You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - What Makes This Album Great: Light As A Feather

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

In this episode, Adam and Peter check out Chick Corea's iconic classic "Light As A Feather". Unlock your FREE Open Studio trial to become a better player today.Have a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open Studio🎹 Head over to our YouTube channel for a better look 👀.Follow us on Instagram

Hey, Peter. Hey. If you were to pick one song for me that is like one of my favorite tunes ever, what would it be? It's a good guess. Strong choice. What about a tune that you think I would think

was just kind of mid? Ooh, you'd be incorrect. I love that tune. Okay. What about a tune that I've heard so many times at jam sessions that I'm a little bit over it, but it's still a classic.

Close. From the 70s. Oh. Ding dong. Manamanus. And I'm Peter, Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hearer podcast. Jazz advice coming at you. Jazz advice coming at you. brought to you by Open Studio. Go to Open Studio jazz.com to start your free trial and check out all of our online courses. I wanted to get an online.

That's a lot coming at. Buddy, we were just in New York with a bunch of you'll hear iters that are you'll hear at live event. And I got a couple of comments about people missed the, oh. You didn't do it? I thought you did it. I didn't do it on the show. You were trying to be classy. You were like in your. City. You had your special bespoke clothes on. I'm my best low first on. No, it's true. It was a blast, man. It was a great time. Thanks everybody for coming out to the Sheen Center and hanging with us. It was great. And thanks for sticking around and saying hello. I think we talked to almost half of the audience, if not more.

We talked to a lot of folks. It was so cool. People were all the way from Paris, France came out. Yeah, that was crazy. Yeah, we were asking where folks were from. When we got to, like, see how far they were from, somebody said Maryland. I was like, wow, that was good. Michigan. And then a gentleman And bespoke a gentleman with the attire of a Frenchman. That's the bespoke bell, by the way. They said Paris, France, Paris, France.

Paris. Paris. I was so amazed by that. So that was super cool. And let's do it again. Yeah, shout out to our whole team for putting that on. Let us know in the YouTube comments where you wants to come to next. We'll come to your town.

Well, no, we can't promise that. We can't promise. But we want to. We're going to go somewhere. Yeah, yeah. We're going to go somewhere. And that was awesome. What are we talking about today?

Is this part of our series? This is part of our... What makes this album great? What M-T-A-G? You know what I know it might be is when producer Caleb sets these in front of our workstations here. We know that it's that time of day

of the week. We're going to listen to music and we're going to be scoring Chick-Korea's Light as a Feather. This is by Chick-Korea and Return to Forever, which is his second album under that name or with that lineup, the original lineup of Return to Forever.

It's Ayertoe on drums of percussion. It's Joe Farrell. This was their first record. No, this is their second. The first was Return to Forever. Okay, that's about right. And this is Chick-Correa and Return to Forever. Light is a feather. Right.

So Ayrto, Joe Farrell, Flora Perim, Stanley Clark on the bass, and of course the great Chick-Correa on all things keyboards. Peter, this is one of my favorites. This might be the best Rhodes record ever recorded. I don't think anybody could argue with that. I think it's certainly the most iconic, like, you know, sort of road sound and connected with the tunes,

with, of course, Chick-Karea is playing. Absolutely. You know, just iconic from that period and from that instrument. So I love Chick-Korea, by the way. Can we put that out there? Chick's the greatest, man. Chick was just an incredible human,

obviously an incredible pianist, Fender Rose, musician, composer, and those, which was quite a few. Like, he was very influential, like always, you know, would go into, he had these iconic bands, of which, you know, doesn't get any more so then return to forever.

But many bands, all the way until the end of his life, just cool groupings of great musicians, young, old, different generations, different styles and everything. And he touched, I think, more people personally and through his music in a very personalized way than perhaps anybody else, or at least as much as I would say anybody else in this sort of jazz world. So... Totally agree. Yeah. Totally agree. So here's our criteria. We've got 10 criteria playing. Don't cry at our titeria. Oh, boy. Vibe. Compositions. sound, cover art, title, lore, snobometer.

