Where Have We Heard Them Before?

“I’ll tell ya,” says Chick Corea, “it’s a very satisfying and great feeling to be back with old friends.”

And such friends! Bassist Stanley Clarke, drummer Lenny White, guitarist Al Di Meola, and Chick recorded and toured as Return to Forever during the mid-’70s, creating not only some of the most inventive and exciting new music of the time, but also a reputation for mind-blowing virtuosity.

Though Chick’s lush synth and keyboard parts were often front-and-center, the force of each member’s musical personality blazed through on every tune. It certainly helped that they were all as adept as composers as they were monsters on their instruments; half their albums contain contributions from everyone in the band. Listening to their recorded works in sequence, you can hear how, over time, their interplay deepened, their sense of orchestration matured, and their desire to push the envelope increased. The world seemed to concur: Their third album won a Grammy, and their final album together went gold — not bad for a bunch of jazzers.

So, what are we talking about here? How extensive is RTF’s recorded oeuvre? Of the seven albums that display “Return to Forever” on their covers, only the middle four feature the lineup described above. The first two, Return to Forever and Light as a Feather, featured percussionist Airto, vocalist Flora Purim, and reedman Joe Farrell; they were highly influential in their own right, and they still are among Chick’s best-selling discs today. The final one, Musicmagic, introduced keyboardist/vocalist Gayle Moran into a new lineup that included one hell of a brass section.

You want old friends? For the folks reading this magazine, those middle four RTF albums — Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy, Where Have I Known You Before, No Mystery, and Romantic Warrior — are as close to bosom buddies as it gets. But just four albums? Were these guys the Beatles, or something?

Well, yeah, in a way. If you were a jazz-minded drummer, bassist, guitarist, or especially a keyboardist in the ’70s, you probably wore out the grooves on the LP versions of these albums. As Chick himself is quick to point out, RTF was just one of several wildly talented and adventurous groups at the time — but RTF was a must-hear. Each of these four musicians influenced a generation of players. Simply put, this group set the bar way high.

If you weren’t around back then, you’re in luck. In one of those incredibly rare, serendipitous confluences, they’re back, albeit briefly. Touring the U.S. and Europe this summer and fall, and supporting the release of a two-CD set of completely remastered and remixed classic tracks, RTF is once again entertaining the planet.

In the midst of reacquainting himself with his old pals, old synths, and old tunes — and working around the clock to integrate new synths into his touring rig — Chick Corea took time out to chat with us about the return of Return to Forever.

What’s it like, playing with Stanley Clarke, Al Di Meola, and Lenny White again?
It’s hard to describe. We shared so much fun and success in the ’70s together. Those kinds of pleasure moments in life are written in bronze. They never go away. They’re based on all of our real basic goals: to play music, and to entertain audiences. So coming back together with the idea of putting on a show and once again going out on tour really has everybody buzzing. It feels really good.

How much time have you been able to spend rehearsing?
We got together once, for three days in L.A. at Mad Hatter Studios. That’s where we did that little film for the electronic press kit [see it at return2forever.com]. That was the first time the four of us were in the same room together. We didn’t have that much time to play, but we did have a listen to each other’s sounds. I was interested in that: What’s the sound of the band going to be like? What equipment are we going to have? And the sound of the band is going to be wonderfully rich and simple. Al, Lenny, and Stanley, they have simple rigs; it’s pretty much au naturale. The keyboards are the main area of complexity. I’m trying to put together a rig that really suits my tastes.

How have the guys grown or changed, musically?
The main thing I noticed is that friendship that goes so deep, never changes. That’s the unchanging part. Everybody’s pretty much the same guy they were, which is nice. But then 30 years or so of experience as composers and bandleaders, making music and traveling around the planet has been accumulated by each one of us. So in that sense, there’s a kind of settled-ness that everyone’s got, that I think is nice. During the little bit of time we had, we took out “Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy” and “Romantic Warrior” to play them a bit. We even jammed on “500 Miles High,” which probably won’t be part of the tour. And you know, everybody’s an improviser, man, with great taste. It put me back in that zone where my partners were surprising me every step of the way.

