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Chick Corea: Trilogy

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Concord Jazz
Released: 2013.09.10
Time:
 76:53/77:37/50:24
Category: Jazz, Post-Bop, Contemporary Jazz
Producer(s): Chick Corea
Rating:
Media type: 3xCD
Web address: www.chickcorea.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2020
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


Disc 1

[1] You're My Everything (M.Dixon/H.Warren/J.Young) - 12:00
[2] Recorda Me (J.Henderson) - 7:29
[3] The Song Is You (O.Hammerstein II/J.Kern) - 13:55
[4] Work (Th.Monk) - 5:14
[5] My Foolish Heart (N.Washington/V.Young) - 9:20
[6] Fingerprints (Ch.Corea) - 10:22
[7] Spain (Ch.Corea) - 18:29


Disc 2

[1] This Is New (I.Gershwin/K.Weill) - 12:42
[2] Alice in Wonderland (S.Fain/B.Hilliard) - 9:04
[3] It Could Happen to You (J.Burke/J. van Heusen) - 12:00
[4] Blue Monk (Th.Monk) - 10:01
[5] Armando's Rhumba (Ch.Corea) - 9:13
[6] Op. 11, No. 9 (A.Scriabin) - 10:43
[7] How Deep Is the Ocean? (I.Berlin) - 13:48


Disc 3

[1] Homage (Ch.Corea) - 10:02
[2] Piano Sonata: The Moon (Ch.Corea) - 29:58
[3] Someday My Prince Will Come (F.Churchill/L.Morey) - 10:22

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Chick Corea - Piano, Liner Notes, Producer
Christian McBride - Double Bass
Brian Blade - Drums

Jorge Pardo - Flute on [CD1: 5,7]
Niño Josele - Guitar on [CD1: 5,7]
Gayle Moran Corea – vocals on [CD3: 3]

Bernie Kirsh - Engineer, Mixing
Brian Vibberts - Mixing
Bernie Grundman - Mastering
Andrew Elliott - Photography
Bill Rooney - Management
Brian Alexander - Personal Piano Technician

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


2014 CD Concord Jazz - CJA 3568502

Recorded live in Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Turkey, and Japan.



Trilogy is a triple-CD set recorded live around the world with Chick’s spectacularly virtuosic trio featuring bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade. Christian and Brian are both star leaders in their own right (and previously the rhythmic backbone in Corea’s Five Peace Band).

This is a recording to rank with the landmarks of Chick’s career — a marvel of live recorded sound that ranges from reinventions of classic Corea compositions and previously unrecorded originals to an array of jazz standards even freshly re-imagined Scriabin.

Chick said about his trio partners, “Both are master musicians and together we have an easy rapport. There is a lot of give and take in our music. It’s always a lot of fun.” Featuring guest appearances by Jorge Pardo and Nino Josele on “Spain,” and the ethereal vocals of Gayle Moran Corea on “Someday My Prince Will Come.”

Liner Notes



Arguably (and not many would argue) the greatest living jazz pianist, Chick Corea has had a long and highlight-filled career, beginning with his tenure with the great Miles Davis when Davis was defining the jazz-rock synthesis, through Corea's own breakthrough jazz fusion recordings and his subsequent journeys into everything from the post-bop avant-garde to classical and new age, and his restless and musically inclusive spirit has always shone through. This expansive live release finds Corea working with bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade, and the three have an uncanny connection, filling space with gorgeous and subtle phrasings, gliding through all manner of styles with a seemingly effortless elegance, grace, and freshness. The three-disc Trilogy was recorded live at tour stops in Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California, and in Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Turkey, and Japan, by Corea's longtime (since 1975) recording engineer Bernie Kirsh, who has provided the trio with a bright, warm production sound that allows each player's slightest shift and voicing to come through with clear precision. In spite of the various locations, this set has a remarkable sonic coherency. It might be too much to call this set a summation of Corea's legacy, but it does have the slight feel of a retrospective collectio. The band revisits classic Corea compositions like "Spain" and covering several tunes from the Great American Songbook, a couple of Thelonious Monk tunes ("Blue Monk" allows bassist McBride to particularly shine), a previously unissued Corea composition, the half-hour "Piano Sonata: The Moon," where the trio shows its ability to move between scored and improvised sections with breathtaking ease, and even a take on classical Russian composer Alexander Scriabin's "Op. 11, No. 9" that manages to breathe and flow without sounding like a forced fusion of classical and jazz. There are guests on three tracks, flutist Jorge Pardo and guitarist Niño Josele on "My Foolish Heart" and "Spain," and vocalist Gayle Moran Corea, the pianist's wife, on "Someday My Prince Will Come," but it's the three primary musicians who drive everything. Not exactly a holding pattern, and not exactly a career summation, Trilogy will surely please and delight Corea's many fans.