Which has gotten an adjustment. We'll talk about that. Okay. And is it better than K-O-B? Which has also gotten adjusted from last week. So let's start with playing, Peter. I've got something queued up here. So we alluded to Spain. You know, famously, around here at Open Studio,

I'm not a fan of Spain. But not because of this version. I actually love this original version. I just think I've been burned too many times at jam sessions by people. Kind of know it and kind of ruined it for me. Right. But we're going by the OG original here.

This is such a beautiful song and this is such a beautiful tune. I really, I just want to skip ahead a little bit. We all know Spain, yeah? You can go back to it for sure. Here's for about five minutes in here. Joe Farrell, shout out. Possibly one of the greatest road solos ever. It's got that older drive sound on it, right?

Well, he has dipped the times so that they're overtone heavy. Okay. Oh. Oh. So, the little punt-y left-hand placing. So we're just going to be grunting our way through. It's just like so beautiful. Do you do but wait?

No, it's not the early. Finish pattern. Yeah. So that's tick solo. Man, it's such an epic tune. You know what I mean? It's got an epic flow to it. And the way he crashed that solo is.

that well we can maybe talk about the sound of the roads a little bit but you you'd mention like the overdrive on it there's a little bit of that 70s tape overdrive i don't know it's from the tape but maybe from the roads itself but there's also you know on a roads you can position so the roads is basically like each tine is like a tuning fork like there's a resonator and then there's the tine itself yeah and then each one of those has a pickup similar to like a guitar um pickup right which is a microphone a single coil yeah microphone essentially but it's a pickup and you can position the time up or down

or exactly even with the pickup and if the tine itself is directly even with the pickup it gets a very warm whole tone and a lot of roads are not set up like that they're set up so that you adjust them so that you get uh if it's away from the pickup you get more overtone

or like an octave above it's thinner and it provides more bite and so chick I believe has this one set up so that it's very much skewed towards the overtone So it has this sort of like round bubble thing that happens when you do that. And now it's so funny because like when you get on a Nord or whatever,

there will be a chick setting. Right. That has where it's like they've adjusted it. So it sounds like the overtone is like you've adjusted the time so that they're up. So most roads are more tone based with a little bit of overtone. This has more overtone than your average. So it's the up and down with that screw with that Phillips screw driver. Yeah.

So at the back end of every time, there's two. screws and they're on springs and grommet, two grommets and two springs on two screws. We call that Wallace in Gromit. Right. So, and there are great, some great tutorials on YouTube where you can, you can adjust your roads. By the way, if you have an old roads that sounds jankety, go. Get rid of it. Send it to us. Send it to us. No, go on YouTube and check out some regulation tutorials. It's so easy to do, and you can really customize your sound with it. Right. It's been a game changer for every roads I've had to be able to do that. But then there's the distance, the horizontal distance to the pickup and the time.

And that's more about just volume. Right. And so this is more, the up and down is more about the tone. Oh, so cool. And so this is such an amazing specific tone. I love it because it bites and you can hear the attack so clearly. And it's a beautiful sounding. Well, and during this time and actually, yeah, right around this time or a little bit later,

I remember Diane Reeves telling me some stories about going to L.A. And, you know, she kind of went in these same circles, musicians for early career. Yeah. And she would talk about like George Duke, who's their country. cousin and kind of took her among a number of other great musicians that came out to L.A. under his wing. But she talked about how, like, George Duke would have his Rhodes set up sound. You know what I mean?

Like, the way that he would have it regularly. Then Chickoria would have his. Herbie had his. And, like, a lot of other keyboardists and stuff. Like, they looked at that as, like, their sound, you know, how it was set up in there. And that George Duke had the, I think he even had one. Or maybe Chick brought it over at his studio there with his sort of sound. And it was a very exciting time for that kind of personalized keyboard.

Stevie Wonder, too. Stevie Wonder played around with that stuff. All right. Our first rating here is for playing. Yes. I'm going 10 because Chick sounds so good. Do you love Chick-Rerea? I can't remember.

