Mr. Corea, a jazz fusion pioneer whose best-known band, Return to Forever, merged genres and styles from across the musical spectrum and around the world, passed away on Tuesday. According to his website, he was 79 and was recently diagnosed with a rare cancer.
“I want to thank everyone on my journey who helped keep the music fires burning brightly,” he said in a statement on his website. “I hope those who have the slightest idea to play, write, perform or otherwise do. If it’s not for yourself, then for the rest of us. It’s not just that the world needs more artists, it’s just a lot of fun. “
The fun started early for Mr. Corea. On the way to expanding jazz’s vocabulary, he embraced music and piano as more interesting alternatives for the rest of his young life.
“I remember very well going to first class in Chelsea, going for the first time in my life in this fixed environment, where at one point you had to walk into the room and fold your hands, and then we had to lay head on the desk and do, for me, kind of crazy things, “he told the Globe in 1996.” And I thought, ‘Well, it’s kind of fun, because I’m around kids my age,’ but it was all like a dream.
‘And after I left school every day and went home to my family and to my piano, I thought, this is the reality.
In his twenties he played with jazz notables such as Stan Getz, Herbie Mann and Miles Davis. Mr. Corea played on Davis’ transformative 1970 album ‘Bitches Brew’ – he once recalled Davis instructing him to switch to electric piano during a session.
Shortly after ‘Bitches Brew’, Mr. Corea founded Return to Forever, which expanded the fusion of rock and jazz elements in ‘Bitches Brew’. On the band’s first album of the same name in 1972 he was joined by Stanley Clarke on bass, Flora Purim on vocals and percussion, Joe Farrell on flute and saxophone and Airto Moreira on drums.
“Our music has a simple, clear purpose: to convey happiness and truth to people and create some beauty and share it with people,” Mr. Corea told The Globe in September. “Our journey is a group journey, to bring people to a safe and beautiful place, instead of a place of conflict and chaos.”
Over the years, through the 1970s and through reunions with a 2011 tour, Return to Forever changed its scope and staff, at different times, including musicians such as guitarist Al Di Meola, violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, percussionist Steve Gadd , and guitarist Earl Klugh.
Mr. Corea also formed the Chick Corea Elektric Band and Chick Corea’s Akoustic Band, and he has performed and recorded in duet projects over the years with vibraphonist Gary Burton, jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, classical pianist Friedrich Gulda and banjo player Bela Fleck.
Globe critic Ernie Santosuosso described a solo performance from 1980, writing that Corea’s “frenetic flamenco style of keyboard playing almost mesmerically circles the listener.”
Of a trio appearance at the Regattabar in 2000, Globe critic Bob Blumenthal wrote that Mr. Corea’s “returning vampire looked like he’d been shot by a cyclotron. The piano solo came to the rhythm head-on. “
Armando Anthony Corea was born in Chelsea on June 12, 1941 and was the son of Armando J. and Anna Corea. His father had played the trumpet in a band.
“While hanging out with my dad and his orchestra, I had made a pretty clear decision in private, when I was 5 or 6 years old, that this is what I wanted to do – make music,” Mr. Corea recalls at the Globe- interview from 1996.
He also played the trumpet well enough to join a local drum and bugle corps in his youth, and had played drums in the 1960s when he “couldn’t find gigs with decent, in-tune pianos.” But “piano has always been my main ax,” he said in 2018.
“When I was about 8 or 9 years old, my mom or my uncle got me a performance at a cafe on the corner of Broadway and Everett Avenue in Chelsea,” said Mr. Corea. ‘They had an upright piano and my mother took me there to play. She sat at the piano to protect me, I played for about an hour in the evenings and I got a few tips. That was pretty cool. When I was in high school, there was a pub a few blocks from where we lived after we moved to Everett. I had a funky trio there. There was a drummer and an accordion player, and I played the trumpet because they didn’t have a piano. “
As an artist, he was inspired by pianists such as the classical musician Glenn Gould, whom he called his favorite influence. All of my contemporaries have been influential: McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett and before that Bill Evans. For the spirit of exploration and freedom in jazz, Bud [Powell] and [Thelonious] Monk continue to touchstones. Also Duke Ellington, not only as a pianist but as a complete music maker. There should be one more near the top – he’s in a class alone – and that’s Art Tatum. “
Mr. Corea briefly studied music in New York City at Columbia University and the Juilliard School before turning professional full time.
Along with his 23 Grammys (and 67 nominations), Mr. Corea was named Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2006. In 1997 he kept the starting address when the Berklee College of Music awarded him an honorary degree.
According to the Associated Press, Mr. Corea, who lived in Clearwater, Florida, and was a member of the Church of Scientology, is leaving his wife, singer Gayle Moran, and a son, Thaddeus.
A complete list of survivors and plans for a memorial service were not readily available.
Mr. Corea has influenced generations of musicians with his intercultural, genre-blended approach to performance and composition, and with his unforgettable improvisations.
“When you compose or improvise, you make something up, you create something out of nothing, you get an idea and then you give it back – boom! – so, ‘he said in 1996.’ If you just continue that in a flow, in a flow, it becomes an improvisation. Like when a stand-up comic grabs an idea and he’s gone, and it rolls off him, that’s improvisation. “
Bryan Marquard can be reached at [email protected].