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REMEMBRANCE / The Otter Creek Incident. Lucky Bounce. Juno. Small Potatoes (Béla Fleck). Impromptus: I. Cheshire; II. Mock Turtle; III. March Hare; IV. Gentlemen Fish; V. Jabberwocky (Fleck-Corea). Enut Nital. Remembrance. Continuance (Chick Corea). Bemsha Swing (Thelonious Monk-Denzil Best). Scarlatti Sonatas: K. 1/L. 266; K. 9/L. 413 (Domenico Scarlatti-Corea-Fleck) / Thirty Tigers Records 83731CD or LP83830, available for purchase at Elusive Disc or the Béla Fleck Official Online Store; free streaming on Spotify.
“We pushed this duo to a new place before we ran out of time,” says Béla Fleck, who produced this CD. “We have here another cool look at Chick Corea, at the different ways that he can play that we wouldn’t have had. There’s a lot of great Chick Corea out there, and this is different.”
It sure is. By cracky, we ain’t had a good piano and banjo jazz record since the 1920s, I think. If Rudi Mahall thinks everyone hates the clarinet, that must go double for the banjo. “I consider it my mission to eradicate the banjo from jazz bands,” Eddie Lang told an interviewer in the late 1920s, and he did before his untimely death in every major orchestra except Duke Ellington’s, which kept the banjo into the early ‘30s.
But of course, Béla Fleck is different. He is, to the best of my knowledge, the only modern jazz banjoist, and if he isn’t the only one he is certainly the best. Thus we have some very interesting duets on this CD, although to my mind they’re not as complex as the free jazz duets that Corea played back in the 1990s with the late Friedrich Gulda.
Corea occupied a unique niche in the jazz world. Strictly as a pianist, he was excellent but not wholly original in style, but his talents went far beyond mere improvisation. Many collectors, myself included, still treasure his CDs with the acoustic version of his 1970s band Return to Forever, and then there was his jazz suite with vibist Gary Burton, his compositions for strings, and many other projects that set him apart from almost anyone else.
Since I didn’t have the booklet for this CD, I can’t tell you how much of this album was recorded in the studio and how much was recorded “live,” but there is applause on only a few tracks. What is consistent, however, is the sound quality, with both performers closely miked and perfectly balanced. Of the five Impromptus I again know very little beyond the titles, four of which take their names from Lewis Carroll’s surrealist stories of the late 19th century. Much to my surprise, the two Scarlatti sonatas are played straight without any improvisation, but they surely were Corea’s idea. He was a huge fan of Baroque music and that of Mozart.
Partly due to his reverence for classical music, Corea’s playing always had direction and form. Here, even when Fleck pushes the envelope, Corea sticks pretty closely to his trademark style. When Fleck is going out on a limb, Corea is accompanying him with a combination of ground bass and complementary chording, occasionally holding back completely during Fleck’s extended breaks. One of the more amazing things is how creative Corea could be when playing together with Fleck. In some moments he simply acts as an accompanist, but then he’ll change positions on a dime and play counter-melodies and, occasionally, counter-rhythms. And, as usual, it’s all very subtle. Corea’s diverse musical mind worked quickly, able to absorb as well as echo what his musical partner was playing at all times. It was what made him unique.
The duo plays the five Impromptus out of sequence, thus the first one up is No. III, “March Hare.” This has a distinctly classical bent to it, but halfway through the duo completely changes the harmony around, and it ends with a slower, out-of-tempo cadenza.
I couldn’t figure out what the title of Enut Nital was supposed to mean until I read it backwards. Latin Tune. It combines traditional Spanish rhythms (sounding a bit like flamenco) with a busy, almost Baroque top line. Fleck is particularly wild in the second half of this one; Corea lets him go his own way, tossing in his commentary as the music develops. No. II of the Impromptus, “Mock Turtle,” also has a Latin undercurrent, but Corea’s accompaniment is played at half the tempo of Fleck’s improvised top line, giving the music a sort of split personality. The duo really has fun rewriting and improvising on Thelonious Monk’s Bemsha Swing, with Corea in particular fracturing the beat to the point where, at times, he is running counter to Fleck while at others he is pushing him strongly with tremendous swing, at times sounding like a cross between Fats Waller and Dodo Marmarosa. But this is clearly a purely jazzy reading, with no real allusion to classical or Latin music except in some of his rhythmic phrasing of a few passages. This is one of the “live” tracks, which gets a wonderful round of applause.