Did you bring out the original charts?
It seems like each one of us has our own way of recalling music. But I did fulfill my librarian function by pulling as much of the original music as I could. I had it stored well. When I looked at it, what was interesting was how I wrote out the charts; not all of the information was on the written page. But it was still pretty fresh in everybody’s mind. It was a matter of looking at the charts and working out where the fingers go.

How much did you have to reacquaint yourself with your synthesizer orchestrations?
Did? Am doing. Will be doing. They all apply. I’m in the midst of it right now, preparing for our first rehearsals. You know, getting into keyboards has always been a whole playground in and of itself. It’s a huge sandbox, man. And these days, it’s the sandbox universe!

I haven’t been playing electronic keyboards very much recently, except for a couple of reunion dates with the Elektric Band. And that was even a chore for me to put my rig together again. At least by the time I had the original Elektric Band, I had become pretty meticulous about notating my setups, in terms of instruments, patches, and that sort of thing. So it wasn’t that hard to put together the Elektric Band stuff. And back when I recorded To the Stars, I started messing around with soft synths, which was a whole new area for me. So I have that going already.

Now my objective is to get comfortable with a rig that I can play easily and blow with. One of the advantages the old analog instruments was there wasn’t much change that you had to do. Maybe there was a knob you could twist to get the kind of change you wanted, on the Rhodes, the Clavinet, or the Minimoog. But in terms of orchestration, having MIDI and being able to send program changes is also attractive. So I’m in the midst of it right now.

Will any of your favorite instruments make an appearance?
Absolutely. I’ve got a Stage Rhodes that I’ve been playing since . . . oh, gee . . . since the beginning of the Elektric Band days. That Rhodes has been through hundreds of maintenances, tweaks, replacements, patch-ups, and upgrades. And then when Brian Alexander began working with me, he took that job to heart. So working with him, I’ve developed a sound on that instrument that I have to this day. But the only problem is that it’s such a put-together, that in order to duplicate it you’d have to build another one to have a backup. It’s my favorite. It’s retrofitted with MIDI.

Lately, I’ve been messing around with the new Moog Voyager. And I just got the Dave Smith Prophet ’08. It’s really got a cool sound, and it’s got that ease of programming. These are taking me back to the time when I was trying to program Moogs, and at that time I got four steps out of the 50 steps you needed to make. So I’m picking up where I left off, and I’m doing some programming on the new Prophet and the Voyager.

I’ve got the new Yamaha Motif [XS], too. It’s got a great array of sounds and a lot of flexibility. I’m using master mode in order to send program changes. And I’m using a Muse Receptor, too. I want to see how I can integrate soft synths into my rig. I’m not yet comfortable, but when I do get sounds out of it that I’ve programmed that I like, it keeps me going. It’s just a matter of me getting familiar with how to program it and use it. I like to program it through the laptop. It adds some new complexity for me, but it’s very attractive to go into because some of the sounds in the soft synth area are just so different, especially the pads and the atmospheric kind of sounds. For composing and arranging I’ve been using the Spectrasonics stuff: Atmosphere, Stylus RMX, and Trilogy. Atmosphere’s the one I’ll use in live performance. There are a lot of other soft synths that are deep in the investigation mode right now!

Joe Zawinul is probably my biggest source of interest and inspiration as far as a guy who elicited amazing music out of synthesizers. I saw Joe and his band about a year before he left us, at the Tokyo Blue Note, not having heard him in a long time. I was totally captivated by his creativity on those instruments, and with the band. But technically, the kind of sounds he got and the warmth with which he used them, is something that I’ve always liked.

I like the Rhodes because of its simplicity; it requires no programming, and it’s a mechanical percussive instrument, in a way. The Minimoog has a very warm sound, and it’s very direct. So these are great for keeping the rig flexible. But it’s just going to take time to put my electric keyboard world back together after so long of not doing anything with it.

