JAZZ REVIEW : Corea Turns Another Page at Catalina

Chick Corea’s recently expressed desire to deliver “the feelings we want to get across to the audience” wasn’t exactly what turned up at Catalina Bar & Grill Tuesday. In the opening set of a six-night run, the pianist-composer’s quartet spent a lot more time assiduously reading music than roaming the inner reaches of their emotions.

Why reading? Because Corea decided to devote the bulk of his program to a full exposition of a suite-like collection of segments from his new album, “Time Warp.” It’s certainly not unusual for artists to support a current CD by performing selections from it in concert. And, to Corea’s credit, the overflow crowd cheered almost everything the group played. But consigning an entire set to the presentation of a work that demands concentrated reading on the part of the musicians is not the way to open the door to imaginative self-expression.

The problem was further compounded by the fact that “Time Warp” was composed as the musical extension of a brief fantasy story also written by Corea. Lacking the availability of either a written or a spoken reading of the tale, long portions of the suite had the feeling of background music without a picture.

Which is unfortunate, because a few of the sections of “Time Warp” contained some striking elements--the chugging rhythms and floating, suspended melody of “Discovery,” the playful, childlike quality of “One World Over,” the lyrical piano line in “New Life.” But, too often, whenever the quartet members--Corea, piano; Bob Berg, saxophones; John Patitucci, bass, and Gary Novak, drums--began to spring free of the written music, they were obliged to turn their attention away from spontaneous interaction back to the printed page.

Corea wisely added an encore consisting of two Thelonious Monk tunes--”Straight, No Chaser” and “Crepescule With Nellie”--finally stepping forward with several vigorous, straight-ahead piano choruses and allowing his band to stretch out. Patitucci, in the shadows for too much of the evening, played a solo that was as musically energizing as it was technically virtuosic, and Novak amply justified his reputation as a hot young drummer. Berg, however, sounded unintegrated into the ensemble, functioning instead as a kind of musical outsider, whose pursuit of high-speed, fast-fingering displays continually led him to lines dominated by repetitious, descending scale passages.

* Chick Corea Quartet at Catalina Bar & Grill through Sunday. 1640 N. Cahuenga Blvd., (213) 466-2210. $16 cover tonight and Sunday, $20 cover Friday and Saturday, with two-drink minimum. Corea performs two shows nightly, at 8:30 and 10:30.