Chick Corea - The Montreux Years.

Chick Corea

The Montreux Years 1981-2010

(BMG)

9/10

By Paul Davies.

Culled from a collection of Chick Corea's finest performances at the jazz mecca of Montreux, this seductively produced 180g double heavyweight vinyl release is a superb tribute to this rare and much-missed jazz talent. It's the latest in the Montreux programme of stunning performance releases and it's a carefully curated edit of Corea's repeated visits to this festival. By coincidence, this 23-time Grammy winner also performed 23 times at Montreux and the performances nailed into these heavy grooves are lifted from seven shows. 2001's performance of Fingerprints, from Chick's award-winning album Trilogy, expertly eases the aficionado into this tailor-made compilation. 

The superb audio fidelity of this full campaign of recordings is due to the legendary founder Claude Nobs refusing to compromise on sound quality. Released from Claude Nobs' private collection, these rare and unreleased tracks further benefit from the MQA mastering that capture the original sound all thanks to the uncompromising ethos surrounding the source material. The earliest recording, and final track, is 1981's Trinkle Tinkle, from Chick’s Piano Variations Vol 2 landmark '72 album, and jumping forward to 1988 for Quartet No 2 (Pt 1) the inimitable fast and flowing style of Corea freshly follows through this seven-year gap. The most recent inclusions of America (Continents Pt 4), from 2006, and 2010's Bud Powell are unmistakably Corea, and this is the beauty of this release as it reveals the organic development and sweeping jazz fusion interpretations by this pioneering master of the genre. Don’t let Swiss time run out. This is an essential addition to the vinyl collection of all jazz-fusion enthusiasts.