Steve Leggett - All Music Guide



Remember when CDs were so expensive to make that record companies would release double albums and remove a track or two, just so that it could fit on a single CD? Well, there may be many negatives about the state of the music industry today---despite this being a time when so much music is being made that, like the glory days in the 1960s/70s, it seems like anything is possible...there's just no more industry support to help any of it reach the same number of people—but one good thing is that the price of manufacturing a CD has dropped so much that artists like the SFJAZZ Collective can regularly release double or triple CD collections of the music toured each year, when the group pays tribute to a different artist by having each member contribute an arrangement of a favourite song by the honoree, as well as another original composition in his/her spirit, like its loving 2013 homage to pianist Chick Corea, Live SFJAZZ Center 2013—The Music Of Chick Corea & New Compositions (SFJAZZ, 2013).

Well, it turns out that Corea has his own multi-disc live set on offer this year: Trilogy, a whopping three-disc, nearly three-and-a-half hour collection of music culled from various dates in his extensive world tour with bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade. Corea's trio combines original material old and new, with a healthy dose of jazz standards, songs from the Great American Songbook...even one classical piece, liberally reinterpreted by this masterful, virtuosic and eminently swinging group.

When the trio made a 2010 stop in Ottawa, Canada as part of the TD Ottawa Jazz Festival's off-season program, there'd been no prior announcements about what the trio would be doing. With McBride and Blade first teaming up together in Corea's fusion-heavy Five Peace Band collaboration with guitarist John McLaughlin, including a 2009 Montreal performance that virtually lifted the roof off Place des Arts' Salle Wilfred-Pelletier—and with the pianist last playing Ottawa in 2006 with longtime friends and musical collaborators Eddie Gomez and Airto Moreira in a trio that augmented Corea's grand piano with plenty of Fender Rhodes and synth—there was every reason to expect that his trio with McBride and Blade might be configured along similar lines.

How wrong everyone was. Instead, it was an all-acoustic affair that, by the end of 90 minutes of breathtaking interaction and, in particular from the puckish Corea, plenty of mischievous musical fun, many in the nearly sold-out Dominion Chalmers Church crowd were wondering it there'd ever be a release from this exceptional trio. Well, it's been a long, long wait—nearly four years—but Trilogy absolutely meets any expectations and, in fact, with one small exception, completely exceeds them.

Very little of the music performed at the Ottawa show made it onto this three-disc, 17-song set where Corea, McBride and Blade take their time with almost all the material: only a bright, Latinesque version of Joe Henderson's "Recorda Me" and a quirky but effervescently swinging take of Thelonious Monk's rarely covered "Work," first heard on Thelonious Monk & Sonny Rollins (OJC, 1955), drop below the nine-minute mark, while Corea's epic "Piano Sonata: The Moon," part of a larger suite that, at this time, remains unfinished, clocks in just one second shy of the thirty-minute mark.

That piece may not be Trilogy's centrepiece in terms of positioning (it opens the third disc), but it absolutely is, in terms of demonstrating just how simpatico and capable this trio can be in navigating both complex compositional constructs and more open-ended improvisational forays. "I thought it would be ideal," Corea says in the press release, "to expand it in this trio setting since Christian and Brian are so adept at reading and interpreting tricky scores. We spent time weaving together written sections with the improvised sections."

Corea has had many trios over the years, and this one certainly ranks amongst his most memorable. Capable of swinging amiably on the set-opening "You're My Everything"—though Blade's now-signature explosive punctuations are never far away—and burning much more fiercely on an exhilaratingly up-tempo version of "Fingerprints," Corea's answer to Wayne Shorter's classic "Footprints," this is a trio that possesses all the necessary muscle to work with Corea's often percussive pianism, while being equally adept at more refined elegance on a generous reading of "Alice in Wonderland," the Sammy Fain composition made popular in the jazz world by pianist Bill Evans that here contains one of McBride's most compelling solos of the set: robust yet effortlessly lyrical.

