A standout in the pantheon of jazz keyboard gods, Chick projects humor and a charming nonchalance onstage that belie the genius of his work, as well as the level of commitment he has towards his craft. As if further affirmation of his abilities was needed, the prolific composer, keyboardist, and pianist recently captured another two Grammys for his album, The Ultimate Adventure.
The need for a larger trophy case is far from the only noteworthy development in Chick’s musical life as of late. Reunion tour dates with vibraphonist Gary Burton have had him bouncing around the globe, as have shows with his newest musical partner, bluegrass fusion banjo wizard Bela Fleck. The duo’s first CD together, The Enchantment, features a wide array of tunes composed by both artists.
We caught up with Chick after his duo gig with Gary in Berkeley, and were lucky to talk music with Bela as well on a separate occasion.
Gary and Chick, Chick and Bela Of the many paradigm-shifting musical statements Chick has made throughout his long career, his ’72 duo collaboration with Gary Burton on Crystal Silence is both one of his simplest and most profound. And if the adoring response the duo received from their Berkeley audience is any indication, that statement continues to resonate loudly 35 years later. “My role in the duet through the years has basically been to provide compositions and ideas for the duo to play off of,” says Chick. “Gary is one of the most brilliant soloists I’ve ever worked with and I like him very much. He’s so masterful and fluid on his instrument, and if I present material to him that he likes and that inspires him, he really runs with it, and that’s sort of been our relationship.”
Chick’s musical partnership with Bela Fleck shifts the duo dynamic, both in instrumentation and creative approach. “Collaborating with Gary is actually quite different than playing with Bela,” says Chick. “Whereas with Gary, I try to provide a kind of orchestral backdrop to his virtuosity, with Bela, it’s more of an interaction and a back-and-forth thing.
“Bela and I have been friends for a long time and I’ve been listening to him play and hearing how he and the Flecktones have developed,” Chick continues. “He’s dipped into all kinds of music — compositions, things with chamber orchestrations — and he’s worked with [bassist] Edgar Meyer. He invited me to play on a recording years ago. I’ve sat in with his band several times and I’ve invited him to sit in with my performances several times, so the idea of playing together isn’t a new one. It just finally came around to, well, his schedule with the Flecktones opened up, and I’ve planned a year of duetting, of working on collaborative projects myself. It slotted in the right time for us to get together and finally do something.
“The way we started was by just deciding to write music. We were talking on the phone, and we had a first rehearsal in Nashville. I did a gig there with Gary Burton, and Bela came to sit in. I stayed an extra day and we went over to Edgar Meyer’s very nice studio there, and he was kind enough to let us spend a whole day showing each other the compositions we’d written, and we had our first rehearsal. Bela showed me a bunch of stuff and I brought a few things. It was an instant hookup and a lot of fun playing with banjo and piano. We were discovering things as we were going and figuring out how to play with one another, how to make the timbres of the two instruments fit with each other, working out all sorts of ways we could interact. It was a great kickoff. From there, we just wrote some more, emailed each other some demo ideas, and kept working on it.
Chick and Bela recorded The Enchantment in Los Angeles. “We spent about four days recording. It was a blast making the record. Both of us sat with it pretty much through to the end of the mix. Bela really jumped in there, did a lot of personal editing. He’s pretty facile on Pro Tools. I was amazed to see him work. He was a great help in choosing bits and piecing it together. But basically, they were all pretty much one or two takes.”
For Chick, the long personal history with Bela was inseparable from the creative process. “It’s not so much personal relationships influence music — it’s more like that’s what the relationship is. It’s personal, period. All my musical relationships, I feel are that way. Occasionally, I’ll work with musicians, for instance in an orchestra, where I’ll play with them one night, and I won’t get the chance to meet everybody, say hello, and find out even what their names are. That’s a little more impersonal. It’s a friendly atmosphere, but it’s a different thing. But when I work with musicians on a project and it’s over a period of time, it usually develops out of a friendship and an affinity for certain things, certain kinds of music, certain ways of performing, and life in general.
“I like to present that to audiences. That’s why I love working in groups, having a band, and working with musicians who I get to know personally, play with, and live some life with.”
Jazz and Bluegrass
Melding two strong, distinct musical backgrounds for
The Enchantment challenged both players, though it helped that each was more than familiar with the other’s work. “Chick is a fundamental inspiration for me,” says Bela of his collaborator. “When I saw him play when I was in high school, it changed my whole idea of the type of music I wanted to make, even though I was playing the banjo. I saw him and Return to Forever in ’74 or ’75, and I went home after that concert and tried to figure out what they were doing and what Chick was playing. It struck me that all their notes were on the banjo as well, and I just had to go looking for them. That was 30 years ago. And now we’re not just playing a couple songs on a record together. It’s a touring unit now and it’s a dream come true. I’ve had the opportunity to play with people I looked up to a lot and have discovered that they weren’t everything I thought they were, and that the impressions I made when I was young were childlike. In Chick’s case, he exceeded all my expectations.”
