Hancock Corea

Herbie Hancock's edition in the Columbia This Is Jazz series draws six tracks from the approximately 12-year period between 1974 and 1986. An electric band is featured on half of the selections, including "Gentle Thoughts" from Secrets, "Actual Proof" from Thrust, and "Calypso" from Mr. Hands. These aren't exactly the best tracks from Hancock's electric period, and the acoustic portion – covering "The Sorcerer" from a 1981 V.S.O.P. performance in Tokyo, the live duet "Maiden Voyage" by Hancock and Chick Corea, and "The Peacocks" from the 1986 film 'Round Midnight – are similarly erratic. All of the selections on This Is Jazz are good, but it doesn't make much sense to feature such a scattered set of tracks.

This post-Return to Forever Chick Corea LP is a bit of a mixed bag. Corea is heard on his many keyboards during an atmospheric "The Woods," interacts with a string section on "Tweedle Dee," features a larger band plus singer Gayle Moran on a few other songs and even welcomes fellow keyboardist Herbie Hancock for the "Mad Hatter Rhapsody." The most interesting selection, a quartet rendition of "Humpty Dumpty" with tenorman Joe Farrell set the stage for his next project, Friends. Overall, this is an interesting and generally enjoyable release.

This post-Return to Forever Chick Corea LP is a bit of a mixed bag. Corea is heard on his many keyboards during an atmospheric "The Woods," interacts with a string section on "Tweedle Dee," features a larger band plus singer Gayle Moran on a few other songs and even welcomes fellow keyboardist Herbie Hancock for the "Mad Hatter Rhapsody." The most interesting selection, a quartet rendition of "Humpty Dumpty" with tenorman Joe Farrell set the stage for his next project, Friends. Overall, this is an interesting and generally enjoyable release.

This post-Return to Forever Chick Corea LP is a bit of a mixed bag. Corea is heard on his many keyboards during an atmospheric "The Woods," interacts with a string section on "Tweedle Dee," features a larger band plus singer Gayle Moran on a few other songs and even welcomes fellow keyboardist Herbie Hancock for the "Mad Hatter Rhapsody." The most interesting selection, a quartet rendition of "Humpty Dumpty" with tenorman Joe Farrell set the stage for his next project, Friends. Overall, this is an interesting and generally enjoyable release.

Secret Agent follows a by-now familiar pattern: a costume change, a re-shuffling of the cast, and a mix of songs that are individually impressive but collectively less so. The record ranges from life-some Latin jazz ("Central Park") to haunting Vangelis-like instrumentals ("Bagatelle #4"), with Chick Corea adding and subtracting instruments as the arrangements dictate. The steady forces behind the music include a new rhythm section (Tom Brechtlein and fretless bassist Bunny Brunel), familiar faces Gayle Moran and Joe Farrell, and a kicking horn section that gets a couple of well-deserved cameos.

Recording live at New York's Blue Note club, Chick Corea unveiled another new group, the challenging Origin acoustic sextet, on this CD, winnowing down some 12 sets into an hour-plus package. With Steve Davis (trombone) and Bob Sheppard and Steve Wilson (flutes and reeds) up front, Corea had a flexible horn choir to write for, and he uses mellow, urbane voicings that recall some of the Herbie Hancock Sextet's early work in the late '60s. The interplay that Avishai Cohen (bass), Adam Cruz (drums), and Corea have with the horns, though, is anything but mellow, and frequently they strike combative sparks against each other. Some of the selections, including "Double Image" (no relation to Joe Zawinul's electric jazz classic) and "Dreamless," have Latin-ish grooves – which are no strangers to Corea's Spanish heart – in spots.