Return To Forever: Flight of the Reborn

By: Dennis Cook

Return To Forever

Return To Forever is back. For those in the know, a happy shiver runs up your spine, and for the uninitiated there’s a world of treats in store during their upcoming summer tour that kicks off May 29 at the Paramount Theater in Austin, TX. This seminal ’70s band used jazz as a launching pad for explorations into rock, Cubanismo, space music, flamenco and much more, all of it charged with crackling electricity and jaw dropping musicianship. Like Can and Traffic, RTF doesn’t always get credit for exploding music’s walls and creating the borderless atmosphere that made the jam scene possible. Their fearless, jubilant sonic revolt helped show several generations of players that one needn’t adhere to what anyone says is the “correct way” of doing things. Sometimes it takes visionaries like Return To Forever to help clear the sleep from our eyes.

Outside of a brief reunion in 1983, Chick Corea (keys), Al Di Meola (guitar), Stanley Clarke (bass) and Lenny White (drums) haven’t played together since 1977. Each has made an indelible mark on jazz (and a few other genres) in the intervening years but there’s never been anything quite like the bubbling, irresistible, even volatile chemistry they shared together for a few short, ridiculously creative years.

“A lot of times you do things, whether or not they come out good or bad, and you don’t get an opportunity to revisit them. Let’s say you made a mistake and you say, ‘Oh well, I gotta chalk that up.’ Or you did something and you had a great time but it becomes memories. To get the opportunity to revisit those sorts of situations is kind of special,” says White. “To go back and look at this music for a second time, in a new time and new space, is pretty special.”

At the time of their inception, there was considerable controversy in the jazz world over the hybrid they’d created. Founded in 1972 by Corea and Clarke, the lineup went through some changes before settling into what most regard as the classic RTF quartet that’s reassembled today. Each of these gifted musicians – Airto Moreira, Joe Farrell, Bill Connors and Steve Gadd are alumni – offered pieces of the puzzle along the way. Bringing in scraps of what they’d heard in Hendrix and Santana, as well as harnessed noise, Sibelius’ modal implications and myriad other random threads, Return To Forever helped birth a new sub-genre: jazz fusion.

“The jazz police stuck us up. Even to this day when you look at the history of jazz, the jazz police still kind of cut this part out of the lineage. It is a different time now, and the climate is good for it because things have changed not for the better but the worse, in terms of what we did with instrumental music and really music in general,” says White. “They’ve taken the human process of making music out. You go to see Justin Timberlake tour, to see Madonna tour, something like that, that’s one thing and it’s good for that, but what we’re talking about is playing instrumental music that doesn’t have singers, a light show and all that. There are maybe two generations that haven’t seen much of this so there’s a curiosity. Jam bands do this, so we’re considered one of the forefathers of jam bands by some.”

However, the stratospheric skill level and compositional acumen of Return To Forever is a rare, rare thing in the jam sphere. The fundamental solidity of every aspect of RTF is a huge part of why this music initially put the zap on people’s heads – filling coliseums and selling unprecedented albums for an instrumental, ostensibly jazz band – and why it endures today.

“I believe that was the climate we emerged from. It was good and healthy competition. You had to be on your game. Everyone else around the genre was stepping up their game. We come from an era where you had to be able to play your instrument and make something happen. I think that’s different now,” White comments. “I always use Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs as my barometer. He had a very successful series on MTV called Making The Band, and nobody in the ‘band’ played an instrument! It was a boy band, a singing group, and no one played an instrument. That’s what it’s come to. Music is made by non-musicians.”

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To go back and look at this music for a second time, in a new time and new space, is pretty special. –Lenny White

Where Have I Known You Before

“[Playing together again] was like riding a bicycle [laughs]. It sounded great from the first rehearsal,” says White. “The first day my cymbals didn’t arrive, so I set up the drums and we just went over notes. We just played and it was like we never stopped playing. We had to re-familiarize ourselves with the actual notes because we haven’t played them in 25 years but it was really great immediately.”

“At first, I just wanted to play ‘Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy’ [the title track from the 1973 LP that was White’s first outing with RTF]. Then, as we started to re-investigate these tunes, I found that all of them are kinda cool to play,” says White. “What’s interesting to me is I go to shows where the musician has maybe a couple albums and two or three hits, and when they come on people go crazy. But then you get a band like Santana, where everybody knows all the tunes and is into it the whole show. It’s going to be interesting for us to play, and though there’ll be new fans, there’s also people who will know every tune. I wonder if they’ll say, ‘They changed that! They didn’t do it that way on the record!'”

