Return to Forever
Wherein two intrepid virtuosi reunite classical music with its improvisational roots
“I’m not into worshipping Mozart nearly as much as I am into simply enjoying the fun of his creativity.” Quoth the great jazz pianist Chick Corea, seen here with his friend and comrade, Bobby McFerrin, who long ago laid to waste the very notion of genre.
“Out of the silence sounds the voice, its notes like condensations of air. Stately, grave and limpid, the piano enters, pauses, turns reflectively in on itself and then gathers speed until, in a silver shower of treble, it flows seamlessly into the orchestral tutti and we’re off into Mozart, having arrived by means of a prelude as beguiling as it was simple. Unlike the centuries-old composition it hooks up with, it never existed until this moment.”
That’s how I began my liner notes to the 1996 album The Mozart Sessions, a collaboration between two stellar jazz musicians (even if one was also a classical conductor). Chick Corea, a major voice in late-20th-century jazz, and far more than a dabbler in classical music (he’d spent a solid year preparing for the entrance exam to Juilliard, only to drop out after a month to pursue his interest in jazz) had a lot on his mind.
“When I see musicians holding violins and woodwind instruments,” Chick said, “and when I see musicians holding tenor saxophones and trumpets, they’re musicians to me and they’re’re playing music, whether it’s Mozart’s piano concertos or Bud Powell’s jazz. Mozart is one of the touchstones of our modern-day culture, no doubt about it, but no more so than Duke Ellington.”
Corea and another world-class performer had just recorded two of Mozart’s most beloved concertos for piano and orchestra: No. 23 in A Major and No. 20 in D minor. Corea’s fellow adventurer was the genre-defying vocalist Bobby McFerrin (though you can get away with calling him a jazz singer). Corea died in 2021; McFerrin is still with us.
Two years prior to The Mozart Sessions, McFerrin had “ruffled the academy’s feathers,” as I put it, by assuming the conductorship of the St. Paul [MN] Chamber Orchestra. To shock the bourgeoisie by thumbing one’s nose at its hidebound conceits was neither a new, nor a particularly worrisome, experience for McFerrin, who had burst through boundaries, not for its own sake but out of a limitless curiosity, almost since the start of his career. McFerrin and Corea had known each other for years, and had long shared the conviction, a tradition itself since Gershwin and earlier, that great things can come of well-thought-out attempts to synthesize jazz and classical music.
“We obviously don’t have any recorded documents of Mozart playing his music,” Corea said, “but you can almost see him onstage with his musicians. Do you think he was somber and serious? I can almost feel him getting up there and improvising. So could McFerrin. “That’s Wolfie at the keyboard, wondering, ‘Hmm, how’s it going to come out today?’”
“There’s a paradox at work here,” I wrote. “In its very departures from convention”—the improvised preludes, for instance, with which McFerrin and Corea introduce each concerto, or the improvisations that Corea freely tosses into written passages—“this album is nothing but a quest to restore tradition to itself, to rekindle the unfettered exuberance with which this music was performed by its creator. [In his cadenzas,1 for instance, Corea takes as his jumping-off point the passage as written, but soon leaves it far behind to follow his imagination. The only fixed points are his exits, when he gives cues for the orchestra to re-enter.]
“In Mozart’s day, soloists were improvisers; Mozart himself extemporized with unrivalled brilliance, bursting the confines of the score for the sheer fun of it. As the Western concert tradition hardened into ‘classical music,’ a boulevard of monuments, improvising went underground, to resurface in jazz. So it make perfect sense that two jazzmen have emerged to reinvest Mozart’s music with the spirit of play.”
Another instance, to quote myself shamelessly: The third movement, the conventional conclusion of the D minor concerto, “gives way to silence, and a piano enters, sketching the shape of the lovely, sad second movement of Mozart’s Sonata in F [dubbed “Song for Amadeus” by Corea and McFerrin]. Here comes the voice, rendering Mozart’s melody in some unknown vowel-rich language, and the tempo quickens, the voice arcing as if through shafts of sunlight, the voice toying now with the melody, but never ceasing to evoke Mozart’s grave gaiety, and then the music floats to a standstill, merging, in an unreheard instant of accord, the cadences of the centuries with the ever-unfolding now.”
And another paradox: the more times you’ve played a piece of music, the better the position you’re in to make something fresh out of it. “I’m not just talking about playing it,” McFerrin said, “but about listening to it, throwing it out the window and starting all over again from scratch, with a bigger group, a smaller group, no group, just piano, two pianos, a jazz band. I don’t know a piece until I’ve lived with it for a long time. I mean, I’ve been married for twenty-two years, and I still don’t know my wife the way I’m going to know her after another twenty-two.” Here’s one place where the jazz musician can lead the way. I’ve known many who feel that it’s not until they’ve played a song for ten years that they’re able to take a great solo on it. How many times did Miles Davis play ‘I Thought About You’ before he felt that it could be a tool, so to speak, with which to say something really new?
“Regardless of your background,” said McFerrin, “whether it’s classical or jazz, it’s only when you get away from being dependent on someone telling you what to play and how to play that you’re going to bring something really, really strong spiritually to music-making. If I ever find myself in the position where I’m dean of a music school, my students won’t be able to graduate unless they take a class in improvisation. They’re going to have to be able to play without music in front of them, just to have the courage to to play one note after another and see what it sounds like.”
Long before they made this album, McFerrin, on a whim, phoned Corea.
“Chick,” he said, “let’s play some Mozart.”
“No!” came the answer. “Mozart’s for the closet!”
Years passed, and every few months McFerrin called his buddy.
“No!”
Perseverence finally paid off, and in May 1995, with McFerrin conducting the San Francisco Symphony, Corea played the D-minor Concerto. To McFerrin’s delight, Chick established right away that a conventional approach was not what he had in mind. The two were walking onstage when Corea suggested that at the end of the second movement, he go straight into the third. No pause. “Normally, of course,” McFerrin said, “you take a nice long pause, everybody coughs, tunes, shuffles their feet, makes comments, whatever, until everybody gets quiet, the conductor lifts his arms and everybody starts again. Well, Chick ends the second movement and BANG! goes right into the third. You could see the members of the orchestra literally jump. He’d caught everyone off guard. This moment was so electrifying that the last movement, McFerrin recalled, “was on fire. It was… great!”
“Let’s make a record!” McFerrin said.
Too far out of the closet to turn back now, Corea went home to L.A., woodshedded for six months, and came to St. Paul in February 1996 for two days of rehearsal, four concerts, and a two-day recording session: “the most absolutely intense eight days of musical activity in my life,” Corea recalled. Four months later, everybody reconvened in New York for a second two-day session, and on the third day they rested, and behold, the two concertos, the inspired improvisations in particular, were very good. Purists (if there are any of you still out there), take note.
Just reminding you: a cadenza is a solo passage, often improvised and often to put the soloist’s virtuosity on full display, while the orchestra stands by.
We’ve got three audio embeds:
—In the beginning is That Voice, which, joined by solo piano, locks in with Mozart’s score. The improvised meets the composed, and we’re off to big places.
—Until, with the improvised “Song for Amadeus,” the experiment finally vanishes back into the silence whence it emerged.
Time for talk: Since Chick Corea was dissatisfied with a previous writer’s liner notes, he had a lot that he wanted to clarify. Our interview was long, and I’ve excerpted its essential nub, the 4:45 segment attached below. My interview with McFerrin was much shorter; he had no beefs, just a handful of sharp, eminently quotable insights that I’ve worked into the text. Here’s Chick Corea, out of Chelsea, Massachusetts:
Amazing. What a great story. I wonder if anybody the orchestra has written about that night.