One of the attractive features of jazz is the way great talents seek to combine with others to create musical delights that fans and, indeed, the artists themselves may not previously have dreamed of.

Keyboard legend Armando ‘Chick’ Corea has graced the Montreux stage on several occasions, at least three of these as half of a double act with Herbie Hancock (1979), John McLaughlin (1981) and, in 1997, Gary Burton. These duets have been rightly acclaimed as jewels in the Jazz Festival’s star-studded crown.

Corea’s diverse four-decade-plus career is well documented, highlights including a spell succeeding Herbie Hancock in Miles Davis’s band between 1968 and 1970. This was followed by the foundation in 1971 of groundbreaking jazz-rock fusion ensemble Return To Forever which gave Stanley Clarke and Al DiMeola their first stairstep to fame.

Vibraphone player and fellow Bostonian Gary Burton similarly provided a launch pad for guitarist Pat Metheny to shoot for solo stardom, but his career is equally notable in its own right.

As for the pair’s combined ventures, these started as long ago as 1972 with the release of the ‘Crystal Silence’ album on the ECM label and continued with 1978’s ‘Duet’, ‘In Zurich, 1979’ and 1982’s ambitious ‘Lyric Suite For Sextet’ which found the duo augmented by a string quartet.

‘It's never been a reunion,’ Corea told Digital Interviews in 1999. ‘Me and Gary continue to just play. It's always been, "Oh, let's do another gig." There was never a point where…we reformed. It's always been a sideline with us, in the sense that we've always had main groups that we do, and then we've always gotten together with the duet. It's kind of worked out very, very nicely. It's a special little place that's all its own.’

Burton reciprocated with interest on his official website: ‘No one understands the idiosyncrasies of my improvising the way Chick does,’ he explained. ‘When we stumbled into an impromptu duet as an encore to a 1972 concert, we discovered an immediate connection, like two people who speak the same obscure language. It could be because we both play keyboard instruments, or because we both came of age musically in Boston with many of the same local musicians as mentors. Whatever the reason, we discovered from the beginning that we could anticipate each other's ideas with surprising accuracy, and our duet repertoire has been an essential pillar in our careers.’

The year of 1997 saw them take their partnership into the studio – Chick’s Mad Hatter Studios in Los Angeles, to be precise – and emerge with the album ‘Native Sense: The New Duets’. Released in October, three months after their Montreux appearance, it naturally supplied the bulk of their set, the closing ‘La Fiesta’ the exception. Down Beat magazine opined: ‘’Native Sense’ renews a longstanding, very durable friendship…throughout, vibes and piano deftly support each other and smoothly exchange roles, carrying on a dance of their own…’

Burton and Corea had always resisted adding other players to their duet projects ‘because,’ Gary explained, ‘we were a little afraid they might get in our way and limit our rapport.’ They broke that rule this year of 1997 when guitarist Pat Metheny, who had been at Chick and Gary’s first American concert at the University of Michigan 25 years earlier, was invited into the relationship for the excellent ‘Like Minds’ album.

Another Burton/Corea collaboration has since appeared on ‘Rendezvous In New York’, the result of a sixtieth birthday party at the Blue Note in New York which ended up lasting three weeks and produced a 10 DVD box set!

And the story continues… The 35th anniversary of the pair’s original collaboration, ‘Crystal Silence’, is marked with concerts in late 2006/early 2007 scheduled to take place in such diverse locations as Nashville, Moscow, Sydney, Singapore, and beyond. 

Michael Heatley