Tag Archives: Chick Corea

Marking the Double Nought Milestones

My blogdaddy Nightsky hit 200 posts, for which the only appropriate response is a full length movie.

By uncanny coincidence, Whud Yuhd Faye is also hitting the double noughts at the same time. Five double oh, people. Yes, this post is the big five double-a-rooni. Five. Oh. Oh.

In this epic but pathetically doomed Oedipal struggle, yours truly, the miscreant son, has been trying to outdo Dad with all that manic posting, especially in the initial months of this blogging adventure. Predictably, the results have been questionable in terms of quality . . . but, by gosh . . . THERE’S NO QUESTION AT ALL IN TERMS OF QUANTITY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And like Nightsky, we celebrate by playing with numbers. In our case, we will start with five and lay on the zeroes one by one until we get to 500. Let us begin!

OK, I’ve never been a huge Brubeck fan, but he definitely had his moments and this was one of them.

“Take Five,” with Paul Desmond (sax), Eugene Wright (bass), Joe Morello (drums). The album Time Out (1959) was the first jazz album to go past platinum. I just remembered: I was also told Brubeck took a spiritual direction with his music later in life, which is something we’ll have to investigate for our Sunday selections.

Anyway, Wikipedia tells me Dave Brubeck suffered a serious spinal injury after diving into the Hawaiian surf in 1951. (Hey, fifties!) Not good for Dave Brubeck. But who knows what graces came out of it, including a life path that led to the first jazz album to go past platinum? One good thing that definitely came out of that incident, though, is that it gives me a nifty little segue to the next clip, which may be among the top five, certainly the top ten tv show themes EVER!

And now, all we need is one more zero, which we find supplied by none other than Chick Corea and Return to Forever.

“500 Miles High,” from Light as a Feather (1973). Chick Corea (keyboards), Flora Purim (vocals), Joe Farrell (sax), Stanley Clark (bass), Airto Moreira (percussion). (I want you to know that I wrote all that album info from my head, and when I went back to check the only thing I got wrong was that Joe Farrell has two “l”s at the end of his name, not one.)

Let it also be known that my other blog associates, that zany, rollicking hippie commune that has come to be known as The Blog of Funny Names, also hit the big 5-0-0 not too long ago. I’m only a little behind.

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