You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Discussing Chick - #81

Episode Date: December 17, 2018

Today, Peter and Adam take a question from a listener about the legendary pianist, Chick Corea. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Pete. Hey, man. Your chair in the pod cave is gathering dusk. You coming home anytime soon? I'm going to be back, man. Keep it warm for you, please. I'm Adamannis. And I'm Peter Martin.

And you're listening to the You'll Hear at Podcast. Daily Jazz advice coming at you from around the globe. From around the globe. Now, last time we spoke you were in Colorado. Where are you at tonight? Yeah, right now I'm in beautiful Palo Alto, or actually Stanford, California, Palo Alto. I think...

Palo Alto? So, okay, so the connection looks a little... Connection looks a little grainy, which I'm a little disappointed in Palo Alto. You would think that they would have, like, perfect, high speed, you know, you know what I mean? I think either like the Facebook campus or the Apple campus is sucking all the internet

out of my Wi-Fi and my hotel room. But it's good to be back with you, and we had a little funny thing earlier today that we were back and forth, and I was very excited because I thought this was our 200th episode. and you inform me that I'm off by a little bit. Yeah, it's like 282.

We totally skipped the 200. It feels like 200, man. It feels like 200. We're going to have to do it up for 300. I'll tell you what. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Right.

Yeah. So today I think we have a speak pipe, right? Yeah, we do. We do. So let's get to it. Is that me playing it? Yeah, you get. Hi, guys.

Josh from Melbourne here. Love the podcast. I've been listening to a bit of Chick Careers music recently. And I just wanted to get your thoughts on his style. of playing, any album recommendations, and just your general thoughts about his music. If my memory serves correctly, I don't believe you've spoken much about his music on the podcast before. I could be completely wrong, and if so, just ignore this question. But if that's not the case, and you haven't spoken much, I'd love to hear about your thoughts about his music

and how he goes about playing the piano. Anyway, keep up the good work. Always listening. Thanks. Bye. Josh and are you actually always listening now? Have you listened to all 278 episodes to really say that we've never mentioned shit career? 282. 282. Oh, 282. Sorry, I've already forgetting. No, thank you so much. I'm just joking. Josh, thank you. Love the accent. Love Australia. Love Melbourne. I love Australia, but like Melbourne is my hands-on favorite city in Australia. So that's always fun. Man, I've never been and everybody says that. Everybody says it's like art capital of Australia. It's dope. dude there's so there's there's i can give you a list of about five things off the top of my head that are so great in melbourne any one of them individually would keep you from ever coming back

to your beautiful family you would you would leave the coffee the the vibe the architecture this yeah it's it's great i'm a sucker for all that it's super cool that that uh we have listeners there yeah well and and thanks yeah josh for that uh i love chick korea and i know you are a huge chick fan too and you sound kind of defensive there he i think you put us on the defensive I realize we might not, I feel like he's been in most of our like top seven lists in some way. But certainly he's been, he has been, I think, underrepresented because really, I mean, I think that, you know, I think that, you know, in terms of his impact on the music and impact on me and probably you as well. For how much we rip him off. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if we're not talking about him every episode, we're under talking about him.

It's so true. We're playing him every gig, you know. Yeah, yeah. But, um. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great kind of reminder. And I think from actually heard last night, we had a really fun event, right? In the space where you are now in our open studio studios, we had our very first live at Open Studio event. And we had Jeff Kieser, the great Jeffrey Kieser, the legendary Jeffrey Kuezer and his trio. And he actually told me a little story about Chick-Karia as we were getting some work done on on the piano. And he said that Chik Ria had told him recently that what he's doing now is if he's going to some city that they don't have like,

a kind of usual piano or one that he knows at the venue or something or there's some kind of choice and instead of being like it has to be this brand or this model he always says talk to the technician or he wants to talk to him or have his people and the best technician in town whichever piano they think is best like that's the you know I was like what what a smart thing you know and that's kind of coming from chick Korea um but yeah I mean chick Chick, Chikaria is, you know, I always kind of end up lumping him together with Herbie Hancock, which is a nice place for those two guys to be lumped together. Yeah, they're contemporaries.

