Spontaneous Conjunction : Plugged Into Each Other, Chick Corea and the Elektric Band Get Charged on Improvisation

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

“My biggest pleasure comes from working with a group as opposed to working solo or working various projects,” said Corea, 52. “I like to have a group--that’s the bottom line. It’s the camaraderie, man. I get lonely if I’m traveling alone. 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 and make something out of it.’ Then you get into the music, get into playing, get into seeing what you can create on the road.”

Corea said he’s having a ball touring with his new Elektric Band II, a unit he formed late last year and which recorded “Paint the World” for GRP Records in the spring. The band, which will complete its first tour next month, is composed of Mike Miller (guitar), Jimmy Earl (bass), Gary Novak (drums) and Orange County’s Eric Marienthal (saxes). The quintet is the follow-up ensemble to Corea’s long-standing Elektric Band, which he started in the mid-’80s and which made a half-dozen albums for GRP before disbanding in 1992.

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

Corea said a lot of times he and his partners, who appear tonightat the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, head spontaneously into an unexpected area. Then, by the seat of their pants, they have to figure out how to get out.

“Some of the pieces have opened up wide, and the players have to bring them together to make the show work,” he said.

Take the date at the Grand Emporium nightclub in Kansas City, Mo.

“Miller was having a particularly hot night, so I just sat back and let him blow,” Corea said, using jazzmen’s jargon for improvising. “The set was nearing an end, and I was trying to figure out a way to round things up. So after he finished, I did a segue into just keyboards and drums, and Gary and I created a tune together, just improvising. Then we segued into ‘Tumba Island,’ the tune we’ve been closing the shows with. It worked out really nice, and we’d never done anything quite that way before.”

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

“I really wanted to go for a much less thought-out, produced, composed music” than in previous versions of the Elektric Band, Corea said. “I wanted just less written notes, varying tempos of songs, leaving more parameters open for freedom to interpret the music differently.”

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The native of Chelsea, Mass., said he had long believed that the areas of music the Elektric Band dealt with weren’t quite wide enough for him. Then why keep exploring them?

“Well, it was a group thing,” Corea said, referring to other Elektric Band members Frank Gambale (guitar), John Patitucci (bass), Dave Weckl (drums) and Marienthal.

“It was because I didn’t want to be a dictator about it. And at that time, it was the fun thing to do. But after the years went by and I kept reviewing how it felt on our live dates and on record, I knew I wanted something else. I wanted this new band to blow more.”

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 to diminished 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 said. “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.”

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Miller, Earl and Novak are all highly rated Southern California jazz and studio musicians whom Corea met in various ways.

He heard Earl play at the Baked Potato in North Hollywood and hired him to fill in for Patitucci on some 1992 tour dates. The keyboardist heard Miller on a tape, caught Novak in concert with Brandon Fields and was impressed by both. When the new band got together for rehearsals, Corea said, the chemistry was “kind of instant.”

Corea broke up the Elektric Band more than a year ago, “when it became obvious that Frank, John and Dave wanted to have their own bands.”

In the interim, the keyboardist--who has worked with such giants as Miles Davis and Stan Getz--occasionally led an acoustic quartet that featured saxophonist Bob Berg, but forming a new plugged-in group remained a top priority. Corea has lived on the road six to seven months a year for more than two decades, and he needed to get back out and tour.

He said that the United States, where he has been playing mostly 500- to 1,000-seat clubs, is a tough sell.

“This is the hardest market for us to stoke interest,” he said. “Maybe there’s more glut of recorded product, maybe less interest in anything that isn’t media music, that doesn’t make it to MTV. It’s a lot easier in Europe and the Far East, where they are less MTV-oriented.

“Still, people have been turning out, even in the Midwest. We sold out two shows at Nick and Eric’s Place, which was located in a bowling alley in Omaha, Neb. The goal of the night was to bring more people into the club than were in the bowling alley, and we did it.”

* Chick Corea’s Elektric Band II plays at 8 p.m. tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets, $19.50. (714) 496-8930.