Every once in a great while, the stars align and the muses visit a recording studio to smile beneficently on the musicians assembled there. How else to account for the ineffable chemistry that infuses the best jazz albums? Well, the muses were working overtime when vibraphonist Gary Burton arranged the first recording encounter between pianist Chick Corea and guitarist Pat Metheny, and recruited an impeccable rhythm section staffed by bassist Dave Holland and drum legend Roy Haynes. Like Minds (CCD-4803-2), the resulting album, ranks among these musicians best work, with the kind of soul-deep communication that is often expected but so rarely occurs on all-star sessions.
"The very first take of the first tune was terrific and in one day we did eight songs, one after another," Gary says. "It was everything we had hoped it would be, in terms of feeling comfortable playing together. That was the big question for us. Would it be as magical a thing as we thought it should be? Sometimes you have great expectations and then it doesn't turn out. You never know."
Burton's third album for Concord Jazz, Like Minds captures the quintet playing their own adventurous compositions at a superlative level of intuitive interplay. Profound and playful, sophisticated and emotionally direct, the music is the expression of five highly distinctive personalities collaborating without ego and with complete confidence in each other. With nine of the album's 10 tracks composed by band members--including dazzling new works by Chick, Pat and Gary--the session is the perfect melding of musicians and material.
"The magic of this for me was that we all have these really long connections and yet with the exception of Roy there was at least one person who each of us had not played with yet," Burton says. "Roy was the only one who had worked fairly extensively with all of us. Pat and I talk about it constantly-- if the drummer has a bad night we all have a bad night. With Roy, we all knew this was the best we could get. He absolutely knew what was the best for each of us, like he almost shifted gears as he went from soloist to soloist and did what he knew we would be most comfortable with."
While Haynes is the only player on Like Minds to have worked with all four musicians before, the interconnections between these players are extensive. Indeed, tracing the various bands, tours and recordings that Burton, Corea, Metheny, Haynes and Holland have shared would require a flow chart the size of Manhattan. Each of the players cites the longstanding connections between them as the explanation for the album's extrasensory musical interaction.
"All of us except Dave have worked in Gary's group at one time or another, "Chick notes. "Roy and Pat worked extensively with Gary's band and made some wonderful and memorable recordings. I followed Gary into the Stan Getz quartet around '65 and that's where I met and worked with Roy for the first time. And I had some wonderful years with Dave both in the Miles Davis group of in the late '60s and early '70s and then with our group Circle for a few years. Pat and I have jammed together a few times but this was the first time we really worked together on a project. So the musical connections and friendships were very much already well established amongst us all."
Metheny, who was partly responsible for setting the session in motion by mentioning to Gary his desire to record with Chick, reminds that the band can be seen as a combination of the trio captured on his "Question and Answer" album and the classic duo of Gary and Chick.
"In fact, the tune 'Question and Answer' was the first thing we played on the session and ended up being the first tune on the record," Pat says. "That record 'Question and Answer' was actually the first time that Dave and Roy had played together. I had always felt that they would be an incredible match for each other. We then did a lot of touring as a trio following that record's release. And of course, Chick has played extensively with both of them, so right from the first note, it sounded like a band. The years that Gary and I have played together let us phrase and interact together in a way that always kind of surprises me for its familiarity."
In hindsight, the session seems like a no-brainer, but actually a whole series of apprehensions had to be overcome in order to make it happen. Chick and Dave hadn't worked together since their days in the avant garde band Circle. And it had been almost three decades since Gary and Chick played together with a rhythm section. Both players briefly wondered whether it made sense to tamper with the rapport they have established as one of jazz's most inspired duos.
"And I think Chick and Pat were both a little nervous about recording together for the first time," Gary says, "'Will we be in each other's way? How will I comp for him? How's he gonna comp for me? It's always a little more complicated when you're all chord players."
Turns out all the worries were for naught. The band establishes its distinctive sound immediately, with each player taking ample space to develop his own ideas. The music is complex and beautifully textured without being busy, while each player builds on and supports the other.
"What I really love about this record is the conversational nature of the playing," Pat comments. "There is an enormous amount of activity going on there, but it is always clear and focused, the result of the way that everyone was really listening to each other. To have three chordal instruments playing that much together without stepping all over each other is difficult. We did it by each of us thinking in an almost orchestral way, playing smaller kinds of voicings and really following each other as little harmonic suggestions were implied by one or the other of us and then instantly adjusting."
Except for George Gershwin's standard "Soon," all the material on Like Minds was written by the musicians on the session. Gary supplied two tunes, his piece "Country Roads" from his 1969 RCA album "Country Roads and Other Places," and the title track, a new piece composed for the session. His boundless respect for his bandmates' composing skills almost kept him from using his own pieces, but Pat and Chick both insisted Gary include his own tunes.
