I wrote the first song in 1971 to convey simplicity as beauty, as represented in the spirit of a child.

—Chick Corea, from Preface to Children’s Songs

While working on Pat Metheny’s Minuano, something about that piece brought to mind Chick Corea. I wondered: did the two ever collaborate? Not only is the answer “yes”, but in the form of an album called Like Minds.

Some personal associations to Chick Corea are:

  • Windows
    • Just an amazing mood. Last fall I was driving around on a crisp day, the colored leaves in the wind, could not stop listening to this track over and over.
  • Corea’s thoughts on improvisation (via YouTube)
    • “improvising is living”
    • “I have a thought in my head and I’m trying to get it out using the cumbersome medium of the english language; it’s really difficult.”
    • Improvisation is “the natural thing that you do when you’ve already decided you’re going to something and you’re going to make a movement”
    • There are decisions that have to made:
      • Freedoms
      • Rules
    • Determine a “pattern” and then “decide how closely you want to stick to the pattern — the improvisation part is what freedom you give”
    • Improvisation is “What you decide will be there as a pattern and what you decide you’ll be free about interpreting”
    • Take gradient steps to build up to the next step

And man! — when he plays Happy Birthday “like how people sing it” — he makes “sounding wrong” “sound right”.

So anyway, during that thought process, I went and ordered a copy of his Children’s Songs. In the preface, he wrote “I wrote the first song in 1971 to convey simplicity as beauty, as represented in the spirit of a child.”

And last night and today read through the first song. It (“simplicity as beauty”) has been conveyed!

In the vein of the beautiful middle section of Debussy’s Clair de Lune (I wrote about this aspect of Debussy’s (much more complex) work in a previous post), Corea’s piece is based on a 100% repeating, simple, 2-bar ostinato in the left hand, and simple, sometimes repeating phrases in the right hand above, playing (in the childlike sense of the word) against the unchanging rhythm of the ostinato.

Reading through the piece, I am left with a similar sense of peace. The first beautiful, questioning phrase in the right hand is repeated so elegantly at the end, after briefly surveying the surroundings in the middle section.

RIP. And count me in those “like minds”.