Chick Corea - Circulus
Released - 1978
Recording and Session Information
A&R Studios, NYC, April 8, 1970
Chick Corea, piano, percussion; Dave Holland, bass, percussion; Barry Altschul, drums, percussion.
(tk.1) Drone
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.
Percussion Piece
A&R Studios, NYC, August 21, 1970
Anthony Braxton, alto, soprano sax, clarinet, contrabass clarinet; Chick Corea, piano, prepared piano, bass marimba, percussion; Dave Holland, bass, guitar; Barry Altschul, drums, bass, percussion, vibes, bass marimba.
tk.1 Quartet Piece No. 1
tk.2 Quartet Piece No. 2
tk.3 Quartet Piece No. 3
Track Listing
| Side One | ||
| Title | Author | Recording Date |
| Drone | Corea-Holland-Altschul | April 8 1970 |
| Side Two | ||
| Quartet Piece No. 1 | Corea-Braxton-Holland-Altschul | August 21 1970 |
| Side Three | ||
| Quartet Piece No. 2 | Corea-Braxton-Holland-Altschul | August 21 1970 |
| Side Four | ||
| Quartet Piece No. 3 | Corea-Braxton-Holland-Altschul | August 21 1970 |
| Percussion Piece | Corea-Braxton-Holland-Altschul | August 19 1970 |
Liner Notes
CHICK COREA
Armando Anthony Corea, known more familiarly as Chick, already had a richly varied career behind him when he joined with David Holland and Barry Altschul and, somewhat later, Anthony Braxton to form Circle, in 1970. During the first half of the sixties he'd paid his Latin dues with leaders like Mongo Santamaria and Willie Bobo, picking up a razor-sharp rhythmic acuity along the way. Herbie Mann helped introduce him to some other aspects of world music — if he is nothing else, Mann is a dedicated internationalist — and Chick also found time to play straight-ahead jazz with Blue Mitchell. In 1968 he joined a Miles Davis band that shifted in personnel over the next few years and produced the most influential jazz albums of the electric era. Chick was an important participant on In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and Live at the Fillmore East, to name just three.
As Stanley Crouch remarked in the notes to an album we might consider the companion volume to this one (Circling In, Blue Note BN-LA472-H2), Corea and the Davis rhythm section — bassist Dave Holland, drummer Jack DeJohnette — sometimes roamed far afield from Davis' funk-based direction, delving into the more freely rhythmic and textural areas associated with avant-garde figures like Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. They were a kind of mini-free jazz band within the Davis unit, and although their proclivities sometimes made Davis' concert appearances uneasy affairs, just as often they contributed to widening the scope of the trumpeter's music. It was an unsettled, exciting time.
At this point, the route out of Davis' bands led straight to stardom. Wayne Shorter got together with two more participants in Davis' electric sessions, Josef Zawinul and Airto, and formed Weather Report, which pursued an electric jazz-rock fusion direction with consummate taste and skill and signed with Columbia for a (for jazz) hefty advance and big promotional budget. From that point on, Miles' ex-sidemen were the chosen ones of jazz. Keith Jarett chose to pursue a more personal direction and did not immediately break into the pop market, but he did work. Corea might have been expected to do likewise. Yet in 1970 he played most consistently with Holland, who never really took to fusion as a direction, preferring the acoustic bass, and Barry Altschul, a very gifted drummer with avant-garde connections (principally a long stay in pianist Paul Bley's trio). When Chick joined forces with Anthony Braxton, a maverick reedman even by the very free-thinking standards of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the black jazz collective he'd been a part of, it was time to sit up and take notice. Chick even took part in a radically adventurous Marion Brown date for the then-fledgling ECM company in August of 1970. There was no question about it; instead of going for bucks, he had joined the avant-garde.