It’s a fair concern given how many listeners (this writer included), spent long hours growing intimate with their music, gazing lovingly over the evocative illustrations on the vinyl sleeves and pondering the liner notes. For some, things like the slow fade into “Theme to the Mothership” that suddenly assaults you with speed and heady gravity is part of a personal soundtrack tied to a crucial turning point in their listening. The details, small and large, with this band are crucial and cumulative. Return To Forever holds up to that kind of scrutiny and private welcome from listeners, benefiting from the bridge their thoughtful packaging and careful musical choices (synthesizer tones, drum sound etc.) created for their sometimes challenging, unorthodox music.

“I miss that whole package. I personally like the way vinyl sounds better than CDs, but that whole experience of reading liner notes and everything was something you shared with us when you bought our albums. That was great, and the problem is that’s been taken out of the equation. It’s not even CDs anymore, you just download stuff,” laments White. “It’s not just a bridge to the music, it personalizes the people making the music when you find out some information about them. Then, while you’re listening to the music that added detail really connects you to the tunes.”

“Of the five or six seminal bands that [jazz-fusion] comes out of, we spoke to the people a little bit more. We were a little more personable,” says White. “With Mahavishnu [Orchestra], John McLaughlin announced the tunes. With Weather Report, they didn’t announce the tunes. With the Headhunters, Herbie Hancock announced the tunes. With Lifetime, Tony Williams announced the tunes. But, with Return To Forever, everybody announced the tunes. We told jokes and made it light, and then played some really heavy music after that. How can you take a guy in a tuxedo t-shirt too seriously? I’m sitting there in a tuxedo t-shirt on and playing notes at 90 miles per hour [laughs]. You can’t take that guy seriously!”

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Apart, it’s like four different doctors looking for a cure for cancer and everybody has a different approach. But, the four doctors come together and suddenly say, ‘We have an elixir! We have a cure!’ We’re coming together again and comparing notes, like we’re in front of the World Congress of Doctors, and hopefully everybody’s gonna come and check out what our notes say. –Lenny White

Romantic Warriors

Return To Forever is comprised of four strong personalities, each throwing in hard at all times. White has been asked to comment on his bandmates a lot since they announced the reunion earlier this year. It’s always a question that makes him squirm a bit.

“When you have friends you grew up with in the neighborhood – the ones you play ball and see movies with, the ones you chase girls with – and somebody says, ‘Let’s talk about your friends.’ What do you say? You can’t say the intimate things. I grew up somewhat musically with this band, and I grew up as a man. I learned a lot of things about life playing in this band,” White says. “Chick’s such a great composer that when he gave us the opportunity to write music for the band the bar was raised SO high. It really kept you on your game. Al joined the band maybe a year after I joined, and he was maybe 19 years old! I saw him grow up as a musician. Now, he’s an accomplished, virtuoso guitarist known all around the world. But, he’s still Al to me [laughs]. And I met Stanley when he was 18 or 19, and we’ve played together since that point in a lot of different situations. The one thing that is consistent about Stanley is he’s such a great person and that makes him a better musician. I’ve watched him grow into a master musician, not just on his instrument. He just got a doctorate, but he’s still Stanley from Philly, my friend. I played his first gig ever at Gino’s Empty Foxhole in Philadelphia.”

During the 1970s, Return To Forever played in the kind of venues normally reserved for big rock acts. Such was the power and appeal of their music that it quickly jumped from jazz’s normally small club setting to a much more populist setting.

“It was great that it happened, and I’m hoping that it might again because there’s a void that’s happened again. And don’t get me wrong about the ‘void’ stuff because we all had our stuff that was cool over the years. Apart, it’s like four different doctors looking for a cure for cancer and everybody has a different approach. But, the four doctors come together and suddenly say, ‘We have an elixir! We have a cure!’ We’re coming together again and comparing notes, like we’re in front of the World Congress of Doctors, and hopefully everybody’s gonna come and check out what our notes say,” muses White. “I was always of the mindset that we made better live shows than the records that we made. The records are somewhat of an example but the live show was what you really had to see if you wanted the music translated. Hopefully that’ll continue now.”

“The philosophy behind what we did together was to communicate. How you do that provides answers. In finding ways to communicate, you find out things about yourself and find ways that work and don’t work. We do that with music and not anything else,” says White. “A lot of times today, they help it along with lights, dancers with no clothes on, guys flying from the roof and all sorts of stuff. All those things work but it’s like a circus with music. We really play music. That’s what we do. It’s our way of communicating. If you play music with a passion that communicates, that’s the purpose. Today, they often let other things help them communicate, and there’s a big difference to me. There’s something to be said for just getting down and playing your instrument, which is not the norm today. It will make us unique.”

Here’s a glimpse inside the first day of 2008 tour rehearsals at Mad Hatter Studios in Los Angeles:

Jump back to 1976, and here’s the boys conjuring “Sorceress” on England’s beloved Old Grey Whistle Test:

Return To Forever’s massive international tour begins next week, dates available here. And on May 27 Concord Records will relese the two-disc retrospective The Anthology…

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