Chick Corea – Three Quartets Band – Michael Brecker, Eddie Gomez, Steve Gadd

Chick Corea is known as one of the greatest pianist and composer that jazz has to offer. Chick is known for his famous jazz compositions such as “Got a match?” , “Spain”, and etc. He performed a concert on April 22, 2003 at the Blue Note Club in New York City. In this performance, Chick has three great musicians right beside him which did an outstanding job. Michael Brecker – saxophone, Steve Gadd – drums and Eddie Gomez – upright bass (also a bass player I admire). Before starting the first piece, chick speaks to the audience and explains how his music career was divided between Classical music and Jazz. As a jazz performer, he also incorporates many techniques from the classical era into jazz to give it more organizations and his pieces are going to be presented as Qua

rtet No. 1, Quartet No. 2, etc just like classical music.

Quartet No.1 starts off with a piano introduction which the upright bass responds to. Chick’s piano playing brings energy to the musicians as if he were playing percussive rhythm melodies. I’ve noticed his playing pushes the musicians to respond faster and come up with creative improvised solos. The first solo is started by Michael Brecker on saxophone. Brecker begins his solo playing long notes looking for an open spot to enter his solos. If any one could notice on his solo, he stopped and smiled which can be a way to express or communicate with the musicians or the crowd in Jazz. He also hits high notes which has a similar timbre to the trumpet. Brecker begins to switch over to chromatic scales and his tone starts to turn distorted. By watching Brecker, I compare him to Charlie Parker with his fast fingering. (If any one can compare to another sax player please do so)

As the saxophone softly finishes off his solo, Chick continues off and closes the solo with some melodic lines on the piano which are jazz melodic ideas but with the techniques of Baroque music. After his melodic line, piano and bass perform a Tutti together and introduce Eddie Gomez on upright bass. Gomez starts his playing high notes on the upright like as if he’s telling the crowd “it’s my turn to solo”. The upright bass is one of the instruments that is really difficult to play fast scales and to add on, there are no frets on the upright. The way Gomez solos on the upright, reminds me of Charles Mingus. Mingus played a lot of fast scales which Gomez might of inherit and played on this performance. As anyone could notice, Gomez sings what he plays on his solo. The bass and drums have a unique relationship when it comes to walking. It also sounds as if Gomez inherits a lot of Ray Brown’s walking techniques. In this performance Chick Corea gets together a quartet of creative musicians. aside from their great harmonic features, these musicians bring together chemistry that makes it seem as if they were playing together for many years or in other words, they work as a team which is really important in a ensemble.

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