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ecording The Dealer or the Chuck Berry licks
inserted into his solo on the title track.
Coryell’s subsequent experiments with The
Free Spirits—tenor saxophonist Jim Pepper,
rhythm guitarist Chip Baker, bassist Chris Hills
and drummer Bob Moses—further bridged the
worlds of jazz and rock, pre-dating the formation
of Blood, Sweat & Tears, which also blended
horns and rock rhythms with pop singing
and jazzy improvisation. The Free Spirits’ 1967
ABC Records debut, Out Of Sight And Sound,
is often called the first-ever jazz-rock album.
Although tunes like “Cosmic Daddy Dancer”
and “Tattoo Man” meld the psychedelic aesthetic
of the times with Coryell’s tough guitar
solos and Pepper’s free-jazz flights on tenor,
this LP, with its three-minutes-or-less-persong
approach, didn’t reflect the way the band
would stretch out in concert, opening shows for
Hendrix and The Doors. Coryell left The Free
Spirits shortly after the album was released.
He subsequently joined the Gary Burton
Quartet and made more musical history in
April 1967 by playing on Duster, another seminal
jazz-rock album. His debut as a leader came
the following year, with the Vanguard LP Lady
Coryell, where he’s joined by Moses, Jimmy
Garrison (bass) and Elvin Jones (drums).
Coryell participated in yet another landmark
recording with his 1970 album Spaces,
which featured an all-star cast of John
McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Miroslav Vitous
and Billy Cobham, well before the formation
of Weather Report, Return To Forever or the
Mahavishnu Orchestra.
At the time of DownBeat’s post-election
phone call to Coryell in Orlando, he was busy
working on a piano reduction for his next opera,
an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
His first opera, based on Tolstoy’s War and
Peace, received its world premiere in Slovenia in
2013 and was staged in Russia in 2014, with help
from the U.S. Embassy there. “It went over huge
in Russia,” he said. “The audience went absolutely
crazy. And it was also a good diplomatic
exercise in showing how through love of music
and culture you can have a dialogue between
what are ostensibly enemies.”
The world premiere for Coryell’s Anna
Karenina will take place in May. Plans are
already in place to stage his third opera,
Ulysses, based on the James Joyce novel, in
Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 2018, which is officially
Bloomsday, an annual commemoration
and celebration of the life of the Irish author.
“Fortunately, I obtained from one of his family
members while in Ireland a ‘companion book’
telling how to read the original, in terms of
what he means or may mean,” Coryell said. “So,
I am slowly extracting content from the book
and converting it to music.”
Opera, it turns out, is a relatively recent passion
for the godfather of fusion guitar. The seed
was planted several years ago when he first
heard Barney Kessel’s 1959 Contemporary
album Carmen, on which the great guitarist
adapted pieces from the Georges Bizet opera.
But it wasn’t until 2010, when Coryell encountered
a series of Maria Callas performances
on German TV, via YouTube, that the opera
bug bit hard. “I was enamored by these videos
of Callas,” he said. “She had a tone like Ben
Webster … it was so deep, just unbelievable.
She had to sit through eight or nine minutes of
the overture, but when she started to sing, she
was truly transfigured. And it reminded me of
when I saw Wes play. When you see a genius
like a Wes Montgomery or a Maria Callas, they
have this look when they’re in the heat of battle.
It’s the look of eagles, and I saw it on her.”
Between the Eleventh House reunion, the
solo project and his immersion into opera,
Coryell was thriving artistically through the
first half of 2016. But all his forward momentum
came to a crashing halt for a period of
three months—from June to August.
“On June 2, I had a sinus operation that
went wrong,” he explained. “The doctor went
into my brain by accident with the laser. So
FEBRUARY 2017 DOWNBEAT 37