Chick Corea Trio - Thursday, February 1, 2018 at 7:30 pm

Chick Corea has attained iconic status in music. He’s the fourth most nominated artists in Grammy Award history with 63 nods and 22 wins, in addition to a number of Latin Grammy’s. The keyboardist, composer and bandleader is a DownBeat Hall of Famer and NEA Jazz Master, as well as the fourth-most nominated artist in Grammy Awards history with 63 nods – and 22 wins, in addition to a number of Latin Grammy's. From straight-ahead to avant-garde, bebop to jazz-rock fusion, children’s songs to chamber and symphonic works, Chick has touched an astonishing number of musical bases in his career since playing with the genre-shattering bands of Miles Davis in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Yet Chick has never been more productive than in the 21st century, whether playing acoustic piano or electric keyboards, leading multiple bands, performing solo or collaborating with a who’s who of music. Underscoring this, he has been named “Artist of the Year” three times this decade in the DownBeat Readers Poll.

As a pianist, keyboardist, composer and bandleader, Corea has helped define jazz’s vanguard for half a century, ever since recording his classic debut album Tones for Joan’s Bones in 1966. While he’s never stopped forging ahead, every once in a while Corea honors an artist he considers a formative influence, like his masterly 1996 album Remembering Bud Powell, which features an all-star cast re-visioning the bebop patriarch’s compositions through a post-bop lens. Corea recorded a similar homage to Evans on 2012’s Further Explorations, a double live album featuring two essential alumni of Evans’ trios, Gomez and drum maestro Paul Motian. Investigating Evans compositions, standards inextricably linked to the pianist, and some originals, the trio paid Evans the deepest respect by using the music to fully express themselves. Corea revisits the Evans homage with Gomez and drummer extraordinaire Brian Blade, a member of the protean trio with Christian McBride that earned Corea his 22nd Grammy Award last year for the three-disc Trilogy.

Born in 1941 in Massachusetts, Chick remains a tireless creative spirit, continually reinventing himself through his art. As The New York Times has said, he is “a luminary, ebullient and eternally youthful.”