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Salient. Official Newspaper of Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. Vol 40 No. 20. August 8 1977

Return to Forever

Return to Forever

Jazz in the mid-seventies is so closely interwoven with rock elements and, more recently and more thoroughly, with soul elements, especially the inescapable disco beat, that jazz addicts may begin to question the honesty and worth of musicians who continually use the disco beat underneath carefully worked out, repetitive and often boring horn riffs, guitar licks and so forth. There seems to be far less emphasis on solo improvisation. Solos are either short and sharp, sounding as if it had been rotated by the arranger; or are long meandering excuses with no hope of gaining interest from the incessant two chord disco shuffle beneath. Vocal passages have gained importance in this "pop-jazz" phase, the lyrics being mostly soul-food rehashes. When Stevie Wonder released "Music of my Mind" in 1972, it was obvious that this was the very best of "new" soul music owing much to the ideas of jazz musicial but now these musicians are in their turn being influenced by the Wonder-recipe which, second time around, unfortunately begins to taste somewhat stale.

Narada Michael Walden plugged himself in to these formulae and came up with a dull and trivial set. Chick Corea and Stanely Clarke in Return To Forever, although they have been influenced by the commercial values of the disco beat, do not drown their musical artistic integrities by the over-observance of the laws of certain formulae The stance they take enables them to head towards a greater public acceptance as well as creating music which is well above the level of trite. As Corea says "our intention remains the same — musical fun with no barriers of style of type of audience". It is just that — musical fun played extremely well. And I like the record because of that. The material is not that exciting, but the way it has been fitted together is. Corea on all keyboards strides through the performance with complete assurance; Clarke puts together some technically brilliant solos and contributes two fine songs; Joe Farrell blows all the reed solos — he's good; Gayle Moran, although not as important a singer as Flora Purim was to the early RTF, is clear and exacting. One thing I like most on the album are Corea's brass arrangements on all tracks. They are quite adventurous and overwhelming, giving RTF a much larger sound than usual.

There are only six songs — listen to each one. They are all enjoyable musical fun.

— Tim Nees