortly after Chick Corea joined Miles Davis and began getting national exposure through that unit, he was required to switch from acoustic piano to a battery of keyboard instruments, all of which were electric, and play what was later to be called "jazz-rock." However, there were times when Miles Davis would lay out and Corea, accompanied by Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, would briefly leap into the freer and more radical directions improvisation was taking in the bands of men like Sun Ra. And, though, it didn't go on for very long before Davis would abruptly take the band into something like Bitches Brew, it gave the listener who heard that band the idea that there was more going on inside those men musically than was heard for the most part.

The music on these recordings comes from that period in the late sixties around the time Corea initially joined Davis and from two sessions in the fall of 1970 with the musicians he was to use in a short-lived ensemble known as Circle. It is music that has attachments to many of the forces of that so very innovative decade, the 1960's, which were some of the most amazing years in the history of the continental United States in that almost everything was being called into question, nay, challenged — capitalism, sexual attitudes, racism, life styles, foreign policy, ideas about drugs, the credibility of the nation's leaders, etc. There was hardly a stone that was not kicked over or smashed. And, of course, music, popular as well as jazz and European, found itself being taken apart—for better or worse — and redirected along with everything else.

But the changes go back a bit farther than that. In 1939, while jamming in a Harlem chili house, Charlie Parker came across a way of playing changes that, coordinated with his new syncopations and those of men like Kenny Clarke and Max Roach at the drums, would bring about major stylistic extensions and demand new levels of instrumental technique. It became, through the efforts of the great alto saxophonist and fellow geniuses like Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron, Fats Navarro, a new movement that brought with it the first big time fight in jazz circles concerning the aesthetic because this was the first avant garde wing of jazz that was not very quickly accepted as were the innovations of Morton, Armstrong, Ellington, the Kansas City players (though we must remember that Lester Young caught it for not sounding like Coleman Hawkins). It was also the first style of jazz whose makers did not necessarily think about the danceability of a composition as they were putting it together, which is probably the root of the whole problem. No, this was not primarily a dance music nor a music that went with shows and production numbers of one sort or another. It was a music meant to be listened to above and beyond all else—and that, given the good time" tradition of the places in which jazz was usually professionally performed, was possibly its most adventurous step and one that was to make what can be later seen as the break between jazz and popular music.

So the forties were wild years during which all kinds of intricacies were brought into the music—melodically, harmonically and rhythmically. Dizzy Gillespie brought the Afro-Cuban rhythms of Chano Pozo into his big band and the "Spanish tinge" Jelly Roll Morton spoke of was given more complexity, replete, in things like Cubano Be and Cubano Bop. with call-and-response authentic African chants between Pozo and the rest of the band. Thelonious Monk was the spaceman of the era, inventing a music full of whole-tone qualities, broken rhythms, angular melodies, suspenseful usage of rests and convention-shocking accents that demanded a piano style so profoundly original it initially struck the uninitiated as inept in the same manner Picasso's paintings did. Bud Powell became the piano's King of the Zulus through his virtuosic handling of high-speed improvisations that technically transplanted the possibilities of Parker's ideas to the keyboard and gave birth to an army of followers. Kenny Clarke and Max Roach gave the drums survival jackets for this music with independently coordinated spontaneous accents and punctuations that intensified the dialogue between the front line and the rhythm. Following Jimmy Blantan, Oscar Pettiford brought the bass into the new forms with smooth, exquisitely intonated lines that buttressed the fantastic tempos and the high-flung harmonic ideas. Yes, it was a complete music that called for a re-evaluation of all traditional jazz instruments, brought a greater complexity to ensemble Improvisation than anything since New Orleans form and, with the berets, glasses and sartorial boldness of many of the boppers as well as their spaced-out slang, brought about the popular media images of jazz musicians as "weirdos."

Interestingly enough, though, in 1947. Duke Ellington wrote The Clothed Woman, a work almost totally devoid of a tonal center and one which probably did not get the attention it deserved because the bebop controversy dominated the scene. Obviously, even greater innovation was in the air, According to Lennie Tristarjo, Parker himself was tired of playing chord progressions by 1949 and was speculating on taking the music another way, to atonality in fact. In short, the aesthetic was on the verge of even more radical transformations at the height of the bebop era!

In 1953, the year Parker, Gillespie, Powell, Mingus and Roach played the classic concert at Massey Hall, George Russell had just about finished his Lydian Theory of Tonal Organization. With its scalar ideas about organization, it was to be of primal importance to the modal era of the sixties as it was folk-rooted and presented as alternative to chord running. With that great concert and the work of Russell, the height of bebop had been achieved and it was time for other things to take place.

