The New Crystal Silence (Concord Records)
Chick Corea & Gary Burton
Released February 5, 2008
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual or Group 2009
Top 10 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll 2008
YouTube:
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About:
When they teamed up in 1972 to play in a piano-vibraphone setting, little did Chick Corea and Gary Burton realize that 35 years later their duo would continue to expand its modern chamber music approach to jazz with full introspection and exhilaration. Even though their serendipitous debut, Crystal Silence, was released on Germany-based ECM Records, which at the time did not have a distribution deal in the U.S., the album not only forged the alchemic partnership, but also brought to renown the deep and insightful collaboration of the two virtuosic improvisers. After their premiere outing, they recorded four more albums and have never skipped a year performing together.
In celebration of the Corea-Burton duo’s 35th anniversary, Concord Records releases The New Crystal Silence, a double CD featuring the pair performing with the Sydney Symphony and as a duet captured in a sublime performance at the Molde Jazz Festival in Molde, Norway. The orchestral concert bears the fruit of an invitation from two symphonies in Australia, in Perth and Sydney, which offered the twosome the opportunity to perform and record their repertoire in an orchestral setting. As for the duo disc, Corea and Burton marked their long relationship onstage of anticipating each other’s musical ideas by embarking on a worldwide tour and then chose one of their best performances to document.
Writing in The New Crystal Silence liner notes, Burton reflects, “I’ve always held the theory that all musical collaborations, particularly among jazz musicians, eventually run their course as players evolve and everyone moves on to new ventures. But, I’ve come to believe that what Chick and I have together is going to break that rule. The performing we have done over the past year has been our best in 35 years, and we are very pleased to make it available on these CDs.” He adds, “We both feel that our music has evolved in the last 10 years more than it did before. We play the tunes very differently, with fresh concepts and new inspiration.”
Corea agrees: “The way we were approaching the music during our 35th anniversary concert tour was so different that I thought it warranted documentation.” In the CD liner notes, he adds, “Gary’s playing continues to amaze and inspire me. The tours we’ve done over this past year are my favorites of all that we’ve done. There’s more to come, but here is a slice of what we’re into these days.”
On the opening CD, recorded May 10 and 12, 2007, at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, Corea and Burton are accompanied by the Sydney Symphony, which was celebrating its 75th anniversary. The orchestra was led by guest conductor Jonathan Stockhammer, an American from Los Angeles who lives in Berlin, and who, says Burton, “was very in tune with the music-with its feel and the stops and starts of the arrangements.” The music was orchestrated by Tim Garland, the saxophonist for Corea’s band Origin. “I originally wanted to do everything-the writing, the arranging, the orchestration-but because of Gary’s and my tour schedule, there wasn’t enough time,” says Corea. “That’s when I thought of Tim, who had helped me rehearse and edit my second piano concerto the summer before. Tim has a special genius for orchestrating. He took the ball and ran with it.”
The material presented to the Australian orchestras included new arrangements to such Corea compositions as “Duende,” “Love Castle,” Brasilia,” “Crystal Silence” and “La Fiesta,” which represented music the piano-vibes duo has performed on their earlier albums, including Duet (1979), In Concert, Zurich (1980), Lyric Suite for Sextet (1982) and Native Sense-The New Duets (1997). “This was pretty much an experiment,” says Corea. “But the performances were spirited, exciting. The tempos were bright. Plus, there was the buzz of newness.”
In the second CD of The New Crystal Silence collection, Corea and Burton deliver new spins on such old duet material as “La Fiesta”-the very first tune the pair played in 1972 for their first onstage performance, at a jazz festival in Munich, before the Crystal Silence recording-and Bill Evans’ “Waltz for Debby.” In addition, they perform Corea’s “Alegria” and a new rendition of Gershwin’s “I Loves You Porgy.” “We wanted to connect with the audiences by playing familiar material for the fans of our duet,” says Corea. Burton adds, “We decided that the purpose of our 35th anniversary tour was to reflect back on our years together.”
The daunting challenge in presenting a live duo disc was to choose which show from its 75-concert tour to showcase. “We had scores of performances to consider, but we finally recalled the Molde show,” says Corea. “Even though the piano there was unusually small, there was an extra magic happening that night, from the beginning to the end. Gary’s vibes sound so relaxed, so nice.” Burton recalls that the performance space was intimate-a 400-500-person hall-and that the sound was ideal. Plus, he says, “the audience was very knowledgeable about the music we were playing. They reacted well, which makes a big difference. Chick’s compositions are complicated, and because we play it from memory, on some nights we make mistakes. But this night we were infallible.”