Are there particular tunes that you want to have on the set list that are proving difficult to re-orchestrate? For example, it must be a chore to recreate anything from Romantic Warrior.
This RTF quartet made four recordings. In reviewing the records, I recalled and noticed that the keyboard sounds kept getting wider and more complex and with more layers, and also with more overdubs. This would be impossible to redo live, though you could go through hoops with MIDI and layering to get it exactly. But that’s not my goal. It’s more to just make the songs sound as I intended as a composer. I may be using different sounds than those that were on the records. It’s not possible to do all of that with just two arms and two legs!

Will you write new tunes?
I want to. All of us are going to attempt to put something together. I’ve already got a couple of sketches going. I’ve got some ideas, and Stanley and I have talked about collaborating on a piece or two. It might develop more during the tour.

How does this particular group inspire you as a composer?
This has always been the way I like to work. When I’m working on a project where I know the musicians, which is most of the stuff I do, then I can write specifically for them. I like to write music where I know that the guys who are going to play it are really going to like getting their teeth into it. It’s a pleasure writing for this quartet. Stanley, Lenny, and myself share a lot of reality as far as jazz goes. We all listened to a lot of the same people growing up. That’s one of the things I like about this rhythm section: It’s a rock rhythm section, but it’s really a jazz rhythm section. The three of us can play all kinds of ways, rhythmically. So that’s a pleasure to write for. And Al, I write for him like a singer, because his melodic rendition is so strong.

You’ve always been at the cutting edge of getting the sound onstage to be clear and useful for the musicians. Any new monitoring solutions for this tour?
When they first came out, the misuse of monitors and PAs was horrendous. The sound was rough, loud, and distorted. Guys would use monitors in place of sending their sound across the stage to the other musicians. They’d live in the monitors, you know.

This is not the way the kind of interactive music I like to play gets done. You have to be in real good communication with your partners. What my goal has been, and the quartet’s goal is the same, is to play as intimately onstage as possible, and to use monitors as little as possible. So for instance, instead of pointing the guitar amp out to the audience and then having to monitor the guitar over to the other part of the stage, we face the guitar amp in towards the band a bit. We’ll face our sounds at one another, as you would when playing acoustic instruments. And then the other concept is to just allow the man operating the PA, in this case Bernie Kirsch, the greatest mixer on the planet, to operate the fine equipment we now have to take that sound we create on stage and spread it out across the audience. So we have the concept clear. It’ll be a challenge pulling it off with the quartet.

What will you use to get your sound to yourself and to the band?
I like Meyer wedges. They’re clear, with true sound.

Tell us a little about the making of Anthology, the new CD.
Sonically, I’m so happy we did this. It brings the music so much more to life. We were able to fit just about everything from the four records onto two CDs. We left out a few tracks by mutual consent. The package is really nice, too, with great photographs and statements from all the guys. There’s an essay, an incredible look into — what would you call it? — a musical-historical journey, written by Bob Belden, that’s really interesting. The CD is accompanying us on the tour.

Those four recordings were a watershed moment, very influential. What was it like to experience that level of success?
For me the era started when I joined Miles in ’68. When I came into his band, he was still playing tunes like “Agitation,” “Dolores,” and “Nefertiti.” I was playing acoustic piano, Tony Williams was on drums. It was pretty much the famous quintet, with me and [bassist] Dave Holland having replaced Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter. The first change that happened was even while Tony was still in the band, which was that Miles started putting me on electric keyboards. There was a Rhodes, a Wurlitzer, and an RMI. He was hearing something, which turned out to go more in the direction of funk and rock through those years. I’d find myself in the studio with Zawinul and Herbie and eventually John McLaughlin, and all that experimentation was taking place.

Meanwhile, we were out on the road playing free music on electric instruments, with Jack DeJohnnette on drums. And then Dave and I left Miles, and formed Circle. And then the rest of the ’70s was just more experimentation, with the formation of the Return to Forever bands, and with what John did with Mahavishnu and that music — it was just such a time of experimentation and change. I don’t think anyone had an idea of what the eventual impact would be. We were just doing it.