The year following Parker's death, 1956, was the year Charles Mingus recorded Pithecantropus Erectus, which made use of a limited-chordal base and called upon saxophonists Jackie McLean and J. R. Montrose to utilize the purely sonic capabilities of their instruments as opposed to tempered pitches. Though neither saxophonists used these materials in their solos, a willful usage of what would have conventionally been heard as mistakes was pushed into the air of the scene — not to mention the reiteration of full ensemble improvisation informed by the weights of the blues, Ellington, Parker and the black Santified Church that we can singlehandedly credit Mr. Mingus with.

The summer of the next year, 1957, John Colrane appeared at the Five Spot with Thelonious Monk and began a ten-year march to glory, discovering his famous "sheets of sound" and becoming an innovator in his own right. But it was with Miles Davis that he got the fame and the most exposure and through Davis he came in contact with modes, for Davis had recorded a version of I Loves You, Porgy with Gil Evans in 1958 (a year before the historic Kind of Blue session) about which the trumpeter said, "I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variations... When Gil wrote the arrangement of I Loves You, Porgy, he only wrote a scale for me to play. No chords. And that passage with just two chords gives you a lot more freedom and space to hear things.'

In more than one way, that is what these recordings are about, for, the following year, 1959, Ornette Coleman opened at the Five Spot with a music that was to give the final swat to the heavily chopped up tree of bebop. With his arrival, it became clear what another innovator, Cecil Taylor, had been pointing in the direction of since 1955 when he made his first recordings (available now as Transition, part of Blue Note's reissue series). And, though the musics of Coleman and Taylor are very different. they both produced innovations and fellow innovators the likes of Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Eddie Blackwell and Albert Ayler, Sunny Murray, Archie Shepp, Roswell Rudd and Henry Grimes. The alarm clock was ringing, loud and adventurously clear.

In face of the challenges presented by Coleman, Taylor and the innovational quartet of John Coltrane, the piano was being looked at in a variety of new ways, Coleman chose to do without one, but Coltrane found McCoy Tyner and a new school began, much of it initially rooted in the splendid work of Wynton Kelly (whose feeling has more than a little to do with Corea's rendition of Coleman's Blues Connotation). Herbie Hancock joined the Miles Davis Quintet and built his own variations on the work of Kelly, resulting in another school. Bill Evans introduced an impressionistic and legato direction that had a large influence, and hired a bassist, Scott LaFaro, who, following the lead of Mingus, forgave straight time-keeping in favor of a loose, contrapuntal style that propelled by virtue of the nature of the rhythms of the phrases as opposed to the relatively even-metered styles of most bass players. Andrew Hill, a pianist and composer whose work is well-documented on Blue Note, like Tyner, Hancock and Evans found his own sound and developed a phrasing that alternated uniquely phrased lines with rich chords and a very fresh compositional concept. Paul Bley had heard Coleman and worked with him in the late fifties in California and was developing a style that fused Coleman with Evans and many properties of European avant garde music.

This music makes use of all of those things. The tracks recorded in 1968 find Corea moving from romance to adventure and back. In Roy Haynes, one hears one of the very greatest drummers playing with that immaculate control and awareness so very far above mere virtuosity. In Vitous, you hear the legacy of LaFaro in a kind of bass playing that does not so much swing as it amiably ambles along in contrapuntal contrast. On Bossa. for instance, you have a superb rendition of the romantic side of Corea's playing, while Gemini sounds like something Keith Jarrett would play today (the first section only) and take it into his church bag. Fragments is most interesting for me in the way that each player's terrain is so well defined—and coherent. Windows is a waltz on which Haynes really struts his stuff, providing an exquisite moving line with very lyric shifts of accent that are subtly picked up and used by Corea. Samba Yanta examines McCoy Tyner's contributions in an individual fashion and features incredible cymbal playing. Pannonica, Monk's original, is given a treatment very, very different from the composer's. Here, the song swings and sings in a lilting and joyful manner I think Monk might find charming. On this, and the final selection from that session, would suggest that the listener pay close attenton to the range of touches and sounds Corea makes use of, all of which make for variations in timbre and texture.

The music of Circle, which features the reeds of Anthony Braxton, the strings of Dave Holland and the percussion oi Barry Altschul, is greatly influenced by the European avant garde and supplies a bold continuation of fragments. It is a music based on surprise, wide dynamic variations and tonal color and the listener a side of Corea's thinking that can no longer heard since he has chosen a much less demanding form to out of following the disbanding of this group, However, the Chick Corea fans who want the whole picture, will find this music very worthwhile in that it is amongst the least compromising material he has ever played.

So, for those of you who like the more "inside", lyric and swinging side of Corea, there is the initial trio setting: for those you who like the form of avant garde found in the Circle selections, I am sure there is much here be fond of: for those of you who like your jazz only in electronic and heavily-accented backbeat environments, there is nothing here but, at its best, subtle artistry unveiling itself. Take your choice.

STANLEY CROUCH