“I never particularly liked the banjo,” announced Chick Corea on the stage of the Orpheum on Saturday, April 16. “But in this man’s hands, it’s nothing short of wonderful,” Corea landed, pointing at his partner Béla Fleck who has toured with him around the world in the past eight years.
“There’s something about a duo. It’s very intimate and it’s very focused and I’m very much reacting to one of my favorite musicians and a formative musician in my musical world because [Corea]’s someone I focused in on early on, soon after I started playing the banjo he became a hero to me. And for me to sort of have time on the bandstand with an older musician that’s a venerable musician, a genius of jazz, one of the top jazz musicians in the world, get to explore with him is one of the greatest experiences of my life.”
— Bela Fleck
Photo by Noé Cugny.
That sense of versatility was evident throughout the two sets Corea and Fleck played that night, not only in the way they found ways to blend the piano and banjo sounds coherently, but more importantly in how they accomplished it through a vast array of musical traditions and idioms.
Jumping from Scarlatti’s piece to a bluegrass song in Bill Monroe’s “Jerusalem Ridge,” on to their own composition, landing back on classical with a 20th century piece from Henri Dutilleux, and so on.
This roller coaster of different sounds seduced the Orpheum’s attentive audience, who granted the duo a standing ovation after yet another burst of virtuosity.
“You have survived a night of complex, intricate music,” Fleck congratulated the crowd before closing out the show, only to be back for a lighter encore of popular compositions from each artist’s book. Fleck’s “The Sinister Minister,”and finally Corea’s “Armando’s Rhumba,” appeased the crowd’s unspoken wish for renditions of nostalgic hits, before sending them off, on a cloud of completeness and satisfaction.
All photos by Noé Cugny. Click here to view the full gallery on Flickr.
Photo by Noé Cugny
