Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy: Return to Forever:

featuring Chick Corea (Polydor) Reviewed by Richard Best.

Take it or leave it, there's a definite vacant lot somewhere in my head.

Where others nestle folks like Eddie Harris, Gary Burton, Herbie Hancock et al. in carefully allocated brain pockets, the word that has most to do with the aforementioned — jazz — is like salt in tea to my mind.

For all that, and obediently nodding one's head to those in-the-know who would say that Chick Corea has more to do with modern jazz than pop, I give you CC's Return to Forever which has more to do with out-of-the-mainstream rock than pop. Or jazz.

Actually, Tony Williams' Lifetime sounded more like jazz to the untrained ear and that band's half-a-dozen albums of straight excess, so Ralph Gleason writes, were more a marriage of rock and somethin or other than jazz.

So what the mickey looloo is Chick Corea playing at?

McLaughlinese, precisely, and if I am the seventeenth to state thus, apologies but the comparisons really are quite apparent.

The lighter side of the affairs is in Corea's unblushing theft from McLaughlin of all that shimmering intensity and its final transformation into Heavy without the God bog-down, and musical less McLaughlin's unstoppable just for complexity.

Even with Return to Forever's tricky-dick attitude to stuid work — where they plug in every available gimmick and more — and some grating time changes. "Galaxy" is the first truly listenable "progressive" record since "The Yes Album". And that was in 1971.

Oh, and it's relatively Cosmic — if you need it.