Chick Corea - My Spanish Heart (1976)
Front Cover Album Info
Artist/Composer Chick Corea
Title My Spanish Heart
Length 68:15 Discs: 1 Tracks: 16
Format CD Packaging Digipac
Label Polygram Cat. Number 543303
Style Fusion; Post-Bop Rating
Recorded październik 1976 
Musicians Credits
Chick Corea piano, keyboards
Gayle Moran voice, chorus
Don Alias percussion
Steve Gadd drums
various string section
various brass section
Jean Luc Ponty violin
Stanley Clarke bass
Producer Richard Seidel
Engineer Bernie Kirsh
Mastering Bob Ludwig
Track list
01
Love Castle 04:48
02
The Gardens 03:14
03
Day Danse 04:29
04
My Spanish Heart 01:42
05
Night Streets 06:04
06
The Hilltop 06:18
07
The Sky 05:02
08
Wind Danse 05:22
09
Armando's Rhumba 01:36
10
Prelude To El Bozo 02:54
11
El Bozo, Part I 02:05
12
El Bozo, Part II 05:05
13
El Bozo, Part III 06:08
14
Spanish Fantasy, Part I 05:16
15
Spanish Fantasy, Part II 03:08
16
Spanish Fantasy, Part III 05:04
Notes
AMG Review (4 1/2):
This 1976 release features Chick Corea in what was then, and remains, a unique musical setting. While it is truly an electric jazz fusion record, it is also the only solo recording of Corea's on which he attempted to truly explore the Latin side of his musical heritage. My Spanish Heart marks a full-scale, yet thoroughly modern, exploration in the musical lineage Corea sprang from. Making full use of synthesizer technology, a string section, and synth-linked choruses — of two voices, his own and that of Gayle Moran — as well as percussionist Don Alias, drummer Steve Gadd, a full brass section, and the sparse use of Jean Luc Ponty ("Armando's Rumba") and bassist Stanley Clark, Corea largely succeeded in creating a Spanish/Latin tapestry of sounds, textures, impressions, and even two suites — "Spanish Fantasy" and "El Boro." The string quartet performs its intricate and gorgeously elegant arrangements with verve and grace on "Day Danse" and on the suites, with Corea's contrapuntal pianism creating a sharp yet warm contrast to the shifting tempos, wild interval leaps, and shimmering timbral balances that occur. The only pieces that sound dated on this double-album-length set are the fusion pieces, which are, with their production and knotty stop-and-start modulations and key signature equations — complete with aggressive arpeggios and scalar linguistics — destined to be limited in expression by the voice of their use of technology. Thus, "Love Castles," "The Gardens," and "Night Streets" suffer from their rather cheesy production despite their tastefully done double fusion semantics (jazz to rock to Latin music). There is no doubt that Corea's musicianship was up to any task he chose at this point in time. Simply put, he was compositionally and intellectually at the top of his game, and this record, despite the many of his that haven't aged well, still surprises despite its production shortcomings. — Thom Jurek