The first piano trio since Mal Waldron’s Free At Last goes in a very different direction as these three engage in rapid cycles of hyperactive exchanges. Sometimes it’s too much, and they splutter and stutter for breath in the sheer exuberance of it all. But when it all works, and they get out of the way of each other, ka-pow!
The powerful reading of Wayne Shorter’s Nefertiti opening the album swings like the clappers and comes with none of the caution it had when the same trio recorded it for the previous year’s The Song Of Singing for Blue Note. Here at TonStudio Bauer in Ludwisburg, it barrels in with something approaching a swagger that is irresistible. Just over a month after this recording, Corea, Hollan,d and Altschul would perform Nefertiti on stage with Anthony Braxton, beautifully captured on Circle’s Paris-Concert.
Dave Holland’s Vadana is a real show-stealer with the bassist’s heartfelt shadow melodies burnishing Corea’s spacious framing. The real curio however, is Corea’s Thanatos. Taking over a minute and a half to fade in on what sounds like a typical improv, no sooner than it finally arrives, it immediately takes the same amount of time to fade back out into silence. With a title also alluding to death, the whole thing clocks in at a potentially significant 4.33. A Cagean coincidence? An oblique comment upon the ultimate silence?
This record has had three variant covers over the years. First, I think, there's the Scientology-inspired triangle graphic emblazoned with the letters ARC, which, as any acolyte will breathlessly tell you, stands for Affinity, Reality, and Communication.
Then, the same year in Germany, ECM issued a quite atypical for the time photograph of a cinematic-looking landscape, the very first one to grace an ECM release.
And thank goodness they did, as it means we get to enjoy Lajos Keresztes’s photograph of an open road stretching off to the distant mountains. It surely expresses more about the music’s wide-open aspirations than the dodgy cult speak quoted on the rear of the other pressing.
Keresztes, who escaped the Hungarian uprising of 1956, first studied architecture in Munich and, in 1961, photography in Cologne, going on to travel the world gathering sublime images, several of which would appear on the covers of future ECM and JAPO releases.
Chick Corea/David Holland/Barry Altschul
A.R.C. ECM 1009
Having guested on ECM 1004, Corea’s first album as leader lands with a flashy impact. Forever busy and bustling, they generate a lot of heat triangulating between splintery improv, riotous patterns, and euphoric swing.
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