# Chick Corea: The garish, giddy ’80sness of the Elektric Band: Videos, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2023/09/12/chick-corea-the-garish-giddy-80sness-of-the-elektric-band-videos-photos/
- Published: 2023-09-12T00:02:50+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**First things first: I hate almost all of Lou Reed’s music. The Velvet Underground,
his solo stuff, the album where he dragged Metallica down with him — all of it. 
But I love Metal Machine Music. It’s beautiful; it sounds like birdsong to me. So
this piece, featuring him talking to British music journalist Allan Jones about 
that album circa 1977, was somewhat entertaining. Maybe you’ll like it, too!**

Also: This Foreign Affairs review of three new books by right-wing “philosophers”
who want to tear down America and erect some kind of Catholic fascist state in its
place is fascinating, mostly because I can’t figure out what role any of these men
think they would have in the kind of country they dream of. I mean, it’s like a 
college professor proselytizing for the Khmer Rouge. But you need to watch out for
these people, because they are very serious about their fundamentally unserious 
ideas.

And speaking of seriousness…

![The Chick Corea Elektric Band](https://i0.wp.com/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456%
2Cc_limit%2Cf_auto%2Cq_auto%3Agood%2Cfl_progressive%3Asteep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-
post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F833a0054-9d36-4aa8-9c23-2102ef5cbc11_1240x720.
jpeg?resize=640%2C372&ssl=1 "The Chick Corea Elektric Band")

The hair. The coats. The seriousness of purpose…

I interviewed Chick Corea once, in 2009, when he was on tour with the Five Peace
Band, a short-lived quintet that featured John McLaughlin on guitar, Kenny Garrett
on alto sax, Christian McBride on bass, and Vinnie Colaiuta (and later Brian Blade)
on drums. He was a very nice guy, with an interesting perspective on his own work.

“More and more over the past five years, 10 years, going into a studio to quote-
unquote make a record has been less and less a part of my musical life,” he told
me. “There’s less and less remuneration in it, and I find that the live recordings
are actually reflect what kind of a spirit of music I like to give to an audience
even more. So I haven’t been moved to go into the studio to record for a good while.”
Again, this was in 2009.

He also said, “My best monitor of what’s going on in the culture concerning music
and art is when I perform in front of an audience and I see how they respond to 
various things that I present to them. ’Cause I present them with a lot of different
kinds of things. The other group of opinions is the press — media, magazines and
awards shows and that kind of thing. And although I’m a member of that community
too, I pay less attention to it.”

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Corea, if those two quotes didn’t make it clear, was one of jazz’s great populists.
Even at his most abstract, with the semi-supergroup Circle (with saxophonist Anthony
Braxton, bassist Dave Holland, and drummer Barry Altschul), he always extended a
hand, if not a wide two-armed embrace, to the listener. And I’m a big fan of some
of his music, in particular the classic mid ’70s Return To Forever albums _Hymn 
of the Seventh Galaxy_, _Where Have I Known You Before_, _No Mystery_ and _Romantic
Warrior_. But on the other hand, a lot of his vast output was just _too much_.

He seems to have been genuinely incapable of telling the difference between a good
idea and a bad one. He approached music with florid passion, and he loved to play
around with technology, more so than any jazz keyboard player other than Herbie 
Hancock. Sometimes this yielded thrilling results, as when he was scorching the 
air in Miles Davis’s 1969-70 bands. The nightly battles between Corea and Keith 
Jarrett at the Fillmore East in New York, documented on _Miles Davis At Fillmore_
and much more fully on the third volume of the Bootleg Series, are incredible.

But then there’s the Chick Corea Elektric Band. This group, which made five albums
between 1986 and 1991, started out with saxophonist Eric Marienthal, bassist John
Patitucci, drummer Dave Weckl, and two guitarists — Scott Henderson and Carlos Rios.
After the self-titled debut disc, though, Frank Gambale became the sole guitarist,
and stayed for the next four albums: 1987’s Light Years, 1988’s Eye of the Beholder,
1990’s Inside Out, and 1991’s Beneath the Mask. And this music, which I’ve been 
listening to for the first time over the past week because the albums have been 
remastered and reissued — they’re coming out as a 10LP box set (and as individual
CDs) on December 1, but are on streaming services now — is just mind-boggling. And
I don’t entirely mean that in a good way.