They've recorded together. They've toured together. I saw them a couple years ago, that great tour. Those duo, those duo concerts are so good. Yeah. And that's so fun because, I mean, they did it years ago and then they did it, I'm saying a couple years ago, maybe it was like four years ago. But they, that's the kind of thing that could really be a gimmick.

You know, it's like, who wouldn't want to see Chick-Korean and Herb? And then sometimes it can be a little underwhelming. It's not exactly 100% plus 100%. But their thing is like, they both were going places that I never really hear them go. So they seem to really enjoy it and inspired by it. That's great. You know, for me,

Chick is always defined by the two albums that, like, I played on repeat as a kid, which were, now he sings, now he sobs and light as a feather. You know, I mean, those are two of his, you know, most classic recordings. And I'll never, ever forget. I mean, I could still picture it now in my like 84 Chevy S-10 popping in for the very first time on the way home from like borders in Sunset Hills. Like now he sings, now he sobs into my, it wasn't even into the into the council CD player.

This was the 90s. So I was a CD player, but it was a CD player that was like sitting here and it went to a tape. You know what I'm talking about? Remember those? And like went in your tape player and connected to your CD player so you could play CDs. that's the first time I heard now he sings that that's a very vivid lengthy description of me

putting on a CD but it was I mean I was just like the very first when he comes out of the gate in Matrix I'll never ever forget it you know he was in Matrix too that dude's been everywhere man Matrix revisited or first Matrix

No the first Matrix No you know it's like an F Blue It took me like It took me like a week to realize It was an F Blues I know It's just like the hippest F Blues ever It really is, man.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, those two records for me, too, were, like, huge. I actually, the record, the first record that I heard with Chikuria was the Mad Hatter, though. That was, like, the first LP. And actually, Diane Davenport had that record. Dian Davenport is Jeremy Davenport, a great trumpeter and a friend of mine for many years growing up. She had that record in her collection, and when we both sort of started getting interested in jazz, I was going through. And what drew me to it was, you know, the crazy outfit and everything that he had.

hat on in that, you know, that's Humpty Dumpties on there and Tweedledum and it. Just a bunch of cool stuff. And the record's so cool, like the liner notes and the picture and everything. But it's really just talking about this and for you, well, as soon as you mentioned borders, I already could figure out the rest of the lineage

of what you were saying. I already had a picture of that anyway, you know. But it's great when there was a time when a play, like a how you got the CD or the LP or whatever. And then it puts you back in there with the music and everything and how that, of course, just hearing it too puts you back there.

It's like I can almost imagine it how it sounded. You couldn't just like open your phone up and just find this new record someone recommended. You had to like wait a couple days where you had a break and go to borders and pick up the album. Exactly. Yeah. But that for me, Nowie Sing's Now He Saw is probably the most influential and just one of my favorite all-time recordings. Right.

Yeah. And the thing with Chick-2 that I love to think about is like he has some techniques that you don't see other pianists. First of all, like, I always, when I see him live or see a video of him, like his hands never match the sound to me. I always feel like he should be like this. Right. But it's so smooth.

You know, like his hands are just gliding across and he gets this percussive attack. And I'm like, man, how are you doing that? And then the other thing is how much left hand follows him up the keyboard on some of these runs. You know, that's, that's inspiring because I don't do enough of that. Yeah, his stuff is the way he integrates his hands is a very unique way that he does. And a lot of it is, you know, melodically, there's very little separation, if any, between what he wants to do. And I think that I just was remembering the first of my saw him live. And maybe I saw a video over a song on TV or something, but I think it was probably live.

