The Ultimate Adventure is Chick Corea’s second straight concept album based on a novel by L. Ron Hubbard. In order to respond to this music with objectivity, it is necessary to separate it from the trash pulp fiction that inspired it.
Easier said than done. Each of the 19 tracks is based on a character or incident from Hubbard’s 1939 novella, and its lurid sensationalism and overall silliness find their way into Corea’s music. “North Africa” and “Arabian Nights” are unintentionally humorous in their overblown stock exoticism.
Various combinations of six excellent drummers are on hand, including Airto Moreira and Steve Gadd. Yet this percussion-dominated album lacks rhythmic urgency, because tightly programmed excitement quickly loses its edge and becomes back fill. Corea, on banks of keyboard instruments, threads clever, ornate melodies through the drum choir. The capable horn players (Hubert Laws and Jorge Pardo on flute, Tim Garland on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet) try hard, but are constrained by their assigned roles in Corea’s melodramatic musical script.
No one executes electro-jazz-pop with more sleek precision than Chick Corea. But he thinks L. Ron Hubbard is James Joyce. Hubbard writes comic books without pictures. It is difficult for music, or any attempt at creativity, to survive a miscalculation so drastic.
Related Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro