Jazz legends' spontaneous adventure will give us thrills

Chick Corea (above) and Herbie Hancock are at The Civic in Auckland on May 30.

Jazz legends' duet is an all too rare occasion, writes Paula Yeoman.

Chick Corea has seen dramatic changes in music in the decades he's been making it, but he says if there's one thing that's remained the same, it's the magic of live performance.

"You could translate live performance into just life - that's what life is. It's about people being together, doing things together and creating things. It's something that's native to every person.

"So live performance will never change. It doesn't matter how much the technology, the culture, the mechanics and the politics changes, that one aspect will always remain basic to everybody."

There is no one paragraph that could do justice to Corea's life in music. He is simply one of the greatest jazz musicians of our time. And you know that when he teams up with a legend like Herbie Hancock - as he has on this current world tour - you're in for a hell of a show.

With similar career paths that span 50-odd years, Corea and Hancock know one another well. And yet they've not done a major tour together since the 1970s.

"We've talked about it through the years. We'd always see each other and say, let's play together, but we'd get busy and the decades sort of just flipped by," says Corea.

"But I invited Herbie to play a night with me at the Blue Note in New York during my birthday celebrations in 2011 and we had a glorious evening. Then the next summer we were invited to Italy to do one concert together and that also went great. So it kind of hooked up our duet again and we said, 'Right, let's go out and play around the world'."

It's overwhelming when you consider the musical ground Corea and Hancock would have to cover in just a few hours to sum up their collective careers. But "fortunately, that's not a goal", laughs Corea. "We don't think about that. The basic thing that brought us together is that we really enjoy playing together and making music together."

And a night with this legendary pair isn't about knowing what you'll get; it's about not knowing. It's about them stepping on stage every night and shaking off what Corea describes as the mechanics of travelling and touring.

"The mechanics of life can get very mechanical, of course. And that's the opposite to what we're trying to do every night, which is to stay free and to create spontaneously. It's a constant adventure to try and put that out there," he says. "With this duet, we have a lot of affinity for one another.

"And we're playing in a lot of nice venues. I mean, the conditions couldn't be nicer. So when we finally hit the stage, we can - with free minds - just go on an improvisational, spontaneous adventure."