"At first I didn't intend to write anything," Gary admits. "I'm a guy who comes up with a tune every three or four years. Then Pat said, 'Oh no, I want you to do one of these two tunes of yours that I like.' Chick's always after me to write stuff anyway, and he said, 'No you're not getting away with it, you've got to do a piece for the session.' I still feel slightly embarrassed about having two of my tunes amidst theirs, but it wasn't my idea."
Metheny contributed four tunes, including his classic "Question and Answer," a new piece, the up tempo burner "Elucidation," "For A Thousand Years," first recorded on a Marc Johnson session, and the gorgeous, elegiac "Tears of Rain," from Metheny's duo session with Charlie Haden "Beyond the Missouri Sky." On that album Pat and the bassist played the piece as a thoughtful, melancholy aural watercolor.
"I had always kind of pictured Roy in my mind on the middle section of that tune, and the rich kinds of harmonic ensemble potentials of the head itself seemed like a nice opportunity for the three chordal instruments to play" says Pat.
Chick revisited one of his classics, "Windows," for the first time in almost three decades. At first Gary wrote out an arrangement, but Chick had his own ideas.
"Chick said 'no way'," Gary recalls. "He took one listen to it and said no, 'I've gotta do it'. He came back with his own version of it. We recorded it and as we finished the take, and as I did with all of them, I said 'Anyone want to another take? And Chick almost instantly said, 'That was the take.' And it was lovely, he was right, there was nothing that needed fixing."
Chick composed the beautiful, elegiac ballad "Futures" specifically for the session with these musicians in mind. He and Gary had been discussing the up-coming recording while touring together in Japan.
"He had gotten Yamaha to bring over a piano to his hotel room for the four days we were in Osaka, with the express intention of writing a tune by the time we left town," Gary recalls. "The second day he called down to my room, and said I think I've got one. And I loved it. It was very un-Chick like, very spacey and moody. It was perfect for me and perfect for Pat in terms of the colors of our instruments."
By all accounts, the session unfolded like a dream. Though Gary had met with both Chick and Pat beforehand to sketch out arrangements, the five musicians shaped each piece in the studio, running through ideas, concentrating fully on the music without the distractions of competition or ego.
"We're all standing in our spots with our headphones on and talking over the microphones as we're preparing the tunes or doing the takes and the conversation was unlike any record date I've ever done," Gary reports. "We either were talking incredibly freely about the music--'No, you play the second chorus. Why don't you substitute this part in there? And Dave how do you feel about that?' It became a really democratic decision making process. As people made suggestions, what worked was so obvious."
The 55-year-old Burton has a long track record of assembling bands that develop exceptional chemistry and a distinctive sound. A brilliant improvisor with a wide open musical sensibility, Gary has collaborated with everyone from the greatest jazz players to Nashville country musicians and Argentine tango masters. He has long been a pillar of the jazz education community through his work at Berklee College of Music, where he was dean of curriculum from 1985-1995 and is now executive vice president.
A self-taught vibraphonist, Gary appeared on the scene in the early '60s as a young man with stunning, unprecedented four-mallet technique and an approach that revealed his early experiences playing with country and western guitarist Hank Garland. His early recordings for RCA revealed a rapidly maturing improvisational imagination, and by 1966 he had formed his first classic quartet with guitarist Larry Coryell, bassist Steve Swallow and Roy Haynes (later Bob Moses). By explicitly incorporating elements of country and rock, the group paved the way for the fusion movement a few years later, while exploring material by such challenging composers as Swallow, Carla Bley and Michael Gibbs.
In the early '70s, Gary hooked up with Manfred Eicher and ECM and began recording a series of gorgeous, melodically driven albums with Swallow, Moses, guitarist Mick Goodrick and bassist Eberhard Weber. In 1974 the teenage Pat Metheny joined Gary's band, where the Missouri-bred guitarist meshed perfectly with Gary's sound.
"I always attribute a lot of how we hit it off musically to that we've got this common mid-Western background," Gary says. "And Pat grew up listening to my records. He said he listened to 'Lofty Fake Anagram' a thousand times when he was 15. The same thing happened with me and Chick. We both came of age musically in Boston and the same local players were our mentors and influences. We grew up in the same era musically so we have the same repertoire of bebop tunes and standards. So when we finally did get comfortable playing together, one of the reasons I've always assumed that we have a really strong rapport is that we've had such common experiences in our backgrounds."
The confluence of connections--geographical, intellectual and musical-- resounds throughout Like Minds, an album that sets a shining new marker on the long road that Gary, Pat, Chick, Roy and Dave have all traveled down together. Indeed, the album's title only begins to suggest the depth of communication reached on a recording that adds up to the sum of its very impressive parts.
