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Saturday, October 19, 2002 Well. Chick Corea. I had an extra ticket, so when I arrived at Dartmouth, I found my way to the box office, down one level and one hallway from the entrance to Spaulding Auditorium, the space the concert was held in. This is all in one sprawling complex of connected buildings at the college, a warren that includes at least three different performance spaces, the offices of the theatre department, a small art museum, a student center kind of affair, with a cafeteria and tables spread around both indoors and outdoors. Filled with people, loads of them college-age, of course. I spoke to one of the kids in the box office and let him know I had a ticket to sell in case someone needed one (the show was sold out), then grabbed a nearby piece of wall to lean against while I waited for a buyer. Almost immediately, students showed up nosing around for tickets, the fella in the box office referred them to me and when they discovered that I wanted to sell the ticket for what I paid, its face value, they immediately drifted off in search of other ticket sources. (They seemed to think I should be willing to take a loss on the ticket -- HA!!!) So I waited. People came and went. Until three or four short minutes before the performance was to start -- the crowds cleared out, I noticed a 50-something gentleman patiently standing in front of the box office. Waiting, it looked like, for someone just like me. I asked if he needed a ticket, he said yes, he was happy to pay face value for the bugger, and I was off to the auditorium. Found my way to the seat, the guy who bought my spare ticket showed up just as the lights went down (the tix were for adjoining seats), the members of the band began to filter out, the energy in the joint immediately shot way up. I've listened to Chick Corea's music on and off since I was embarrassingly young, when he put together Return To Forever and they, along with Weather Report, had a massive impact on the jazz universe. But I haven't followed his career closely since the 80s. This outfit, the Chick Corea Electrik Band, is a unit he threw together back in that decade. They played until the mid-90s, then went separately off to do other things. Having just regrouped, this was their third performance in an exploratory three-week tour. Clearly, a lot of folks in the auditorium – a crowd whose age spanned a range that began with high school and continued upward from there, including a fair number of 60- and 70-somethings, even one 80-something – were familiar with the Electrik Band, because as soon as they strolled onstage, people started clapping, calling out, leaping to their feet. Chick Corea walked out last, the energy coming from the audience doubled, the feeling of anticipation crackling in the air. I don't mean that as hype or dramatic overstatement – the air literally seemed to start crackling with intense energy as people got ready for what was coming. As I write this, I'm thinking this is not so unusual at popular music concerts, rock & roll, pop, rap. Not so usual in jazz, though, at least in my experience. They picked up their instruments and they were off. And mama, as soon as they started it became apparent why the audience's energy was so high: these guys were heavyweights – virtuosos who love being together onstage and play with chemistry to burn. Powerful, wildly accomplished musicians, every one of them -- a band with no weak link. Chick Corea, of course, is a world-class player, and it was immediately apparent that the drummer and bass player were major talents, on a distinctly higher level than most of the musicians of their ilk one sees playing around. But as the music flowed and time passed, it became apparent that the sax player and guitarist were right up there with the rest of the band -- killer players, all of them. The percussionist sat behind the biggest, most sprawling drum set I've seen in many years. Like a fortress, like a drum shrine -- ten drums (two different-sized bass drums, three different-sized tom-toms, two snare drums, and three timbali-style affairs), eight different cymbals, two of which were double cymbals (I'm not including the high-hat in that count). Just a massive array of firepower. The bass player used a six-string electric that he often played like a lead guitar. His solos seemed to be the ones that got the audience the most fired up – not because he was any better than the other players (he wasn't), but because his work stood out so sharply from most bass playing one encounters. The performance program reads: "Tonight's program will last approximately 70-90 minutes. There will be no intermission." After 75 minutes, they took a 15-minute break, then came out and played close to 90 minutes more. Three hours that whipped by, getting funkier and funkier as it went, until two songs from the end they got into a jazzed-out version of the kind of thing Booker T. & The MG's might play. The encore: out-and-out funk – high-level, complex, jazzed-up funk, but funk, and impossible to sit still for. And that's another weird thing – as psyched out as the audience was, many of them sat still as they listened, intensely focused on the show. I can't do that. If there's any kind of beat, I have to move to it. And so I was, planted there in my comfy auditorium seat. After a while, I began checking out the crowd, where I observed people like me sprinkled all around the space – moving in rhythm to fast, driving (usually loud) music, even if it was only a bobbing head or a leg moving in time to the beat. During the encore, I moved down closer to the stage, taking advantage of seats abandoned by folks who bolted at the end of the regular set. Across the aisle from me sat an elderly couple, her in her 70s, him easily 80 or older, with a cane. They got up just before the encore ended, him needing the cane to get to his feet. She put her arm through his, they walked slowly up the aisle, smiling as funky music washed over them. Afterward, the college staged a Q&A session between the band and whatever audience members stayed around, a half-hour of back and forth which the band seemed to enjoy immensely. A couple of audience members – parents of young children -- asked for the musicians' thoughts re: how to support/encourage their kids in music, which developed into the longest, most interesting, most emotional part of the Q&A. Every bandmember spoke about the importance of exposing kids to the arts, providing it as part of the atmosphere in the home as kids grow up but never forcing them to do anything. Let them find out what interests them, what excites them. Support them, allow them to discover that calls them, and see what happens. They used the words "allow" and "support" over and over again. And it developed that every member of the band had grown up in families where the parents did exactly that. Which got me thinking about the house I grew up in. Neither of my parents were involved in the arts, neither played music or painted or drew. Now and then my father did volunteer technical work for a community theater group in a neighboring town, something he never brought home with him or brought us to see. My mother was tone deaf, couldn't pick up a tune and toss it against the wall, much less carry one. And yet one of my most consistent memories from early times is music playing on the family's little record player in a small room down at the end of the first-floor hallway, far enough away from the living/dining rooms that the volume had to be cranked way up so that it could be heard. My father played classical LPs, my mother folk music. My brothers, both substantially older than me, played rock and roll on a record player upstairs. With all that in the air, I became hooked on music early on, listening seriously to radio by the time I was four. My father's father had been a successful painter, self-taught in mid-life and able to make his living at it from there – his paintings were all over our little house. My brother Terry became an art major, his work began finding its way into the living space, inspiring me to draw and draw and draw all through elementary school and into junior high where my art teacher encouraged me. Terry began bringing music home with him from college, especially Dylan, and would draw and paint in my bedroom as I fell asleep, Dylan playing on the cheap little record player I had. All of this had an immense effect on me. The only misstep my parents made was in making me take up the violin when I was eight. I never really took to that bugger. They made me practice a half hour every day, and I hated it, never really put my heart into it (yet still always wound up in the third or fourth chair of the first violins in the school orchestra). I played that thing for ten or eleven years, and once I'd found other disciplines – voice, theatre – that I discovered on my own, violin studies faded away. Pretty interesting. They're powerful words, "allow" and "support." But you already know that. The band hung out until after 11:30, I got to shake their hands, thank them for a great time. People were getting autographs (the allure of which I've never understood -- ah, well, to each their own). A great time. And there you have it. rws 7:34 PM [+]
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