Okay, I love Chick-Ree. I'm going nine. Wait, but this is for the whole album for everybody's playing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear it just saying. I mean, nine. No, I would do 10. I'm going to go nine to actually.

No, no, I don't want to. You're totally right. This is my thing. I can't tell you any faults in anything that anybody's playing on here. I can. Oh, you can. There's, yeah. In the playing?

Not false, but it's like some of the flute solos are not my favorites. Okay, got it. Yeah. Well, yeah, so exactly. So not favorites based, you know, as opposed to like, there's poor playing or something like that. No, not there's poor playing at all. Everybody's amazing. Yeah, but it's not 10.

It's not a 10. Gotcha. Okay. So number two, Vibe, what do you got there? Vibe. Is that good enough for you? Vibe, I do have a 10. And I just want to play a little bit of the opening track for everything.

because I think this is... So I've only had this album when I was a kid. I had it on... When I was a kid, when I was a teenager, I had it on vinyl. And so this road sound on a vinyl record is so viby. It's a little bit of... Dude.

It just, it's amazing. Jake was a master. Oh. And that's all... That's ridiculous. So that's not the vibrato on the roads. That's him must mess with the volume. Right.

You can hear the inconsistencies. So he's like hitting a chord and going like that. And listen to the way he's playing his left hand. Well, like back when he was going up high with the right. So good. How great is that? Man, he's just,

this is storytelling right here. Laura Perim too. Yeah. Now listen to Chick's time. His sense of groove on this. he's pushing almost yeah he's right on it but it's i'm just remembering how influential the way they play with vocals this was on a whole generation this record's super influential come on countermelancholy you're so much countermele this tune have you ever tried to play this tune

no i've played it a couple times and it's just hard a um this is this is hard a um this is It's not a jam session student. Hear everything. One, two. Now, the drummer, Steve Davis, who lives down the street here, calls the tune all the time or brings a chart on it, too. And I'm like, dang, it's tough. I love about this song, too, this is the solo.

It's just the melody. Right. It's like a soulie, right? For me, this is all about the vibe of the record. This sets up the record so beautifully. I'm going vibe 10. I'm going vibe 10 on this because the vibe is a 10. Yeah.

I'm going 9, but you've, I mean, it's a vibe of the record. I mean, I couldn't tell you why it's not a 10. I couldn't argue with 10. It could be a feeling. That's all good, man. Yeah. I mean, but I mean, this is such a vibe. I think for me, like, had I gotten this record on vinyl, like you say, like, that's part of,

maybe that's part of the lower. We'll see. I mean, there's certain records that, like, I connected with this record later, first on CD, actually. And I have the feeling, like, if my interaction had been at this time or, like, really early on, I kind of came to this later in terms of chickery. And actually, you know, this, the whole vibe of this. record. I kind of came to in a funny place because my high school jazz man, when I was in middle school, the high school jazz man, which was kind of legendary, U-City High School,

big shout out to the Lions, formerly the Indians. We corrected that problem. But they, we did, they played Spain. Yeah. And I remember hearing, man, Jack Casimir on drum. No, no, no, but they were killing it. They were killing. And that got me to go back to, to go to hear this record. And like, that actually kind of introduced me in a great way that high school band repertoire can do that for you you know kind of went down that rabbit hole but next up is uh so I did 10 you did 9 for vibe

compositions and I just want to play a little bit of children's song yeah we've already heard you're going to the tapal we've already heard Spain legendary composition you are everything amazing composition I think this might be the strongest so it's a good orchestration

just a little bit serial ask in terms of a composition it's got a couple of things. I don't know if we would call it cereal or say, you know. I meant cereal like the breakfast. Breakfast cereal? It is the children's son. And, you know, it's hard to

listen to this now in the context of its time, but this was 1972. Yeah. Still early in the 70s, you know, and this is... I remember 72. You, sir, do not. I do not. I was not here yet. I was too. But, uh, I mean, if you think about

what was happening five years before this, you know, This is pretty, even with Chick, a couple years before this. Right, exactly. 69. So beautiful. Children's song. And then, of course, there's 500 miles high.

