Chick Corea - Notes From the Road

Where’s Lenny?

For example, there were the last two nights in Marciac, one the the oldest jazz festivals in Europe. In this little town of 1,000 people amid the vineyards of Southern France, the festival celebrated its 30th year presenting jazz.

The night before my duet performance with Gary Burton, I went to the concert stage (a two-and-a-half-hour drive from my Toulouse hotel) to see my old buddies Stanley Clarke, Al DiMeola and Jean Luc Ponty play as a trio. It was an amazing performance by three veteran virtuosi; made me a little nostalgic for the seventies, and I was encouraged to see how my three friends had continually improved their art through the years - they sounded better than ever.

The great Wayne Shorter and bassoonist Monica Ellis

The next night I had the last concert on my two-month jaunt: it was one of the highlights of the duet tour with Gary Burton. Besides having one of our best nights on stage (we sounded incredible :-) ), we shared the stage that night with Wayne Shorter and his adventurous quartet. Then his chamber music was performed by the Imani Winds, a New York wind ensemble that absolutely killed Wayne’s beautiful new chamber music written for the ensemble. (”to kill” in musician talk means to play at the top level of creative performance—to sound great, astounding, etc).

Hangin’ at Marciac with Jeff Ballard and Larry Grenadier

I had a very pleasant conversation with Pat Metheny, who was scheduled to perform with Brad Meldau, Jeff Ballard and Larry Grenadier the next night. We talked about some of our favorite music, including The Beatles, Ornette Coleman, and Henri Dutilleux.

I chatted with Jeff and Larry. Said hello to Danilo Perez, whom I hadn’t seen for a while, reminiced with my E. Band partner, John Patitucci, and had a quick hello with Wynton Marsalis. Often these jazz festivals are the only time I get to see my friends and hear them play.

It was a wonderful way to end the best set of concerts that Gary and I have ever played. Fortunately, since Bernie Kirsh was live-mixing each show, he was on hand to record most of the shows we did, and sometime soon we’ll release a special package of recordings and DVDs from our performances over this past year, as I described in a previous blog entitled ‘Summertime here in the UK’.