Though it was largely new musical ground for each of them, both players enjoyed visiting on the other’s turf. “I can isolate one track that I had a particularly good time with, since it was so out of my experience,” says Chick. “Bela wrote this slow, grooving bluegrass piece called ‘Mountain.’ It starts with this banjo lick that really puts you right there in bluegrass territory. I made sure that Bela showed me the exact notes of that lick and I learned to play it. The way the track starts, he plays the phrase once and I play it back on the piano. It communicates the real fun of me going into Bela’s world and playing in a style I’ve never played in before. It’s like, ‘What’s Chick doing?’” [Laughs.]
For his part, Bela ventured into Chick’s world of complex, consonant jazz. “I’m not a real jazz musician, though I play one on this record,” remarks Bela, laughing. “I’m a little of a dilettante. I just love it, but I haven’t played this sort of music this way with someone on Chick’s level before. I felt more than a little intimidated, and I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to hold my own when things got harmonically advanced. To which he said, ‘Don’t worry about it. Play what you play and I’ll do what I can to make it work on my end.’ But I didn’t want him to have to do everything to make it work, so I made that effort to push myself harmonically more than I normally do, and as we played live, that’s been one of the most exciting thing going on from the record into the improv we’re doing on stage. A lot of times, Chick will stop playing, look at me as if he’s saying ‘Go for it,’ and I just have to work from whatever he’s just created and add my own point of view to it. And that often involves a lot of harmonically shifting things that I might not do under my own steam.
“That’s why I’m here,” he continues. “I want to get pushed. Whatever my limitations may be, I consider them alterable, so I’m just happy to be playing in a situation where I inevitably have to learn every day I play.”
Composition and Communication
If you’re a longtime reader of
Keyboard, you’re likely already familiar with Chick’s thoughtfulness on the always-important concept of musical communication. “I came across an idea years ago through L. Ron Hubbard,” he says. “Communication is an ability that can be changed, enhanced, and developed. You can work on it and focus in on it.
“I started thinking about how communication, like music and performances, can have a low or high quality. And we strive for a higher quality. You can develop technique, which can produce an emotional response — someone can be technically brilliant and get a wow from an audience — but if the technique starts getting in the way of the message, the feeling of the emotion itself, then it’s not the right balance. Communication should always be senior to it.
“You can see that type of thing if you listen to certain simple forms of music. I was at the 2007 Grammy performance live. There was one performer who stuck out at me — Corinne Bailey Rae. She’s a young singer and all she did was a short song solo, accompanying herself on guitar. She didn’t use much of her vocal range and her guitar part was very simple, but the communication was so deep and so wonderful that, for me, it was my favorite piece of the whole night. That’s a good example of where communication is so strong and so important. If you tried to musically and intellectually analyze her performance, you’d end up with a very boring bunch of notes on the page.”
Creating an engaging, emotionally communicative performance is something all musicians strive for. What’s Chick’s approach to building such a connection between player and listener? “I find it most direct, flowing, and rewarding to have a goal for something I write,” he explains. “It could be as simple as wanting to practice writing a fugue, like as an exercise. Every practice period, every time I sit down at the piano and try to create something, I have an objective or some emotion I want to get out. Sometimes, it’s a game I want to play with my musical partners. I want to play something that’ll engage us in a certain way, that’ll lead us into some particular territory or interaction. That becomes a direction for me to write.
“An example of that is these two symphony orchestra gigs [Gary Burton and I] booked in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. There was a very simple objective: To create a one hour-program combining orchestra and our duo that would really suit where we are right now, and get across to the audience in an expanded way what music we play. And that was the simple intent.”
Though the objective may have been straightforward, the execution has been anything but. “We naively thought, ‘We’ll get some charts done.’” Chick reminisces, laughing. “That was an interesting understatement of what needs to be done to get really good, creative arrangements together for an hour’s program with piano and vibes and orchestra. Anyway, I engaged Tim Garland, who is turning out to be a spectacular composer and arranger, and gave him five of my songs. That’s pretty inspiring. I’m on Sibelius listening and looking at scores Tim sends me, fooling around with them, altering some of the notes, and talking with him about how to get the pieces into the right shape. And that’s a lot of fun.”
The Next Great Adventure
Looking at Chick’s vast discography is enough to make any aspiring pianist want to quit and consider a rewarding future in finance. As prolific as he is, where does Chick find his inspiration, year after year, award-winning record after award-winning record? “Inspiration is an interesting concept,” he says. “I find that most people and artists talk about inspiration as coming from the outside into them. I tend to see it as something you create, rather than something you receive. You can be affected positively by something someone does or creates, but then eventually what you do with that affect is what I like to call the inspiration.
“I like to keep myself open to whatever comes my way on whatever level, and I find interest in a lot of different things in music, outside of music, in life, and all around me. Just musically speaking, my closest contacts are usually the things that are the source of action and inspiration. And right now, it’s playing with Bela. We just played our first concert last night. I’ve been practicing some of the things I need to get under my fingers. After I speak with you, we’re going to rehearse and have our second show. I’m inspired by that. And I’m still buzzing with my work with Gary. We’ve got a nice thing going.
“When it comes to collaboration, the essential thing has to be a high interest in wanting to create something together, unless you have a composer’s mind where you need very specific instruments to create certain sounds. If you’ve got a passion to write a song for trumpet, piccolo, and conga drums, then you’ve got to find a conga player, a piccolo player, and a trumpet player. I don’t approach music that way. I like to find musicians, no matter what they play, who want to create something that interests me to play with them. Piano and anything — that’s what makes a great duet.”