Heart Surgery

A few years ago, I discovered a new term (to me, at least) for something with which I've been very familiar for many years - earworms.

An earworm is a piece of music that gets inside your head - seemingly from nowhere, although something could start it off, I suppose - and stays there, playing away on a loop until it disappears or is, perhaps, replaced by another. It can be anything musical - nothing is too clichéd, tasteless or banal to become an earworm.

Today's earworm was a Chick Corea tune - "Armando's Rhumba" - which first appeared on his 1976 album "My Spanish Heart". Of course, it sent me straight to the Jazz folder on my grossly distended hard drive and I listened to it, in an attempt to exorcise the worm. According to some, it's not actually a rhumba - more of an "energetic samba". Not that Chick would have had any fucks whatsoever to give, I'm sure.

After playing the track a few times, I then listened to the rest of the album as I got on with a few jobs.

As well as Chick on assorted keyboards, "My Spanish Heart" features Jean Luc Ponty on violin (on the earworm track only), Stanley Clarke on (mainly upright, thank goodness) bass, Steve Gadd on drums, Don Alias on percussion, Chick's wife Gayle Moran on occasional vocals, a string quartet, a brass quartet and Michael Narada Walden, who's credited with claps. Claps? Yes, and they're pretty much essential to the percussive drive of virtually the whole album. Sometimes they're the only percussion there is. It's predominantly an acoustic effort, although this being 1976, and with Chick arriving at the studio with a pantechnicon full of keyboards, there are some synths - very dated sounding they are, too.

I was first turned on to the album by the pianist in the French jazz/chanson band I'm in. He raved about it and burned me a copy which I enjoyed very much. However, as a double vinyl album originally, I found it rather overlong and some of the synths sounded rather cheesy, so I've made my own single album version.

I've been ruthless. 

Out went almost every track with a synth on it, which meant that after lengthy consideration for about two minutes, the entire El Bozo Suite was ripped screaming from the twitching patient. A few tracks with more synths were then excised and tossed in the bin labeled "Fusion waste".

I also played about with the running order. The title track is now a sort of prelude that leads in nicely to "Armando's Rhumba". Following are a trio of tracks that set up the Spanish Fantasy Suite and there's a postscript in the form of "the Sky" - the track omitted from the first release on CD.

After this musical bloodbath, what's left is a 46 minute single album that's very acoustic piano driven and seems to keep the spirit and essential elements of the original double, but with less of the dated cruft. I've even managed to include a track that was on the vinyl edition, "The Sky (Children Song No. 8 / Portrait of Children Song No. 8", but later dropped, so that it could fit on the first CD version. A later CD bonus track that added nothing to the album was dropped for this version.

The overall feel after the chopping is much sparer now, with fewer of the synth textures and more of the space that's left, due to much of the instrumentation now only consisting of piano, upright bass and those all-important claps. Needless to say, the musicianship is superb and some of the passages where Corea and Clarke play in unison are simply breathtaking.