(editor’s note – originally scheduled to be Herbie Hancock and Jean-Luc Ponty)
‘Improvisation’ opens jazz festival
by Bryan Holzberg, The Knickerbocker News, August 6, 1977
Amid a hanging mist and wet grass, Chick Corea on grand piano and Gary Burton on vibraharp came together here Friday night to open the Fourth Annual Upstate Jazz Festival with combinations of music that transcended basic jazz.
“The heart of jazz is the individual,” said Corea in an interview following his performance, “individual improvisation. I don’t think about a thing when I play except how to make what I’m feeling real to people.”
Jazz is most effective in intimate settings such as the Saratoga Performing Arts Center’s openness and Friday night’s smallish crowd of 2,463. “I was taken with the environment,” Corea said.
In response, he tried a number of solo efforts that he had never before played on stage. Corea played with precision and beauty, crossing many different elements to create, at times, flamenco, pop, classical and jazz effects that eluded classification as he mixed chord progressions and tempo.
All the while he had a broad grin as the house responded with “bravos” and spontaneous applause interrupting the pieces. It was a night to sit back and relax.
As Burton joined Corea after an intermission, two individuals who had displayed their considerable talents in earlier efforts seemed to mesh together in an impressive display of coordinated sounds. Passages bounced back and forth on vibraharp and piano and gained substance neither had alone.
Burton by himself opened the evening with a short set that was technically repetitious. Before a tune could be absorbed, he had already jumped to a new sequence. Yet, with Corea’s piano foundation, such sequences took on new color.
“Nothing’s a substitute for a grand piano,” said Corea, “but in its turn, the sounds of that keyboard took on a fuller dimension when supported by Burton’s vibraharp.
Corea and Burton last played together, they said, some nine months ago and had never rehearsed their selections at Saratoga. “We’re at ease the moment we play,” Corea said. Many of their pieces were from a collaborative album of some five years ago called “Crystal Silence.” Chick Corea’s band, Return to Forever, and the Gary Burton Quintet rarely perform those pieces, leaving them instead to a duo interpretation that has added Latin inflections to the earlier classical versions.
SPAC’s Upstate Jazz Festival continues tonight with the McCoy Tyner group and pianist Oscar Peterson in a solo effort.
Poughkeepsie Journal, April 13, 1977
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