Chick Corea

Children's Songs is a cycle of short solo piano pieces by Chick Corea, recorded in July 1983 and released by ECM in 1984. Most of the twenty miniatures last under two minutes, built from plain melodic cells and repeating figures, with a clarity that has invited comparison with Bartók's Mikrokosmos. Corea treated them as finished compositions rather than sketches for improvisation, and the complete edition was published as a score by Schott.

In his liner note, dated January 1984, Corea explains that No. 1 was written in 1971 and that the others followed gradually, one at a time, over the next twelve years. The album was recorded digitally at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg. Manfred Eicher produced it and Martin Wieland was the engineer. For the closing Addendum, a piece for piano trio, Corea is joined by violinist Ida Kavafian and cellist Fred Sherry.

The pieces work through economy and contrast. In No. 6 the left hand lays out a dark triadic ground while the right hand spins lighter lines above it. Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews hears in the steady patterns of No. 1 and No. 9 an affinity with Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and finds Satie's Gymnopédies behind No. 19. Corea's ornaments, such as the descending trill at the end of No. 3, recur and grow richer through the set. The Addendum ends the CD in a classical chamber vein, with violin and cello lending a lighter, more pliant texture.

Jazz critics recognised early that this was not a jazz record in the usual sense. Reviewing it in Jazz Journal in September 1984, Richard Palmer heard debts to Debussy, Bartók, Satie and Ravel. He praised Corea as "a writer not just of uncommon skill but of a depth and imagination that take the breath away". He said the album would be his record of the year. Grillo, writing much later, placed it beside Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert and wrote that "beneath the album's contemplative veneer beats a furnace of a heart stoked by creative flames".

This CD is the 2008 edition in ECM's Touchstones series, which brings key albums from the catalogue back into print. Children's Songs was first released in 1984 as ECM 1267.