A FEW days before kicking off their big reunion here, the members of the jazz-rock band Return to Forever shared a moment of collective astonishment. The keyboardist Chick Corea, the bassist Stanley Clarke, the guitarist Al Di Meola and the drummer Lenny White were gearing up to perform together for the first time in 25 years, headlining large concert halls in the jazz equivalent of a blockbuster tour. What blew their minds, during a rehearsal, was the sound of their former selves.
“We were trying to work out 'Vulcan Worlds,' “ Mr. Corea, 67, said the following afternoon, referring to a turbocharged tune by Mr. Clarke. “So Lenny said: 'Hey, I've got this live recording we did in 1975. Let's listen to it, see what we did with it.' “
He chuckled. “Kind of reoriented me a little bit. Because it was the peak of the band back then, '75, when it was really free, and we were playing these incredible improvisations. I thought, 'You know, in a sense it's like we're starting out again.' “
Mr. Clarke, 57, sitting next to Mr. Corea in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel, agreed: “Someone asked me a little while ago, did I regret that we waited so long? I have two answers to that. One is, yeah, it would have been nice. But the other answer is that we all play better now."
The tour, which began in late May and wraps up on Thursday and Friday at the United Palace in Washington Heights, marks a moment of reassessment for jazz- rock, the combustible hybrid also known more broadly as fusion. Long understood as a popular but polemical style, it has often been accused of commercial motivations and hyperactive excess. In most conservative histories of jazz, notably the Ken Burns documentary on PBS, fusion is even cast as a scourge, responsible for the wholesale coarsening of the art.
