Chick Corea on the Elektric Road Again

For Chick Corea, the famed keyboardist and composer, there’s nothing quite like being on the road with a band.

“My biggest pleasure comes from working with a group,” says Corea, 52. “I like to find people where we share interests and kind of throw our life coins in the same bowl and say, ‘OK, let’s go for it.’ Then you get into the music, get into playing, get into seeing what you can create on the road.”

Corea says he’s having a “ball” touring with his new Elektric Band II, which recorded “Paint the World” for GRP Records this spring. The band, which Corea formed late last year, ends its first tour next month. The group comprises Mike Miller (guitar), Jimmy Earl (bass), Gary Novak (drums) and Eric Marienthal (saxes). The quintet is the follow-up ensemble to Corea’s longstanding Elektric Band, which made half a dozen albums for GRP Records before disbanding in 1992.

“After 45 performances, we’re a bona fide road band,” Corea says from a recent tour stop in Boulder, Colo. “The music is charged now.”

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Corea says a lot of times he and the other members of Elektric Band II, which appears tonight at the Strand in Redondo Beach and Saturday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, head spontaneously into an unexpected area. Then they have to figure out how to get out by the seat of their pants. “Some of the pieces have opened up wide, and the players have to bring them together to make the show work,” he says.

This open-ended quality characterizes a good deal of the material Corea is now offering.

“I really wanted to go for a much less thought-out, produced, composed music” than in previous versions of the Elektric Band, says Corea.

Corea also made a decision to use fewer keyboards. He used to employ a bank of synthesizers, now he’s relying mainly on the Rhodes electric piano and, if available, an acoustic grand piano. This shift in instrumentation applied to the other members as well, he discovered.

“I found I really wanted to hear just an electric guitar sound, not a synthesized guitar sound, and not just an acoustic drum set, but a small acoustic drum set,” Corea says. “The way I like to play keyboards and piano, I need a certain lightness in the rhythm section, and therefore a small kit of drums really works.”

Corea has lived on the road six to seven months a year for over two decades and says he needed to get back out and tour. When the new band got together for rehearsals, Corea says, the chemistry was “kind of instant.”

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Fresh Crew for Shank: When saxophonist Bud Shank leads his New Gold sextet tonight and Saturday at Catalina Bar & Grill, don’t expect a another, smaller version of the Lighthouse All-Stars. Shank, former Stan Kenton alto saxophonist, was a member of Howard Rumsey’s original Lighthouse All-Stars, which played in Southern California in the late ‘40s and ‘50s, and is co-leader, with fluegelhornist Shorty Rogers, of the revamped Lighthouse group.

New Gold is made up of Shank, trumpeter Conte Candoli, saxophonists Bill Perkins and Jack Nimitz, bassist John Clayton and drummer Sherman Ferguson. The sextet, says the altoist, is in a “totally different musical direction” than the latter, a nine-piece ensemble that these days works rarely.

“We’re using a lot of different writers,” he says, where the All-Stars’ book was mainly composed and arranged by Shorty Rogers, “and the tunes emphasize soloing, stretching out. The music is more adventurous.” The book is composed of originals and jazz classics, such as Tadd Dameron’s “Ladybird,” arranged by Clayton, Shank, Perkins and Mike Barone.

“It’s also fun playing with no piano,” says Shank, who decided against a keyboard because “I was looking for a way to get the most music out of six people and something had to go. I have a lot of respect for pianists, but there is a freedom you have when there isn’t one. There are also things you can’t do, like certain rhythm section devices, so we don’t.”