AMOGH RAO
“Just Play What You Hear”
– A Glimpse of Chick Corea in India
T
he thing about true genius is, you can’t possibly
hope to grasp it in its entirety. You’re humbled
and pushed back and all you can do is hope to grow
and evolve to a point where you can at least attempt
to comprehend it from afar. Armando Anthony Corea
visited India this November. A solo recital of sorts, it
was to be an exploration of all the music he had been
inspired by and in turn, his attempt to transform it. I was
a fool to believe that to be all there was to the show.
If you’ve ever been around polyglots, you will have
noticed that they inadvertently tend to utilize vocabulary
and references from the other languages they speak.
Now attempt to imagine what a conversation would
be like if they were given the freedom to speak all of
them, however and whenever with no bounds. This is
me trying to give you a superficial analogy for Corea’s
‘style’ since cross-genre doesn’t even begin to cover it.
The show began with a quick tune-up of the piano where
the audience pitched in to help sing the notes. After a warm
up with 500 Miles high, Chick opened up a journey through
the workings of his mind. He explained how he associated
different pieces and composers with each other by way of
the feelings and emotions they incite. As such, we saw a
mashup of George Gershwin and Mozart, Bill Evans and
Domenico Scarlatti and Antonio Jobim with Chopin.
He then performed a duet piece written by him and Paco
De Lucia in memory of the latter. Titled Yellow Nimbus,
the name referred to the literal cloud like halo Chick
would notice surrounding Paco’s head as they performed.
Chick then spoke about his childhood, and how his family
of musicians would make fun of each other by playing
entertaining melodies on the piano, influencing him to
create ‘musical portraits’ of people. He then inexplicably
and to everyone’s absolute astonishment, sat a chair next
to his piano, called audience members up on stage and
literally wrote music on the spot by looking at them.
He also took it up a notch by calling audience
pianists like Louis Banks up on stage to literally
play with him on the same grand piano.
Chick then brought the dynamics down a notch by playing
a handful of compositions he wrote as ‘children’s songs’,
inspired by the innocence and untouched joy of children.
As an encore, he played a crowd favourite, Spain. He
told us that the opening melody of the song is sometimes
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credited to him but is in fact an excerpt from Joaquin
Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. He paid homage
to the composer by playing a portion of the original
concerto, before moving into the actual composition
written by him, improvising feverishly throughout.
As an absolutely massive finale, he made the audience
sing the main phrases of the song, ending with the
opening melody and an absolutely ecstatic crowd.
As everyone sang these complex melodies and completed
phrasings for Corea, we all realized that we were touched
by something far greater than a concert experience. We
had been impacted far beyond vocal emotion. And that this
man was truly the personification of the potential of music.
If there’s anything one can wish for, it’s that every
human being be touched by something this powerful
at least once in their lives. I for one know for certain,
that I’ll never look at music the same way again.
The title of this article comes from Miles Davis’ advice
to Chick Corea before he joined his band. “Nah, no
rehearsal”, said Miles. “Just play what you hear”.