Chick Corea - Notes From the Road

Chick & Hiromi onstage at the Budokan

I’m at Narita Intl. Airport with Bloggish downtime and thought I’d tell you about what we got away with last night at the Budokan arena in Tokyo :-)

Here’s a little description of the venue from Wikipedia:

For many Westerners, the Budokan is synonymous with large-scale rock concerts. It was here that The Beatles made their Japanese debut and the location where many “Live at the Budokan” albums were recorded. The Nippon Budokan, however, was originally built for the judo competition in the 1964 Summer Olympics, hence its name, rendered into English as Martial Arts Hall.

5,500 attend the Chick and Hiromi concert at the Budokan

It was wild to see 5,500 people in attendance for my piano duet with Hiromi, the brilliant young Japanese pianist and composer. Our 3 days last year at the Tokyo Blue Note became a double CD of our duet (released in Japan only) – it became the No. 1 selling jazz CD of the year and consequently the interest seemed to warrant a try at a larger audience.

I wasn’t sure how an audience that large in a venue that sprawling would receive our duet, which was conceived as an intimacy, largely improvised and for a jazz-wise public. Well, what a surprise when the audience calmly and appreciatively took in the almost 2-hour concert with great interest and standing ovation approval. I was so happy to see that this could happen in this day and age, and then thought, “Well, the Japanese have such an artistic culture that it could only happen there.”

This concert brought back memories of the only other time I played the Budokan ‘79 with the first piano duet I ever tried – me and Herbie Hancock.

So big thanks go to the Japanese music fans for their support of jazz music through the years.

5,500 people attending a one-off concert of intimate piano improvisations, not part of any “series” or “festival,” – wow – pretty nice. :-)