Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Blue Note, Chick reunited with two incredible bands...

Dec 15, 2006

As part of a two week extravaganza celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the world famous Blue Note Jazz Club in New York City, Chick reunited with two incredible bands in November of ‘06.

Week one featured the Elektric Band with Chick/keyboards (including Rhodes and Mini Moog), Dave Weckl/drums, Eric Marienthal/saxes, Frank Gambale/guitar and bass virtuoso Victor Wooten. The music nearly raised the roof off the venerable jazz club making it a very memorable week for this one-of-kind ensemble. The band played a great cross-section of material from the Elektric Band catalog. The band was in top form and with the addition of Victor Wooten on bass for this special engagement, the group was grooving and burning hard.

The second exciting week featured a group of musicians Chick dubbed "The Leprechaun Band." This group featured Chick on keyboards, the great Steve Gadd on drums, bass legend Anthony Jackson, the amazing Ravi Coltrane on saxes and the Elektric Band's Frank Gambale.

This exclusive reunion focused on Chick's music from the 70's; revisiting tunes from the classic albums The Leprechaun, The Mad Hatter, My Spanish Heart and Friends. This group was really special because it was the first time Chick, Steve Gadd and Anthony Jackson--all musicians who were on the original recordings--had ever played the music live together!

To take things over the top, Chick and band played Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy from the first electric Return To Forever album. There's a special significance to this in that Steve Gadd was actually the original drummer for the electric Return To Forever band (a little known bit of fusion-lore) before Lenny White joined the group.

The gigs were documented with a very innovative video shoot using 15 miniature High Definition cameras placed around the stage at different interesting vantage points. The end result will make you feel like you're actually on stage and in the band!

Additionally, there are plans to make a special "instructional video" version of this film, where the viewer would be able to focus on a particular player in viewing the DVD. If you wanted to watch only Victor Wooten (or whoever your choice was) for the whole performance, from two or three camera angles, the viewer would have that flexibility. You could switch between all of the players individually or watch the show with the "conventional" edit.

It takes a lot of work to edit that many cameras and mix the audio in 5.1 Surround Sound, so you won’t likely see the release of this DVD until fall or winter of 2007.

You're going to love both of these DVDs which will most likely be packaged as a reasonably priced double DVD.

Keep your eye on Chickcorea.com for news on this release!

See the photos from New York