Captain Marvel. The title track from Stanley Clark Light is a feather. Spain. And children's song, I think, is the most unique and, like, just compositionally. I can't say interesting, because, I mean, to me, Spain is... Spain's interesting. They're all very interesting. But there's something about the compositions.

I'm going nine for compositions. I'm going nine. I'm going nine. That's what I have. Nine. We've heard a bunch of the sound. This is tough. The road sounds in 11. I know.

Yeah, that's why this one's tough for me. But the bass sounds of six. Well, I would say, yeah, I was going to say five. But on children's song, I forgot. Like, the bass sound is killing on that. I know. I don't know why it's so different. It's got the classic 70s sort of pickup.

Pickup. I mean, in a way, it's a 10 for that. It is. It's just, that's not, you know. Stylistically, it's a little. But it's a little bit like. Do we look at back at bell bottoms and be like, but now they look back at bell bottoms

and depending on what's in style, it was a vibe. I've grown more accustomed to it and I like it more now. I couldn't imagine this record without it. Yeah, so that's weird. So that's why, like, I think five years ago, I probably would have given the whole sound of this

way less than a nine, but now that I'm kind of more in tuned with the pickup bass sound, I'll give it a nine all the guy. I've got it as a seven because I'm just not, like there's enough. Not a fan. Well, and some of the drum sound,

I'm not, It's not bad, but the bass sound on a lot of it, I'm not a fan of. The Rose, as you say, that's a 10 for sure. So, I don't know, 7 feels like kind of the right place. Track sequence, we've got your everything. Light is a Feather, Captain Marvel, 500 miles high children's song in Spain. Yeah, I'm going to go eight on that. Okay.

I think it's good, but not great. I got as a 9. I don't find no fault with it. I love the way it starts. Yeah. I think that's kind of a gutsy thing. I love like Spain, like Spain would be kind of, or Captain Marvel would be kind of an obvious starting out. You know, putting Spain at the end?

I wouldn't have put Spain at the end. I would have started the second side with it. But does that take away points for you or add? By saying. Yeah. It takes away. See, that kind of adds to me just because it's like, it's interesting. It is, actually, this is kind of built like a live set.

So that's, I can see that. But I'm still going eight. Okay. Cover art, can we put that up on for the YouTube folks in the cover art gear? Peter doesn't like it. Well, I'm going six. Does that mean I don't like it? I'm still getting an acclimated.

Oh, I'm going 10, buddy. Are you serious? I love it. Oh, producer Caleb says, I mean, for its era, the fonts, the, yeah, the beautiful colors. It's just a feather floating in space with, like, some. I prefer, I would give the chikerea, what's the chikere album with the smurf on the front of it? You like that one?

I'd give that one a higher way. Friends? Friends. Oh, boy. That's not bad, actually, this Friends cover, but this is so, again, you know, I used to hold the, the vinyl of this. Yeah. It just, is such a vibe. It looks like how it sounds, which I think is the color.

color palette. I know, because that's what's in again now. Yeah. I don't know. To me, this doesn't, it doesn't hold in the way. I mean, it's definitely emblematic of that period. The gradiation is interesting. You don't have to like everything.

It's okay. Yeah, yeah. No, sorry, can I explain why? Can I justify? Can I jazz explain it a little bit? You can jazz explain it. But, wait, what did you have? Ten.

Oh, my God. That I'm surprised at. This is a near-perfect cover for this album. Okay, near-perfect would be nine, my friend. you just said it. You said this is a 10 and it's near perfect. Which is it? This is a 10 for it's a perfect cover.

It's the greatest album. There's never been a better album cover. There's been only equal to that. There can be multiple tens. There doesn't have to be one 10 album cover. But then you're saying they have to all be equal. But you're saying quality-wise, they're equal to this. I can't think of a better cover for this album than this cover.

Really? Yeah. I'll fax you over about a hundred, sir. You're giving it a six. You obviously are not a huge fan of it. It's all good. I love it. title, I also gave it a 10.

