When the 18-time Grammy Award-winning banjoist Béla Fleck speaks of his years-long collaboration with the late pianist Chick Corea, he can sound like a bashful student musician, still obviously in awe of the jazz titan whose impact transformed him as a teenager in the ’70s. “I just feel so lucky to have played with him in such an intimate way, and to have gotten to know him so well,” Fleck says.
Their new album Remembrance (May 10, Thirty Tigers), serves as a moving final document of the profound creative and personal rapport that Fleck and Corea first showcased at album length with 2007’s Latin Grammy-winning The Enchantment. It’s also a crucial addendum to Corea’s legacy, featuring three previously unreleased Corea compositions as well as five short free improvisations, or impromptus, that Fleck has infused with written music.
Listen to the title song and Corea composition “Remembrance,” one of the last pieces of music Chick ever recorded. “It’s just one of those perfect Chick Corea tunes,” Fleck says. “It sounds to me like a New Orleans funeral march, even though it has a Latin component, like everything he did tended to.”
Recorded both live in concert, during the duo’s final tour dates in 2019, and via traded sound files, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, Remembrance runs the stylistic gamut — from Corea’s additional unreleased tunes “Enut Nital” (or “Latin Tune”, spelled backwards), and “Continuance,” an older work that resurfaced in the duo’s setlist, to new Fleck compositions, like the majestic “The Otter Creek Incident” and “Juno,” a winsome tribute to his son, through clairvoyant interpretations of Thelonious Monk and Scarlatti, to challenging exercises, like Fleck’s “Small Potatoes,” that evoke Corea’s unsung work in the jazz avant-garde.
“We pushed this duo to a new place before we ran out of time,” says Fleck, who produced Remembrance. “We have here another cool look at Chick Corea, at the different ways that he can play that we wouldn’t have had. There’s a lot of great Chick Corea out there, and this is different.”
“With Béla, our duet has become so simpatico, and comfortable–comfortable spiritually.” Corea said in 2015. “And not meaning that we’re not adventuring musically, but I know that whatever we’re going to do is going to be musical.”
Corea’s death in 2021, of cancer at age 79, devastated the jazz community, who saw the pianist as a constant international presence, a vibrant musician who never ceased touring and recording. “It was a deep shock,” says Fleck, who also released an inspired live project with Corea, Two, in 2015. “It was one of the special relationships in my life. He was just so kind to me, and so helpful, and I learned so much from him.”
“He found the good in everything,” Fleck adds. “I’m just so glad to be a part of this — glad I could be with him, and glad there’s more to share.”
Chick Corea & Béla Fleck
Remembrance track listing
1. The Otter Creek Incident (Béla Fleck)
2. impromptu III: march hare
3. Enut Nital (Chick Corea)
4. impromptu II: mock turtle
5. Bemsha Swing (Thelonious Monk, Denzil Best)
6. Lucky Bounce
7. impromptu I: cheshire
8. Remembrance (Chick Corea)
9. Juno (Béla Fleck)
10. Scarlatti Sonatas (Domenico Scarlatti, arr.. By Corea, Fleck)
11. impromptu V: jabberwocky
12. Small Potatoes
13. Continuance (Chick Corea)
14. impromptu IV: gentleman fish
