Past, Present & Futures

Past, Present & Futures

• NEW - CHICK COREA NEW TRIO - PAST PRESENT & FUTURES - CD CD

Chick Corea is a musician of extraordinary abilities and sometimes maddening shifts in artistic perspective. On <I>Past, Present & Futures</I>, he returns to the trio format that gained him some early renown in 1968 with <I>Now He Sings, Now He Sobs</I>. This time, instead of Roy Haynes and Miroslav Vitous, he's got drummer Jeff Ballard and bassist Avishai Cohen. Like most Corea sidemen, they are gifted players, though lacking the personality of someone such as Stanley Clarke or Barry Altschul. <I>Past, Present & Futures</I> only partially fulfills its title. Corea rows into the mainstream, drawing from Fats Waller's jazz standard "Jitterbug Waltz" to original compositions that owe more to Chick's post-bop roots than to his avant-garde or fusion strains. While much of the music is extremely competent and buoyantly played, only a few tracks lift off, such as "Dignity," with its off-center melancholy, and improvisations that take some pieces deeper. On "Chelsea Shuffle" a hard-bop homage to his old stomping grounds in Chelsea, Massachusetts, you can hear the Horace Silver soul-groove sound that was influencing Corea at the time. Every few years, people think Chick Corea has lost it, and every few years Chick does an album that shows that he may not be on the bleeding edge anymore, but he hasn't lost a thing. <I>--John Diliberto</I>