What are you listening to now that inspires you?
Over the past year or so, there were two interesting musical discoveries for me. The music has been around for a long time, but you have to discover it for yourself. When I was doing my duet tour with Bela Fleck, I was backstage and I overheard Bela talking with Bernie Kirsch, my engineer, and Bill Rooney, my manager. They were talking really deeply about some piece of music, and it turned out to be a Beatles track. They were talking about the instruments that were used and comparing them with those used on other tracks; they were really getting into it. So I thought, “Damn, I’m out of that loop. I wonder why my friends don’t talk to me about the Beatles. It’s probably because I never really listened to the Beatles or knew their music like a fan.” So I said to Bela, “How about if you give me a crash course on the Beatles. You guys appreciate this music and I don’t, and I want to get in there and see what’s happening.”

So he happened to have just about the whole Beatles collection on his hard drive, and the next day we had a five-hour drive together. So we connected our headphones and he took me chronologically through the Beatles history — what a great music history lesson from Bela Fleck! It totally turned me on. I totally got what people love about this creative and innovative group, beyond just hearing their sound and thinking, “Oh yeah, that’s the Beatles.”

So I started listening. I got the records, the DVD anthology about their lives. Gayle and I began to listen to it at night, and we’d sing along. I got a book of their tunes and learned to play a few of them. It’s been great. It’s like discovering Mozart.

Gayle and I have known [Beatles producer] George Martin for years, but I never really connected him up with the Beatles. I wasn’t aware of the monstrous role that he played in their music. So now that I was, I wrote him a long email. He was blown away. He sent us a copy of the CD of the Love production. He said, “Wow, I’m so glad you like the Beatles.” It was kinda cute.

That was one of the discoveries. The other one is from the other side of music, you might say: The music of the 90-year old French composer Henri Dutilleax. When I started listening to his music, I thought, “Hey! He stole my ideas!” [Laughs.] Not really. But as I listened his piano and orchestral music I realized that my tastes were very much along the same lines. So I began to listen and to study his music. I took one of his early preludes, and performed it with Bela, in concert.

In the first interview you did with Tom Darter for this magazine — just after the classic RTF days — he asked you what advice you’d give developing musicians, and as you always do, you came up with a very succinct and cogent response, which was that you had two things to advise. One, to search for and develop an unreserved intention to accomplish a musical goal, such as instrumental mastery. The second was to be as logical and methodical as possible in practice and study so that you ensure full development of any technical things you were trying to achieve. Do you want to add anything to these, at this auspicious point in time?
The first thing I think of is very simple, which I guess you could summarize as: integrity about your goals, or artistic integrity. All that means — though it sounds like a pedantic phrase, which it probably is, it’s an overused cliché, really — is that every musician has his or her own tastes. There are certain things that please him, including his desire to entertain and audience and please them. All of that is part of the goal. And so, to me, the integrity part comes when you’re willing to say those things and do those things and act that way and live your life that way. The integrity is that you live the way you believe. That sometimes is hard to do, it’s hard to work out. But it’s easy to do if you just be true to yourself. You know what you like, you know what you like to do, you know what effects you like to cause, and then you go out and cause those effects. That’s the only thing I’d add. All the rest of it is as said, just real hard work and dedication.

A Return to Forever Dscography

These discs represent the total recorded output of the RTF lineup consisting of Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, Al Di Meola, and Lenny White. For more info, visit return2forever.com. For more on Chick, visit www.chickcorea.com.

Anthology (Concord)
Romantic Warrior (Columbia)
No Mystery (Polydor)
Where Have I Known You Before (Polydor)
Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy (Polydor)

Anatomy of a Classic RTF Track

Chick’s synth orchestrations on Romantic Warrior are nothing short of amazing. His choice of sounds always matches the part perfectly, and the overall effect is always musical. Since we’re examining the Minimoog solo from this tune on pages 48–49, let’s dig in and discover the other synths used on “The Duel of the Jester and the Tyrant, Pts. 1 & 2” — you can hear this track on the new 2-CD set, Anthology.