1980 · Album
Tap Step
Recorded 1979–1980 · Elektra · Produced by Chick Corea, Don Sickler
Corea's Synthesizer Experiment With Old Friends
Corea layers three Moogs and an Oberheim into fusion territory, chasing something modern that doesn't always land.
By 1979, Chick Corea had already exhausted most fusion possibilities with Return to Forever. Tap Step finds him doubling down on keyboards—not just piano but three Moog synthesizers, an Oberheim, Rhodes, Bösendorfer, and Hohner duo keyboard. It's an embarrassment of riches that sometimes works against him. The album brings back Flora Purim on vocals and percussion, Stanley Clarke on bass, and Joe Farrell on reeds, players who'd earned his trust across earlier projects. That chemistry matters because the synthesizer experiments need ballast. When Purim floats over the dense keyboard textures on tracks like "Tap Step," there's genuine conversation happening. When she's absent, the album tilts toward the freakish territory a Billboard reviewer noted at the time—synth layers piling up without much air, modern for modern's sake. Clarke holds the bottom end steady, but even his solid presence can't always cut through the keyboard clutter. This isn't a failed record, though it sits awkwardly between Corea's acoustic past and his synth-heavy future. It captures him genuinely uncertain about where fusion should go next, surrounded by collaborators who could ground him but didn't always. The record found a modest audience on its release but hasn't aged as well as his cleaner, more focused work from the same era.
