Chick Corea: Piano Improvisations Vol.1 (Luminessence Series LP)

Chick Corea's first unaccompanied album marked the beginning of the solo piano idiom on ECM and proved to be extremely influential. As well as music that emerged from the moment, it featured some strong melodies, not least "Sometime Ago", which soon became the hallmark of Chick Corea's Return To Forever. ECM's pioneering presentation of solo piano music was one of the genre-changing experiments of the early 1970s, and this beautifully recorded session by Chick Corea at Oslo's Bendiksen Studio in April 1971 marked the beginning of this new development. "Piano Improvisations Vol. 1" has long since achieved the status of a classic. With "Sometime Ago", it contains a foretaste of the richly melodic and Latin-influenced music that Chick would introduce a year later in the first Return To Forever band, but most of the pieces here were simply pulled from the ether. Corea, it turned out, had an uncanny ability to form full-fledged compositions in real time. Corea: "This was an intense time of discovery for me. The recordings of the "Piano Improvisations" were made spontaneously in the studio. I recorded the next idea that came into my head, played it in and then titled it later. It was a new way of creating for me at the time. I wasn't sure what the result would be - but I just had fun trying it out to see what would happen..." This enthusiasm is palpable in the recording produced by Manfred Eicher. The Luminessence vinyl edition of "Piano Improvisations Vol. 1" comes in a gatefold gatefold sleeve with Chick's own notes and a text by Neil Tesser that sheds light on the impact of the music in its historical context.