Two tracks, culled from a Madrid performance at the end of a European tour leg, feature flautist Jorge Pardo—last heard with Corea on The Ultimate Adventure (Stretch, 2006)—and guitarist Niño Josele: Corea's recent tribute to the late Paco De Lucia, "Homage"; and an appropriately flamenco-driven look at his classic "Spain" that begins with an a cappella guitar solo of stunning virtuosity that morphs into a lengthy rubato introduction with everyone in the pool. Corea slowly introduces a rhythm-heavy pedal tone-based solo that gradually finds its way to the song's familiar changes, but the near-iconic theme is only revealed after Pardo takes a similarly impressive turn more than halfway through this epic 18-minute reinvention.

The only misstep—as seems to be the case with other live Corea recordings like Rhumba Flamenco: Live in Europe (Stretch, 2005)—is a feature for his wife, vocalist Gayle Moran. As ever, Moran possesses a beautiful voice of unique purity; the problem is, however, that while Corea has utilized her voice to great effect in the past with multilayered choral tracks on albums like The Leprechaun (Polydor, 1976) and My Spanish Heart (Polydor, 1976), when Moran sings standards, as she does here with "Someday My Prince Will Come," she's simply too pure. Perhaps the biggest misstep of all is ending the album with Moran's guest spot, but after three hours and fifteen minutes of transcendence, a brief ten minutes of less-than-perfection doesn't represent such a bad signal-to-noise ratio.

Impeccably recorded by Corea's longtime recording engineer Bernie Kirsh, Trilogy leaps out of the speakers with pristine clarity and visceral punch. After last year's exceptional electric excursion, The Vigil (Stretch, 2013), Trilogy is also a reminder that Corea's allegiance to the tradition is as complete as ever, and that he's in very good company with McBride and, in particular, Blade, who hasn't done an in-the-tradition, hard-swinging session like this in quite some time.

It's hard to believe that Corea is now 73 years old but, if anything, he's never been more active—and, with albums as superb as Trilogy, in the company of the equally outstanding McBride and Blade, clearly at the top of his game.

John Kelman - September 2, 2014
© 2020 All About Jazz



Chick Corea, now 73, has shown that his curiosity as well as his playing remain undimmed with genre-bending recent ventures such as his Vigil group. But plenty of Corea fans want nothing more than for him to cut loose with a classic acoustic-jazz trio, and that’s precisely the deal for this three-CD set, recorded live around the world between 2010 and 2012. Bass virtuoso Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade join him on a collection of jazz standards, old and new originals including a half-hour Corea sonata and a remoulded Scriabin prelude. The Joe Henderson classic Recorda Me features the leader’s daintily prancing touch on Latin grooves, while Niño Josele’s acoustic guitar and Jorge Pardo’s flute add an Iberian heat to My Foolish Heart and Spain. An exhilarating Blue Monk is a blend of swing-piano trills and sly chordwork over McBride’s booming bass-walk, Scriabin’s Op 11 No 9 is an empathic three-way jazz performance that still protects the composition, and Corea’s Piano Sonata: The Moon (an old unfinished work that he used this trio to spontaneously complete) is full of darting, effervescent melodies imaginatively greeted and rerouted by McBride and Blade. For Corea admirers, and jazz-piano fans of all kinds, it’s a must.

John Fordham - Thu 16 Oct 2014
The Guardian



Trilogy is a 2013 live album by Chick Corea and his trio, featuring Corea on piano with Christian McBride on double bass and Brian Blade on drums. The three-disc album was recorded live in Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California, and in Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Turkey, and Japan. In the Billboard Jazz albums charts 2014 the album peaked number 9.

John Kelman of All About Jazz summarizes his review with the statement: "It's hard to believe that Corea is now 73 years old but, if anything, he's never been more active—and, with albums as superb as Trilogy, in the company of the equally outstanding McBride and Blade, clearly at the top of his game."

Steve Leggett wrote in his AllMusic review: "This expansive live release finds Corea working with bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade, and the three have an uncanny connection, filling space with gorgeous and subtle phrasings, gliding through all manner of styles with a seemingly effortless elegance, grace, and freshness." and concludes "Not exactly a holding pattern, and not exactly a career summation, Trilogy will surely please and delight Corea's many fans."

John Fordham of the Guardian wrote: "Chick Corea, now 73, has shown that his curiosity as well as his playing remain undimmed with genre-bending recent ventures such as his Vigil group. But plenty of Corea fans want nothing more than for him to cut loose with a classic acoustic-jazz trio, and that’s precisely the deal for this three-CD set, recorded live around the world between 2010 and 2012.(...) For Corea admirers, and jazz-piano fans of all kinds, it’s a must."

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