Corea noticed that the only thing missing from the set that night was one of the duo’s favorites, “Senor Mouse,” so they included in the CD mix a take on the tune recorded at Tenerife, Canary Island. Writing in The New Crystal Silence CD liner notes, friend and collaborator Pat Metheny lauds the duo’s creatively vibrant history and concludes: “When Crystal Silence came out, there was a freshness about it…35 years later, that freshness remains, enhanced by three decades of shared life experiences. There is a sense of infinity and eternity here, as if Chick and Gary could take any worthy piece and play it forever, finding new things each time around. That sense of endlessness offers hope and inspiration. That is the message of this music to me.”
Track Listing:
Disc 1
1. Duende (Chick Corea) 10:54
2. Love Castle (Chick Corea) 12:41
3. Brasilia (Chick Corea) 9:38
4. Crystal Silence (Chick Corea) 14:09
5. La Fiesta (Chick Corea) 13:35
Disc 2
1. Bud Powell (Chick Corea) 7:55
2. Waltz for Debby 8:03
(Grammy Nominee for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo 2009)
3. Alegria (Chick Corea) 5:49
4. No Mystery (Chick Corea) 9:12
5. Señor Mouse (Chick Corea) 9:10
6. Sweet and Lovely (Gus Arnheim / Charles Daniels / Harry Tobias) 6:56
7. I Loves You, Porgy (George Gershwin / Ira Gershwin) 4:09
8. La Fiesta (Chick Corea) 10:41
Personnel:
Chick Corea: piano
Gary Burton: vibraphone
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Jonathan Stockhammer: conductor
Recorded May 10 & 12, 2007, at The Sydney Opera House Concert Hall; July 7, 2007, at Bjornsonhuset In Molde, Norway; July 13, 2007, at The Auditorio De Tenerife In Canary Island, Spain.
Produced by Chick Corea & Gary Burton
Engineer: Brian Vibberts, Tony David Cray, Bernie Kirsh
Assistant Engineer: Jason Blackwell, Buck Snow
Mixing: Brian Vibberts
Art Coordinator: Julie Rooney
Photography: R. Andrew Lepley
Art Direction: Marc Bessant
Review:
The circumstances that led to pianist
Chick Corea and vibraphonist Gary Burton collaborating on Crystal
Silence (ECM, 1973) are the definition of serendipitous happenstance.
Neither thought the record would have wide appeal, yet it’s gone on to become
not only a classic for the label, but for both artists, who have since built
large discographies with plenty of individual milestones. Recording
infrequently as a duo, they’ve played together every year since that first
meeting, with some significant globe-trotting in 2007 to commemorate their
thirty-fifth anniversary together. The double-disc The New Crystal
Silencedocuments that celebration with performances culled from dates in
Australia, Norway and the Canary Islands.
The duo revisits material from Crystal
Silence through to their most recent and fifth recording, Native
Sense (Stretch, 1997), in addition to a new Corea tune and three
standards. The second disc, from the Norway and Canary Island shows, finds the
duet on their own and in top form. Anyone who caught a 2007 show knows—as
their Portland Jazz Festival performance
amply demonstrated—that amidst the stunning virtuosity, empathic interaction
and subtle nuances is an almost mischievous playfulness. Some of this may be
serious music, but Corea and Burton are clearly having fun.
The “new” comes with the first disc,
where Corea and Burton have a silent third partner in British woodwind
multi-instrumentalist/composer/bandleader Tim Garland. Garland doesn’t perform,
but was recruited by Corea to arrange five tunes from the duo’s repertoire for
the pianist, Burton and symphony orchestra—in this case, the Australian Sydney
Symphony. This isn’t the first time Garland has scored Corea material for
orchestra—his “Fantasy on Crystal Silence” was a highlight of his
own The Mystery (Audio-B, 2007), and
also featured Corea as a guest. Here, his orchestration of “Crystal
Silence” is more reverential, although there are moments of unexpected
power during a tune that has always been more of a tranquil tone poem.
It’s to Garland’s credit that he
finds the perfect blend of orchestration and improvisation. While there are
open-ended sections that allow Burton and Corea to go where they will, Garland
has turned Corea’s compositions into miniature concertos, where the symphony
weaves in and around solo and duet sections. Just how different the approach
can be is clear with the two versions of Corea’s Spanish-tinged “La
Fiesta” included—a more form-based version with the orchestra on disc one
and a looser, more fully extemporaneous duet version on disc two.
That Corea and Burton are in-tandem improvisers
capable of taking great risks while consistently delivering near-perfect
performances is what made their first recording a classic. It’s hard to live up
to Crystal Silence‘s iconic stature. Still, The New Crystal
Silence proves that, as with any committed relationship, these two are
never at a loss for fresh and relevant dialogue. The addition of Garland’s
orchestral arrangements only provides an even more expansive context around
which Corea and Burton can continue to build and strengthen a pairing that’s
destined to last a lifetime.
John Kelman (All About Jazz)
