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Return to Forever

IN 1976, after repeating my O’Levels in Somerset, I did my A’Levels at a “sixth form crammer”. Bedford Tutorial College had multiple advantages over Taunton School: I could go to bed when I wanted; smoking wasn’t banned; you could have girls in your room; and London was 20 minutes away by fast train, almost eight times shorter than the trip from Taunton.

I often went to London for the weekend.

Until I turned 18, my guardian in England was my father’s friend, MacDonald Bailey, the now-late athlete. When Mac and his wife Doris returned to Trinidad, their elder son, Robert, a founder-member of and keyboard player for the Afro-Caribbean fusion band, Osibisa, became my legal guardian. His younger brother, Richard, was a drummer of rare talent.

I arrived in England as a rock music obsessive. My American friend, the redoubtable Rex, also called Harry, who came to CIC via Sao Paulo, had introduced me, in 1972, to the electric guitar music that has never been out of my ears since: Jimi Hendrix, the lodestar; Carlos Santana, who played lead over a rhythm that could have been ours; Johnny Winter; Jimmy Page & Led Zeppelin; Ritchie Blackmore & Deep Purple; David Gilmour & Pink Floyd; Tony Geezer Iiomi & Black Sabbath.

Through Robert, my guardian, and Richard, my partner in household chore-dodging crime whenever I crashed at the family’s Old Marylebone Road flat, I heard more music that changed my life.

In London, I lived like a king on a weekly allowance of TT$20 because my father did not appreciate that the five quid it converted to went so much farther in London. With neither bills nor responsibilities of my own, 1975/76 might have been the richest I’ve ever been, in disposable income terms.

A Mars bar was 4p, a packet of crisps, 5p, a pint of lager, 38p, and you could ride three stops on the Circle Line for 5p. A bus from Old Maylebone Rd to Hyde Park Corner was tuppence.

And an LP at HMV was under three quid; I think I paid £2.50 for Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare album, with its striking cover artwork that would make me pick up curiously one of the two most exciting instrumental albums I’ve ever heard.

In Richard & Robert’s front room, I heard an album that changed the music I began listening to: Jeff Beck’s amazing, genre-defying jazz-rock-funk Blow by Blow LP, on which, even more amazingly to me, Richard played all the drums. (They’d been recording the album during my first half-term break in London. As he left one day I asked, “You going to work?” “I don’t go to work, boy!” he snapped back, with a grin. “I go to play!”)

In HMV, one day, in the jazz section, which I’d started passing through after Robert played a Weather Report album for me, I saw an album cover that reminded me of Welcome to My Nightmare. On the strength of only that, and, for two quid, I think, I bought The Leprechaun, the first of Chick Corea’s three LPs that were of a piece: The Leprechaun, My Spanish Heart and The Mad Hatter. (I’d bought my first Be Bop Deluxe album the same way, just by seeing the Axe Victim album cover: any music that looked like that would, I reckoned, sound like that).

The jazz musician Chick Corea died last week, aged 79, the longest-running gig he ever got. He played keyboards; which is a sentence about as loaded as, “Jesus wept”.

His first album, Tones for Joan’s Bones, was released in 1968, when he was 27 (and I was ten). Including his last album, 2020’s Plays, he released 75 studio and 23 live albums in his own name or as bandleader. His side bands, Circle and Return to Forever, released another 14 albums. About 77 more albums were released with him as a leading side man. He played with virtually everyone who was any good, from Miles Davis, arguably the most influential musician in our time, through Stan Getz, Stanley Clarke, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Mongo Santamaria, Chaka Khan, Al Di Meola, Pat Metheny, Ron Carter, Larry Coryell, everybody.

Of his hundreds of albums, though, six changed my own life, forever, and for the better, his three in 1975/6, and three he did with Miles Davis.

He’s gone now, forever, but the mark he left on a West Indian boy in London close to half-a-century ago, made me return, this weekend, to The Leprechaun, My Spanish Heart and The Mad Hatter.

And then on to the three albums I know that he did with Miles Davis: Filles de Killimanjaro; Bitches Brew; and, my favourite album of all genres and all time, In A Silent Way.

He’s gone now.

But, you and me, we are here.

Listen to any of this music – if you listen to only one track, make it Nite Sprite – and I guarantee you the time you spend will be as rich to you today as hearing it in 1975 was for me.

You’re not likely to get a Mars bar for 25 TT cents.

And you’ll be lucky to get change from a fiver if you buy a pint of beer today.

But it’ll probably be free to listen to Chick Corea.

And you’ll be one lucky firetrucking leprechaun.

BC Pires is in a silent but jubilant way


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