Captain Marvel is a jazz album by Stan Getz released in 1974 on the Columbia Records label. The album features performances by Getz with Chick Corea, who composed most of the material, Stanley Clarke, Airto Moreira and Tony Williams.
One of the more remarkable aspects of Stan Getz's 1972 masterpiece is just how organic he was able to keep the sound. The band surrounding Getz on this Columbia date was led by Chick Corea with his Return to Forever (electric) bassist Stanley Clarke, drummer Tony Williams, and Brazilian master percussionist Airto. With the exception of Clarke, all the rest had played with Miles Davis in his then-experimental electric bands. Corea's Return to Forever was just getting itself off the fusion ground, while Williams had been with John McLaughlin and Larry Young in Lifetime on top of his experience with Davis. But make no mistake, this is a Stan Getz record, his gorgeous tenor tone furiously and fluidly playing through all of Corea's difficult changes on Corea's
Latin carnival jam, "La Fiesta," and shapeshifting his way through mode
changes on "Five Hundred Miles High." The nucleus for the bedrock of Return to Forever was in the Getz laboratory of extended complex harmony and a strict adherence to melodic improvisation. Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" is the space in which Getz teaches the band about dynamic, texture, and ambience -- he even has Clarke bowing his bass. This band, combining as it did the restlessness of electric jazz with Getz's
trademark stubbornness in adhering to those principles that made modern
jazz so great, made for a tension that came pouring out of the speakers
with great mutual respect shining forth from every cut -- especially
the steamy Latin-drenched title track. Captain Marvel is arguably the finest recording Getz made during the 1970s. All Music.
By the time Stan Getz recorded 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, and 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 album's legendary status.
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 Getz the opportunity to utilize his beautiful, romantic
tenor tone in their service.
"La Fiesta" became a mainstay, not
only in Return to Forever's book, but in the books of virtually every
big band out there. Maynard Ferguson and Woody Herman had arrangements,
as did every small working jazz ensemble at the time. 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 keeps the pace 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 in 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 was a Stan Getz album because Getz was 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. by Marshall Bowden.
Prior to forming the innovative fusion band Return To Forever, Chick
Corea, Stanley Clarke and Airto Moreira served valuable apprenticeships
with tenor legend Stan Getz. On this hot classic these four stellar
players joined with ex-Miles Davis drummer Tony Williams and brought
Getz into the electric-jazz era with a powerful kick. The main
highlight is the earth-shaking romp through Corea's up-tempo Latin
groove "La Fiesta", with the pianist conjuring images of Barcelona
table dances and Getz pouring on the fire with a fresh new vigor. Some
of Getz' subsequent electric albums (such as "Children of the World" on
Columbia) were sodden, meandering efforts with few stimulating
moments, but "Captain Marvel" documents a great band with the tenorman
on the threshold of new discoveries. A must-have.
By
Todd Jenkins.
Track listing
All compositions by Chick Corea except as noted.
01 "La Fiesta" – 8:21
02 "Five Hundred Miles High" – 8:09
03 "Captain Marvel" - 5:06
04 "Times Lie" – 9:46
05 "Lush Life" (Billy Strayhorn) – 2:26
06 "Day Waves" – 9:39
Bonus tracks:
07 "Crystal Silence" - 7:47
08 "Captain Marvel" - 5:18
09 "Five Hundred Miles High" - 9:29
Personnel
Stan Getz – tenor saxophone
Chick Corea – electric piano
Stanley Clarke – bass
Airto Moreira – percussion
Tony Williams – drums
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ReplyDeleteSuch a great album. Some of those reviews are wack though. The second one makes it sound like they met for this album. They first played together back in 66 and 67.
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