How can we evaluate this decision in terms of Corea's subsequent development? Does it make sense that a man who turned his back on a surefire ticket to popularity in 1970 would turn around and join Stan Getz and then, at the beginning of 1972, put together the first of an increasingly commercial series of Return To Forever groups? Maybe and maybe not, but it might help to look at the climate among younger New York jazzmen that particular summer The most talked-about new music on the scene, among people who were at all involved in new directions, was the AACM music that had been filtering out of Chicago. Sound, the Roscoe Mitchel lp on Delmark that had announced this latest new wave, was already four years old, but it had been little heard and insufficiently heeded. The Mitchell and Lester Bowie albums on Nessa were rarely seen in stores, and the recordings the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Anthony Braxton had made in Paris in 1969 for Byg/Actuel were just beginning to filter in. But younger musicians had begun checking them out, and what they heard was surprising. They heard a music in which the traditional rhythm section either functioned coloristically, on an equal footing with the other instruments, or had been dispensed with entirely. They heard a music in which kazoos, whistles, toy xylophones, little bells, harmonicas, watering cans, and just about anything else was accepted as a worthy sound-producing tool, a music in which each player often switched from instrument to instrument in rapid succession so that the fabric of collective improvisations was a wash of ceaselessly changing colors, They heard a music in which written thematic materials were sometimes spotted throughout a performance (rather than stuck at the beginning and end, as in most previous avant-garde jazz) or wholly abandoned. It was a spiky, unpredictable new music, and like many new things it was widely misunderstood.
One thing about the AACM was obvious: by banding together as a collective they had been able to survive, if not prosper, playing exactly what they wanted to play. Among some of the younger white musicians in New York there was talk of forming a similar collective, and when Braxton and Leroy Jenkins arrived in New York, fresh from their Chicago dues-paying and new European notoriety, they were duly consulted. Jenkins told one group of white musicians that their goals and the AACM's were different. "You're always talking about getting 'out there,"' he is reported to have said. ' 'We're already on the outside:' (He meant on the outside of American society, racially and artistically.) "We want in."
The talk and the action centered around several private lofts, some in Chelsea and some downtown. where jam sessions seemed to be going on almost ceaselessly. Braxton, who has always liked sitting in with lots of different folks, was a frequent participant, along with Corea, Holland, Altschul and people like Dave Liebman, Bobby Moses, and Jack DeJohnette. I remember hearing one session that consisted of a romp through the Thelonious Monk songbook at furious tempos, and others at which free-form screaming was the order of the day. Chick, Dave and Barry had been working and recording together since the beginning of 1970. It was only natural that their energy should flow together with Braxton's. for Anthony. though he was already a rigorously original and channeled composer. was also, more than many of the AACM musicians. a free spirit, willing to get into something that was somewhat removed from the main channels of his development.
The result was Circle Corea was prepared for it not only because of his various experiences in the mainstream, his work with Davis, and his jamming- He had been playing free music for some time, and had made very interesting avant-garde records, Is and Sundance, with a group that included DeJohnette, Woody Shaw, Hubert Laws, Holland, and Horace Arnold, records that were released on the Solid State and Groove Merchant labels. On those two albums Corea seemed intent on synthesizing a disparate range of new piano approaches, from Cecil Taylor's constructivist frenzies to the linear fragmentation of Paul Bley to the rhythmic modal vamping of McCoy Tyner to the various percussive keyboard disciplines of some contemporary classical composers (eg- Cowell, Messaien). He was doing a fine job, too, for his synthesis rarely sounded like a grab-bag of effects. It was a very broad but well-integrated personal style, and Corea had the kind of tone and touch and singing melodic sense that made even the most abstract moments work.
Even so, on Is and Sundance Corea was working with several players whose exploratory bents were tempered by an innate conservatism. With Holland and Altschul, and especially in the quartet with Braxton, he was really in space, left to his own devices. This album is unusually revealing in that respect, for while the trio piece, "Drone;' is a very consciously structured performance — and one of the finest recorded by this exceptional threesome — the other performances sound like and seem to be absolutely spontaneous improvisations, with little or nothing decided on beforehand. Each man stands naked, as it were, and so does Circle's group consciousness- In a sense, these three sides of music, recorded eleven days after Corea and Braxton participated in Marion Brown's Afternoon of a Georgia Faun and two months before the much more structured Circle selections on Circling In, are tests of how well this group understood the new areas opened up by the AACM and its fellow travellers.
