Jazz, soul & blues
Chick Corea
Chick Corea (1941-2021) was one of the greatest pianists in the history of jazz. A member of Miles Davis’s band and then founder of Return to Forever, winner of some twenty Grammy Awards, he was also one of Montreux’s most faithful artists: he first played there in 1972 and returned twenty-three times. In 2022 the festival devoted an album to him in “The Montreux Years” series.
Chick Corea: twenty-three times in Montreux
A regular since 1972
Chick Corea first stepped onto a Montreux Jazz Festival stage in 1972. He would return twenty-three times, solo, in a trio, leading Return to Forever or in duos, over nearly forty years of closeness with the festival and its founder, Claude Nobs.
In the Auditorium Stravinski as in the early Casino, he tried everything: the acoustic piano and electric keyboards, jazz-rock and flamenco, piano duets and large ensembles. Montreux was for him a laboratory as much as a home.
“The Montreux Years”
In September 2022 the festival released “Chick Corea: The Montreux Years”, chosen from his finest performances between 1981 and 2010, drawn from Claude Nobs’s private collection. The pianist had died the previous year, on 9 February 2021. The album confirms the obvious: in Montreux, Chick Corea was at home.
1972: backstage
In July 1972, Swiss television cameras caught Chick Corea backstage at the festival, alongside his young-guard “fusion” partners, bassist Stanley Clarke and drummer Tony Williams. That night, so the story went, they had pushed the gentle Stan Getz towards an intensity of playing no longer thought to be in him.