By the time Stan Getz recorded the album Captain Marvel
with Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, Tony Williams, and Airto
Moreira, he had been in the music business for nearly thirty
years, and was widely revered as world-class jazz musician
with a unique tenor sax voice. Getz began his career during
the big band era, and cut his teeth with bandleaders as diverse
as Stan Kenton, Benny Goodman, and Woody Herman. A leader
of swinging small groups throughout the ‘50s, Getz spent
some time in Europe following a career disruption caused by
long-standing drug problems. He returned to the U.S. in time
to help sustain the Brazilian jazz-bossa craze, recording
a series of albums with Joao Gilberto and wife Astrud Gilberto
that remain among the most popular jazz recordings of all
time. Getz continued to work and record at home and abroad
throughout the 1960s, but by the end of the decade and the
start of the next, things were changing rapidly. Traditional
post-bop jazz was on the ropes, and there were a lot of new
sounds in the air, many of them thanks to Miles Davis and
his amazingly talented coterie of young sidemen. Getz was
interested in putting together a new book of tunes for his
return to New York following a European stay.
Chick Corea, a young pianist who had cut his teeth with Miles
Davis’s first electric bands, recorded a couple of amazing
trio dates under his own name, then moved on to form the avant-garde
improvisational group Circle, was in the process of writing
for and forming a new band that would be known as Return to
Forever. The group would expand on Davis’s moves toward
electric music and musical forms that communicated more directly
with the listener than the abstract jazz of the late 1960s.
Corea and Getz crossed paths, and the idea of forming a quintet
with Getz took hold. Corea brought along percussionist Airto
Moreira and 20 year-old bass phenom Stanley Clarke. Rehearsals
began, but according to the original liner notes by Albert
Goldman, the project wasn’t quite jelling until Getz
brought in drummer Tony Williams. Corea’s reminiscences
in the new liner notes suggest that he brought the entire
group to Getz, which makes sense since Corea and Williams
had known each other for some time, even before they played
together with Miles. In any event, the band worked out the
arrangements and opened at New York City’s Rainbow Room
to wild acclaim and lines of potential listeners outside.
Following the engagement that group went into the studio and
recorded Captain Marvel, long acknowledged as one
of the best jazz recordings of the ‘70s and a return
to form for Getz. Sony Legacy has now reissued the album,
remastered and with three additional tracks that only add
to the legendary status of the album.
Chick Corea composed five of the six tracks on the original
album, and that fact says much about both Corea as a composer
and Getz as a mature artist who knew talent when he heard
it. There are many other artists who would not have felt comfortable
recording the compositions of another, younger musician and
allowing their young band so much room on something of a “comeback”
album, but Getz was never an artist subsumed by ego, preferring
instead to do whatever was necessary to provide the best musical
experience possible. It also didn’t hurt that the pieces
themselves had a heavy Latin flavor, which lent itself well
to Getz’ propensity for rhythmic improvisation, nor
that Corea’s soaring melodic lines allowed Stan the
opportunity to utilize his beautiful, romantic tenor tone
in their service.
“La Fiesta” became a mainstay, not only of Return
to Forever’s book, but to the books of virtually every
big band out there. Maynard Ferguson and Woody Herman had
arrangements, as did virtually every small working jazz ensemble
out there. Alternating between a paso doble and a bright,
major-key melody that is as catchy as a top-40 pop song, it’s
an irresistible piece that instantly creates goodwill between
musicians and audience. Clarke roams at will across the lower
range of the group’s sound while Williams drives the
piece with an almost unbelievable energy, fusing the vigor
of flamenco and the unexpected accents of bebop with the exciting
drama of rock.
Corea’s Fender Rhodes work is transcendent on the entire
album. The only musician with as fully developed a conception
of the electric piano was Herbie Hancock, but the way the
two pianists approached the instrument was worlds apart. To
Corea the instrument’s very sound connoted magic, and
the fullness and beauty of the tones he wrings from it could
not have been done with an acoustic piano. He’s the
perfect foil for Getz, both supporting him and driving him
forward without ever becoming intrusive. The first bonus track,
a performance of the Corea ballad “Crystal Silence”
shows how this new electric instrument could profoundly expand
the language available to jazz keyboard players. In the wrong
hands, of course, it could be cloying, but Corea is one of
the best to ever play the instrument. The alternate versions
of “Captain Marvel” and “Five Hundred Miles
High” show that this band was creating at a high level,
and that the improvisation undertaken by Getz and Corea in
particular, was everything that jazz music had ever been and
should be. In short, the fact that Getz was recording with
a group of musicians who were leading jazz into the direction
of fusion did nothing to alter his distinctive style. Though
he was updating his sound and using the music of the day as
a springboard, he was in no way attempting to merely do something
that seemed fashionable at the time. Captain Marvel is
a Stan Getz album because Getz is the nominal “leader”
and the only horn player here, but ultimately this was a collaborative
album by a group of musicians who were highly attuned to each
other, and that is why the album has endured, and still sounds
fresh today, some thirty years since it was recorded.
