ALL THE RIGHT KEYS

CHICK COREA, WITH HIS LATEST ALBUM, PLAYS, CONVINCES AUTHOR MIKE GREENBLATT THAT HE’S AMERICA’S GREATEST LIVING PIANO PLAYER.

- MIKE GREENBLATT

In celebrating the legacy of Chick Corea, 79, America’s greatest living piano player, Sting might have said it best: “He completely devastated the landscape. It was like scorched earth — so musical, so powerful, so incredibly virtuosic.”

On Corea’s new 2-CD package, Plays (Concord), he needs no rhythm section, no blaring horns to make his points. His 10 fingers cascading wildly over the 88 keys of his piano creates new vistas of meaning to 300 years of compositional gems by such composers as Stevie Wonder, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Thelonious Monk, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Domenico Scarlatti, Bill Evans, Frederic Chopin and Alexander Scriabin. It’s a live set that actually has him bringing up people from the audience to perform duets with him onstage.

Corea is a man who revolutionized progressive rock in 1972 with his fusion group, Return To Forever. He pioneered world music. He has been a touchstone through the decades for bebop, swing, classical and the avant-garde, putting his indelible fingerprints on everything he transforms. And to think this was all after Miles Davis used him for such seminal American landmarks as Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way.

GOLDMINE: Congratulations on a wonderful new solo piano record that really has so many different components to it. How did you choose this stunning array of composers to transcend?