I think Light as a Feather is a great name for an album. Especially Chick-Krie in Return to Forever, Light as a Feather. There's a little rhyme in there. Yeah, I give it an eight. I mean, I think it's very good, but it's not the greatest title ever, but it's solid. Again, with his, just those stabs

of the roads on Your Everything are Light as a Feather. He's like, da-da-da-da-th. And that, like, you feel like you're floating, like you're lifting off like a feather. So I appreciate that. lore I'm giving an eight and the lore is really just because of how

impactful things like Spain 500 miles highs in the real book my own personal lore my history with performing your everything and flailing yeah I'm giving an eight okay I'm going nine I had ten I just went went down to

because I feel like I'm being too flippant with my tens the lore I think because as you mentioned the influence like this record was so influential in ways. I'm sure that I don't even realize, but even the ways that I've heard, you know, from people that not only, as you said, like, had the album, just think about at that time when this came out. This was kind of like, think about the records that this influenced, just the ways of playing. And like, I think that a lot of people think about this as a classic, or the classic fusion record. Well, I would, the only thing holding me back is, I think,

return to forever. Maybe holds a higher lore than this. It came out earlier. in the same year, pretty much the same band. It was like an introduction to this kind of. But this one won the Playboy Jazz album in the year. That's when Playboy was rocking. It's good. It's great. Now, the Stombo meter, Peter,

do you have a change to the Snobometer? I need you to re-explain it, not for me before our dear listener. Okay, for our dear listener, we've been doing the Snobometer. Is this an album that Jazz Snobbs would love? So that's... And it's one to 10.

They wouldn't love it is a one. They would love it. Jazz Snobbs would love it. I'm going to say four. You don't think jazz snobs like this album. Spain? Linda or Jan's... We're taking Aunt Linda out of the character.

That was so much more... I could understand it so much better when she was the reference point. But if... So give me an example. I need to personify the jazz... So the last time I... Like, who would be the jazz snobb. So someone...

So like... Name names. Eric Dolphy out to lunch would be a 10 on the jazz snob meter, right? Yeah. And like Dave Bruback timeout would be like a one. I think this is closer to the... To the Bruback. I think this is for a jazz snob.

But I'm saying, tell me this jazz snob. Give me a name. Nate Shinnon? No. Shinen? No, no. He's not... He's not really a snob.

No, he's the writer. Okay. But what would be the highest level? You or I? Marty Morrison. Who's that? Drummer Marty Morrison. Oh, Marty Morrison.

He just loves Wayne Shorter. No, but he just loves great music, though. That's what I'm saying, though. But he's not putting up with anything that's not really, really great. So I'm going to say five on this. Okay. All right. I think Marty would like this, though.

I think he would, but I think there's some jazz snobs at that level that would not. They wouldn't even consider. this to jazz. Shout out to Marty Morrison, by the way. Yeah, shout out Marty. Seven. I'm going seven on the stop. Okay. Because I agree. I agree. It's not like the ston is. This is probably the toughest one. That's why I'm splitting the difference.

And then is it better than Kob? So we're qualifying Kobb, kind of blue, is a nine. Solid right on the nine. So is it better than KOB on a scale of 1 to 10? KOB's a 9. I have 8. It's almost as good. Okay, I have seven. Yeah. Okay. All right. Let's add up our scores. Oh, my favorite part of this time?

All right. All right. Let's add up. Peter, you go. first. What is your score and what's your favorite track? Total score? Yeah. 78. I don't know. This is one lower. This an album meter messed me up. That's not on me. This isn't one of your albums. What's your favorite track?

Usain. Okay. Yeah. My total score is 88 and my favorite track is your everything. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Chick Korea. Yeah. For the great music. By the way, the insane thing is we would all be lucky to make one album this good. Yeah. You know what I mean? Come on. Like even close to this. Chick made dozens of albums this good or better. Would you say this is his best record? No.

But it's up there. I mean, it's a great record. That's the thing is his batting average is so high. Right. At like bangor after banger. And that kind of almost works against you in this kind of ridiculous scoring that we're doing. He maybe has 10 better records than this. You know what I mean?

Like it's crazy. Yeah. All right. Thanks, Peter. Cool. You'll hear it. That's good.