The inclusion of Bela Fleck in Chick Corea’s 60th Birthday celebration at The Blue Note in NYC (on both DVD and CD) was great fun and that’s just part of their continuing collaboration. Chick also played on a couple past Flecktones albums. After the Blue Note appearances, the two decided to tour as a duo. The music on this new CD developed as they prepared for the tour.
There have been some great jazz duos of a horn and piano or violin and piano – without any rhythm section – but putting together one of today’s greatest jazz pianists and a basically bluegrass banjoist may sound weird. It turns out both performers are super-open-minded and enjoy breaking down genre categories in their music. Fleck, for example, has recorded albums of Bach and other classical music as well as jazz. Their version of Corea’s Children’s Song #6 takes on the classical slant of the original for piano. Their musical thinking seems to run along the same lines, and in quicksilver rapidity. The amazing virtuosity of Fleck on his banjo is matched by Corea’s palette of sounds – which can even seem to imitate the banjo’s strumming. And in a way both instruments are percussion instruments with strings, which brings their seemingly disparate sound worlds together. Neither performer stays in the mainstream jazz area in their improvisations either – one hears Latin, gospel, funk, bluegrass, gypsy and various other world musics here. The duo pulls out all the stops for a rollicking rout of Barroso’s Brazil. The 11 tunes are about equally credited to either Corea or Fleck. This unique and delightful duo CD should find many fans to dig it from a wide spectrum of the music world.
TrackList: Senorita, Spectacle, Joban Dna Nopia, Mountain, Children’s Song #6, A Strange Romance, Menagerie, Waltse for Abby, Brazil, The Enchantment, Sunset Road.
– John Henry
