Free Jazz Trio in the Avant-Garde Moment
Open-eared listeners who enjoy avant-garde jazz will find much to savor in these fascinating performances.
Circulus arrives as pure sound exploration—Chick Corea on piano, Dave Holland on bass, and Barry Altschul on drums working without a net, no heads, no safety of melody. What you hear is three musicians listening to each other in real time, moving between dense clusters and sudden silence, between locked grooves and complete abstraction. The piano doesn't play chords in any traditional sense; it's more texture and pressure, responding to what the bass and drums are doing. Holland's lines dart and weave, sometimes tethered to rhythm, sometimes floating free. Altschul is everywhere—propulsive, then deconstructed, then barely present. It's the sound of players at the height of their improvisational powers, uninterested in reassuring the listener.
Recorded in 1970, these sessions capture Circle at a moment when the group was pushing deeper into abstraction than almost anyone else in jazz. The music pulls closer to the exploratory territory Anthony Braxton would later map than to anything Corea would pursue by the early seventies. AllMusic reviewer Scott Yanow nailed it: the emphasis falls on sound and texture over melody, on challenge over comfort. If you know Corea mainly from his electric fusion or his later acoustic work, this will feel like a different musician entirely.
Circulus sat in the vault for eight years before Blue Note released it in 1978, by which time Corea had already moved forward. It was never a commercial record, and it isn't one now. But for listeners willing to sit with genuine musical risk, unwilling to turn away from dissonance and the sound of musicians thinking in the moment, this double album remains essential.
Who's playing
Where next?
More by Chick Corea
Crystal Silence 1973
Romantic Warrior 1976
The Chick Corea Acoustic Band 1989
The Chick Corea Elektric Band 1986
The musicians on this record
Their own records, close in time