And I'd listened to his recordings and stuff so much. I had the same thing, what you just mentioned, that I was shocked that he was moving so little. Like his economy, I realized later it was like really advanced technique and his economy of motion of what he was. wanted to do, but everything that I'd heard can play, especially like on roads and stuff, like he had so much nuance to the almost percussive side of the piano

and the roads and stuff, and that how he would attack and like, you know, come, you know, put his phrasing together really with that articulation, that you just assume that it's all like wild finger and hand gesticulations. And he's so, like, control it. So at first my song, I was like, oh man, is he like sick or something?

But then I'm listening, I was like, whoa, no, it still sounds killer. Yeah. But it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily to look like that. And it just shows you like, you know, if you get that really good technique ingrained in you, for him it was probably at a pretty young age and stuff. And they were able to create the sounds that you want to with those different things. You don't have to change up your so-called correct technique that much, you know. He's got this snap in his sound, right?

But he's not snapping his fingers. He's making the hammer snap the string, you know, with this really efficient motion. It's, man, that's really amazing. So, so incredible. Yeah. Another memory I had about, I'm just, this is so cool to kind of just hear this and respond because, you know, Spain was such a pivotal thing for me at that time because that's actually, I heard the tune before I actually heard Chick-A-Ree or even knew who he was because I was in middle school and our high school jazz band. Oh, yeah. Played, you know, play that staple. That staple, especially during that time, you know.

It's still a staple because the charts are like still around because they cut the funding to the school. But that's, but that was a hard arrangement. they played in Todd Williams, great saxophone. I remember took this... I remember it took this... ...the composer, I didn't know he was like a pianist.

I was like, he's some big band composer or something, you know? And then when I kind of realized he was and then started kind of going down the rabbit hole of records that he was on, again, kind of looking first in different recordings that he was on and stuff and seeing that. But that song just compositionally resonated with me so much. And, I mean, if you think about it,

there's a reason that's kind of been a hit song beyond just high school bands, but I think it's very smart, like to, if I was ever directing a high school band, that tune and a number of tunes like that, that some people would be like, no, you got to give them like the real deal, and you got to start them with older and that's fusion or whatever.

I think that's BS because that it's so advanced compositionally. And at the same time, there's so much for a younger person, a younger musician to just hold on to and kind of, and, you know, you're holding on for dear life a little bit, but it really gives you a lot melodically and rhythmically. And it's such a cool thing. It sounds cool.

It's a perfect entree. It's an aspirational kind of thing, I think, for musicians at that level. You're right. It's very cool. Yeah. Well, thank you, Josh, for the call. If you would like to leave us a message and see if we can speak about your favorite artist that we underrepresent on this podcast. I like the seething bitterness that's just coming across via the internet.

Bro, I just had to reassemble our pod cave. I didn't do any of it, actually. But you can go to you'll hearat.com. You can leave us a message. You can leave us a voicemail. You can get some you'll hear at Swag. We got the T-shirts. I think we're about to get some seven-star t-shirts up in here.

Hello. Is that going to fit? That's going to be the extra large and XXL only. On the mediums and smalls, we're going five. So look out for the seven-star T-shirts. Yeah. Yeah, when are you getting back, Pete? I'm getting back just in a couple days.

Okay. I'll be reading out of you very shortly in the podcast. I was just going to say, though, that folks if you have some interesting Chick-Korea stories we want to hear those too and maybe you can go to YouTube.com boom boom-boom-boom-B-T-P

Boom-B-B-B-B-B-Utube.com and find today's episode, as are most of our episodes, unless we're part of a pending lawsuit, will be available on YouTube that our attorney Andrew is defending us in. But otherwise, you know, you could go there. We're getting some nice little. I don't know if you've made it

over the comments yet. I know we got a lot of different place. We have comments, but I dove in last week a little bit earlier. we can have a lot of fun and some really nice folks, some avid listeners. And that's a fun place to kind of talk about the episode. And we'd love to hear your feedback. It's definitely not yours, Adam. Okay.

Well, I'd love to hear yours too. I'm saying for the people. Go ahead. You'll hear it. I just cut it. Wow. Nice.