A teenager in a tailored tuxedo playing Dixieland in a Boston club does not look like the future inventor of jazz fusion, but that is where Armando Anthony Chick Corea started. This episode follows his path from Chelsea, Massachusetts, where his trumpet-playing father sat him at the piano at age four, through classical lessons with Salvatore Sullo, a drum kit at eleven, and a brief stop at Juilliard before he walked away to learn on New York bandstands. Sideman work with Mongo Santamaria and Stan Getz fed his Latin and bossa nova vocabulary, and 1968 brought both the acoustic masterpiece Now He Sings, Now He Sobs and his entry into Miles Davis’s electric band for In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew.

The hosts trace his restless run through the avant-garde group Circle with Dave Holland, solo improvisations for ECM, the founding of Return to Forever in 1972 and its transformation from airy Brazilian-tinged music with Flora Purim and Stanley Clarke into an arena-scale fusion powerhouse with Al Di Meola and Lenny White. They also report on his lifelong involvement in Scientology after reading Dianetics in 1968, the 1993 exclusion from a state-subsidized concert in Stuttgart and the legal fight that followed, his celebrated duets with Gary Burton and Herbie Hancock, the piano concerto version of Spain premiered with the London Philharmonic, a 2016 Blue Note residency with more than 20 ensembles, and his death in 2021 at 79 with 29 Grammy Awards to his name.

• How classical training and a drummer’s instincts shaped Corea’s percussive attack on the piano
• Why leaving Juilliard was a declaration of independence rather than career suicide
• The Fender Rhodes, the Isle of Wight Festival, and the birth of electric fusion with Miles Davis
• Return to Forever’s evolution and the pivot away from avant-garde music toward connection
• Duets, string quartets, and a 75th-birthday residency that refused nostalgia