Fleck’s composition Lucky Bounce opens with staccato figures played on the banjo, with Corea coming in to accompany him and set the tempo. But this one is truly a contrapuntal exercise with only a little jazz “swing” to it; many of Corea’s single-note right-hand figures are reminiscent of the kind of work he did with Return to Forever. There is a neat passage in the middle where Corea suddenly steps up the tempo into double time, followed by a relaxation of the beat and putting the stress on different beats within different bars. This is really subtle music, and here, except for the fact that much of it is improvised and nearly all of it is syncopated, it’s hard to label it “jazz,” yet in the last two choruses the tempo picks up slightly and the playing of both musicians becomes rather daring. It ends on an unresolved chord.
This is followed by Impromptu No. 1, “Cheshire,” a strange bitonal piece played in strict rhythm with an almost Baroque interplay between the two instruments—third stream music at its very best and quintessential Chick Corea. By contrast, the title tune opens with a relaxed, out-of-tempo piano introduction with several right-hand flourishes before settling into another Latin rhythm and a richly textured melodic line of the sort that only Chick Corea could write. Not too surprisingly, Fleck take a back seat on this one, acting mostly as accompanist to Corea rather than active partner. Recognizing that this was a “Chick Corea tune,” he let him fly solo while providing some exquisite if very subtle counter-lines, at least until his own solo, but here he wisely keeps it simple, realizing that Corea is the one creating the more substantive musical statement. And it’s amazing how much Chick stretches this piece out, running it nearly six and a half minutes and introducing B and C themes as he wends his way along. To my mind, this is a modern counterpart to Jelly Roll Morton’s Spanish-tinged tunes, and this one, too, is “live.”
Juno is a cute, playful piece (also played before an audience), not exactly bitonal but with a theme that jumps back and forth between two keys. Again, there is a Baroque feel to it, and Corea slips in some allusions to Latin rhythm as well. There is also tremendous wit in his solo. Fleck, again, joyfully accompanies him until his own solo, which consists of a string of 16th notes and some rapid triplets. This is followed by the two Scarlatti sonatas, to which Corea adds his own slightly syncopated lines here and there. The second sonata is much more a jazz than a classical performance, but still within the bounds of good taste. Fleck falls in line with the fun, and a good time is had by all, including the audience.
“Jabberwocky,” the fifth Impromptu, is the craziest of all, going in and out of different keys even in its opening theme statement. Corea borrows some “rootless” chords from Bill Evans for this one, which keeps the harmony from ever really being settled as the duo romp their way through it. Yet surprisingly, Fleck’s Small Potatoes has the same sort of unsettled harmony along with fluctuating tempi and accents within the bars. Here, it is the banjoist who seems to be pushing the pianist into some truly avant-garde passages, including left-hand crushed chords and other devices before we suddenly reach a bit of Baroque counterpoint in the middle, This is truly one of the album’s greatest peaks; the live audience loved it.
Continuance opens with a series of strange and at times seemingly unrelated piano chords, followed by a sort of fluctuating-tempo theme with unsettled harmony. Fleck joins the fun, and the pair go right on their merry “jazzical” way through the piece. The album closes out with the fourth Impromptu, “Gentleman Fish,” which sounds much more like a Fleck piece than a Corea one, having a certain bluegrass quality about it. It’s short, to the point, and minimally improvised—a sort of musical exclamation point to the entire album.
Even if this were not a post-mortem Corea disc, which of course being such will attract thousands if not millions of listeners, it is certainly a very fine one, a triumphant exclamation point on his storied career, and his wonderful synergy with Fleck works perfectly.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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