Chick Corea, Jazz Keyboardist and Innovator, Dies at 79
When jazz and rock fused in the 1970s, he was at the forefront of the movement. But he never abandoned his love of the acoustic piano.

The pianist, composer and bandleader Chick Corea at the Blue Note in Manhattan in 2012. In his long career, he recorded close to 90 albums as a bandleader or co-leader and won 23 Grammys.　Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

By Giovanni Russonello
Feb. 11, 2021
Updated 7:40 p.m. ET

Chick Corea, an architect of the jazz-rock fusion boom in the 1970s who spent more than a half century as one of the foremost pianists in jazz, died on Tuesday at home in Tampa, Fla. He was 79.

The cause was cancer, said Dan Muse, a web and marketing manager for Mr. Corea.

Mr. Corea’s best-known band was Return to Forever, a collective with a rotating membership that nudged the genre of fusion into greater contact with Brazilian, Spanish and other global influences. It also provided Mr. Corea with a palette on which to experiment with a growing arsenal of new technologies.

But throughout his career he never abandoned his first love, the acoustic piano, on which his punctilious touch and crisp sense of harmony made his playing immediately distinctive.

A number of his compositions, including “Spain,” “500 Miles High” and “Tones for Joan’s Bones,” have become jazz standards, all defined by his dreamy but brightly illuminated harmonies and his ear-grabbing melodies.

チック・コリアの訃報が出てびっくりしている。私と生まれ年が同じなのだ。

1985年にキース・ジャレットと来日し、新日本フィルと共演でモーツァルトのピアノコンチェルトの演奏会があり、ゆーぽーと郵便貯金ホールに出かけたのを思い出す。

⇒　この時のビデオ

誰もが”Spain”の素晴らしさに脱帽した。それに歌詞をつけたアル・ジャローも凄かった。

しかし、聴いてもらいたいのは、今はないStalight Junctionのコーラスだ。プロデューサーの宮住自身のアレンジが桁はずれに難解で見事で、スタジャンは泣きながら練習していたのだった。

⇒　スタジャンのSPAIN

（2021/2/12）