Chick Corea and the JLCO
Wynton and Chick Corea (photo by: Frank Stewart)This has been an inspirational week of rehearsing with the great Chick Corea. Chick is gracious, attentive and purely musical. He was instructional with astute technical adjustments as well as brilliant in his comping and soloing.
Concise, deeply intelligent, playfully interactive and coherent on-the-fly, we have thoroughly enjoyed this experience. Vincent, Ted, Sherman, Victor, Marcus, Ali, and Carlos came in with imaginative, well crafted, difficult and original arrangements (12 new ones including mine).
Our music preparation team, led by the unsinkable Kay Niewood, did its usual stellar and impeccable job.
J. Kelly sent me a message that sums up what our week was, "9,910 notes this weekend…it felt like a ton of work becuz it WAS a ton of work….nice job."
By nice job he meant himself because there were maybe 2 copying mistakes out of those 10,000.
Yeah, we work at JALC.
The band is looking forward to tonight.
We can't wait.
Wynton