I have a friend, Alfred Soto, who haaaaates to see the descriptor “dated” applied
to music. His argument, and he’s right, boils down to: why are Linn drums and Fairlight
stabs perceived to mark the songs that feature them as inextricably of their time,
when the instrumental tones associated with “classic rock” are not similarly freighted
with negative associations? Why is it OK to sound like Led Zeppelin IV, but not 
Debarge’s “Rhythm of the Night”? The simple answer, of course, is bias — (mostly)
white rock being seen by those who shape(d) The Discourse, when it was still up 
for grabs, as inherently more legitimate (yeah, yeah, stop laughing) than black 
and Latin pop. And even if I recognize that it’s the result of cultural programming,
I can’t deny that my taste leans more toward the analog than the digital, and that
certain programmed rhythms, keyboard sounds, and melodic choices will always strike
me as both “of the ’80s” and somehow disposable/plastic/kitsch.

The more complicated answer to the question of why certain sounds are “dated” and
others aren’t is technological. Analog audio recording, as an art and a craft, reached
its peak in the mid to late ’70s. Things were already starting to go awry here and
there (Example No. 1: the rubber-band bass sound heard on acoustic jazz albums from
about 1973 to the early ’90s), but in general, albums recorded in the 1970s sound
_fucking incredible_, and I’m not just talking about Steely Dan. Even the most replacement-
level rock acts — your Foreigners, your Bad Companys, your also-rans I won’t even
bother naming — could dial in guitar and drum sounds that were like being wrapped
in a warm blanket of sound.

But when digital technology came along, engineers more or less had to start over.
The new equipment didn’t capture sound the same way — it just couldn’t. Processing
power wasn’t up to the task. And synthesizers and drum machines had a gloss and 
gleam that was great for certain things, but they had none of the subtlety of what
had come before. Truly creative spirits were able to make the new machines do amazing
things, but there was a whole lot of awkwardness, too, of engineers trying to keep
applying methodologies that they didn’t realize were obsolete, and musicians trying
every new toy that came along without figuring out ways around their limitations.
This is why early hair metal records sound like raw ass. It’s why the whole subgenre
of “AOR bands grappling with New Wave” sucks so hard. The only albums from this 
era that work are the ones where the artists pushed all the way through and emerged
on the other side with something genuinely new: ZZ Top’s _Eliminator_, Yes’s _90125_.
In the realm of jazz, it’s why a lot of albums on the Telarc label have an uncanny
valley sheen that’s completely off-putting to me.

What does all this have to do with the Chick Corea Elektric Band, you ask? Well,
I submit that _there is no music on Earth more late ’80s than this music_. This 
stuff makes the Miles Davis albums cloth-eared dimwits still scorn (_Decoy_, _You’re
Under Arrest_, _Tutu_, _Amandla_) sound like the Bad Brains. It sounds like theme
tunes from forgotten sitcoms. When I listen to a track like “Your Eyes,” from 1987’
s _Light Years_, I keep waiting for Deniece Williams to start singing. The synth
tones Corea embraced, particularly on the first two albums, were some of the most
stock available. They were pretty much presets. The other instruments — particularly
Frank Gambale’s guitar, which sounds like the “hard rock” solos that interrupted
Whitney Houston songs, and Dave Weckl’s drums, which sound like someone whacking
a leather couch with a ping-pong paddle — are so garish you may actually find yourself
laughing. Can these guys _play?_ Absolutely. They’re virtuosi, to a man. But when
they’re working out on funk themes as simple as the ones heard here, and giving 
pieces titles like “Jammin E. Cricket,” you may start to wonder what the point of
it all is.

If you like ’80s Miles, if you like Prince’s “jazz” pieces, but most of all if you
like the music of Mike Post, you may very well like the Chick Corea Elektric Band.
Some of it is OK (“A Wave Goodbye,” from _Beneath the Mask_, rides a surprisingly
deep digital dub groove). A lot of the rest, though, reminds me of listening to 
CD 101.9 for eight hours at a time while working at Quick Chek. If and when you 
listen to these albums, I can pretty much guarantee that you will think, at some
point if not repeatedly, _Oh yeah, this music was _absolutely_ made between 1986
and 1991_.

![](https://i0.wp.com/jazzblues.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Chick-Corea-e1528742095963.
jpg?resize=640%2C426&ssl=1)

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