"Quartet Piece No. 1" is definitely a music of sounds and spaces rather than a music of lines and phrases. Braxton is playing a lot of auxiliary percussion in addition to his woodwind arsenal, and Corea has prepared piano, vibes and bass marimba on hand in addition to his regular acoustic keyboard. Several things are immediately evident - Braxton and Holland have already established a remarkable rapport, one that has sustained much fine music since. Corea is very sensitive to the flow and Altschul is a supremely resourceful colorist. But it is Braxton who gooses the music out of its amiable flow and into a dramatic conclusion with his surging improvisation on sopranino saxophone.
The instrument-switching, one of the more immediately assimilable of the AACM's innovations, continues in "Quartet Piece No. 2," which begins with Holland on guitar, Corea playing inside the piano, and Altschul manning the bass marimba. There is much small percussion, knocking and scraping, an approach that seems to work much better in the controlled environment of contemporary concert music (Boulez for example) than in open-ended situations like this one. Braxton shows us that a reed instrument can accompany as well as lead with his fine work on contrabass clarinet, and then he picks up the alto for a burning, multi-directional solo. It could have been the end, but no, we hear voices...Anthony, I think, saying "We exist...physical universe...WE EXIST." The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Braxton on his Three Compositions of New Jazz album had explored similar uses of the voice, but for this listener, at least, it doesn't quite come off here, and this audacious improvisation remains only episodically successful.
The third quartet improvisation begins with Braxton and Holland out front and could almost be a Braxton quartet date, for a minute. Braxton is using some of the language factors he had developed on his very important album of unaccompanied solos. For Alto, alternating multi-noted flurries with abrupt rasped honks but keeping a flow going through his overarching intelligence and good musical and dramatic sense. It is ironic that Braxton has the reputation of a kind of black Joe Cool of the alto, for on this as on many of his other recordings he is Mr Hot, building to a furious tongue-talking climax There's a brief rapping-and-knocking section that threatens to drift, but Altschul quite magically erases it with a cymbal and initiates a more delicate and more musically substantial dialogue, with vibes and piano prominent, before the group rises into another energy cataclysm. The final percussion improvisation almost sounds like a coda to this most intense of the quartet performances. It saunters along in a kind of loose soft shoe, and although it's lightweight, it does sustain interest, with its overlapping rhythmic layers and alert good humor.
For Corea the complete pianist, turn to "Drone," a marvellously sustained improvisation that has been heavily but intelligently influenced by Indian music. Beginning with a single drone tone, Corea gradually and in a floating, thoroughly dreamlike manner elaborates the music until he is working with all 12 tones of the tempered scale. After Holland's firm, loving bass solo Chick returns on prepared piano and segues into a solo by Altschul that makes brilliant use of silence and crisp, distinct kit textures. Then the music moves back through a relatively agitated section back to the eternal drone. Every minute of this 22-mlnute performance counts; "Drone" and "Quartet Piece No. 1" alone are worth the price of the record.
Circle made three impressive albums overseas, two for Japanese CBS/Sony and one, available in America, for ECM. Corea said after he abandoned the group (and Braxton took Holland and Altschul as his rhythm section for the next five years) that he wanted to communicate, that he felt the music was too introverted. In a way, he was fight. A lot of Circle's music, including parts of sides three and four on this album and parts of Circling In, must have been more interesting to the musicians making it than to most listeners, then or now. The art of instrument-switching was perhaps not fully mastered — too much scraping and knocking and soul searching — and the musicians just did not know each other well enough. Really successful group improvisation takes either working bands, which Circle was all too infrequently, or absolutely ideal physical, psychological and environmental circumstances, which rarely are obtained in recording studios. It is remarkable that these improvisations are as successful as they are. And it is interesting that Corea and Braxton have both opted for more compositional control, but in very different idioms, since Circle disbanded. It's too bad the group didn't stay together longer — it had very great potential, much of which was never realized — but it's nice to have this last collection of Circle music, some of the best, available at long last.
— Robert Palmer
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