The Well-Tempered Clavierist
For most of its recent tour, the Chick Corea Trio has opened its concerts with a seemingly ordinary tuning ritual.
Corea plays a series of As in the piano’s middle register. Christian McBride adjusts his bass as needed. Brian Blade, drums impeccably pre-tuned, tests a few brush strokes on the snare drum. Business as usual.
And then Corea offers that same A 440 to the audience.
He politely requests that they sing an A back. After several more such exchanges, there comes a curveball: a short three-note phrase. As Corea repeats the phrase, he makes conductor-like gestures. The next one is more intricate—a ringtone from a galaxy with faster mental processing. This loses people. Chick Corea smiles a delighted evil-professor smile and keeps going, adding a tritone monkey wrench, upping the degree of difficulty.
It’s a little gimmicky, this call-and-response game. The performance equivalent of jumping jacks before gym class.
But on the night I caught the group, at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, its effect was outsized. After the tuning, when the first plaintive rubato notes of “500 Miles High” arrived, the audience seemed alert and fully receptive, ready to listen, primed for something other than the usual “legend playing the greatest hits” experience.
Musicians rely on tuning to create a sense of unity on the bandstand. Corea’s tuning game widens the circle, luring concertgoers into the trio’s workspace, making them participants. In the age of 24/7 handheld distraction machines, it’s a gentle bit of subversion, an end run around attention deficit disorder.
“At first I did it for a lark,” Corea explains. “And then I found out that beyond just a fun moment we might have with the audience, it sets us up for great communication right at the beginning of the show.”
Blade goes further: “You know, people initially might be shy to sing out, if they’re alone. But they hear the whole room is doing it, and what a congregational beauty that brings. It makes everybody loosen up … Chick is all about engaging with people, and this opens the door and invites them to share in the experience.”
Sure enough, that’s what happens. For nearly two hours, the hall is a zone of active listening. The three musicians play at a hushed or moderate volume, Blade mostly on brushes,
