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A pioneering guitarist, Larry Coryell blazed the early jazz-rock fusion trail in ground-breaking groups, and playing with legends from Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins and John McLaughlin, to Chick Corea and Wayne Shorter. Comfortable in almost any style from incendiary electric fusion to the most delicate acoustic guitar, Coryell also embraced classical and Indian music, and lately he’s delved into opera.
“War and Peace,” his first opera based on Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel, received its world premiere in Slovenia in 2014. Next year he will premiere his latest opera, “Anna Karenina” (based on Tolstoy’s novel), at the World of Guitar festival in Kaluga, Russia. And then there’s James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
“I’m six minutes into ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce,” Coryell reveals, interviewed before playing at the 2016 Maui Jazz & Blues Festival. “It’s a really difficult story to get a handle on.”
This guitar luminary was initially inspired to create an opera after a Buddhist teacher suggested he read Tolstoy.
“I’ve been in jazz all my life playing standards or originals, and I just wanted to do something different,” he says. “Playing straight ahead is like putting on a nice comfortable suit, but putting months of work into ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Anna Karenina,’ that’s when I get happy.”
While he’s been immersed in composing operas, this 73-year-old musician has not slowed down on the jazz front. Last year he released the acclaimed “Heavy Feel,” with All About Jazz praising him as a “guitar hero” who “continues to deserve adulation and attention.” And his recent recordings include “Montgomery,” a powerful tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.
“I was inspired by my mentor, Buddhist teacher Daisaku Ikeda, who told us that we have to do our own human revolution, and how a human revolution in just a single person can make a big difference,” he explains. “I thought about Martin Luther King. I had heard one of his lectures when I was in college, and Mose Allison suggested I read the book ‘Taylor Branch,’ about the civil rights movement. This was around the same time that Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane were doing their collaborations, and I sensed there was some connectivity there.”
Raised in rural Texas, he moved to New York in 1965, arriving at a time when the city’s music scene was infused with an experimental spirit. Early on, he performed with Chico Hamilton and Gary Burton, and helped organize one of the first jazz rock groups, the Free Spirits. Then in 1968, he was hired by flute legend Herbie Mann on the landmark recording “Memphis Underground,” which fused jazz and R&B.
Often referred to as the godfather of fusion, in 1969 he released the seminal album “Spaces,” which introduced the world to jazz rock. His all-star collaborators on the record included guitarist John McLaughlin and drummer Billy Cobham (who then formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra), future Weather Report bassist Miroslav Vitous, and keyboardist Corea (who later founded Return to Forever).
“I just wanted to make a record that was different,” he says. “That session was in the afternoon, and they (the other musicians) were coming from a session with Miles Davis. I put music in front of them, but they didn’t even play what was on the music. Miles had motivated them to be more free and creative. At the beginning I was upset, it wasn’t going how I planned, but it really sounded good.”
Coryell then toured briefly with a super-group of former-Cream bassist Jack Bruce, Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell and keyboardist Mike Mandell, before he formed the jazz rock quintet the Eleventh House.
Impressing critics and fellow musicians at the time, Coryell was hailed by The New Yorker “the most inventive and original guitarist to appear since Charlie Christian,” while the East Village Other proclaimed him “probably the most adventurous, daring and exciting guitarist playing rock or jazz.”
In the late ’70s, Coryell turned his attention to the acoustic guitar, producing a series of duo and trio sessions with guitarists like Philip Catherine, John Scofield, Joe Beck, Steve Khan and McLaughlin. Then in 1979, he joined McLaughlin and Spanish flamenco virtuoso Paco De Lucia to tour Europe as a guitar trio, before Al Di Meola replaced him.
“That was fantastic,” he notes, “but I was hitting the bottle pretty hard. I haven’t had a drink in 37 years.”
During this time, he recorded an epic interpretation of Ravel’s “Bolero” on acoustic guitar.
“I was lucky I came across a way of playing something that’s very popular that’s actually just boring repetition when it was written,” he says.
In more recent times, Coryell has expanded his musical horizons recording superb projects with Indian virtuoso violinist L. Subramaniam (“From the Ashes”) and flutist Hariprasad Chaurasia (“Music Without Boundaries”).
“What I like about Indian music and jazz is that they are both improvised,” he says. “In each case I liked finding certain chords that could go with their phrases of the raga scale. I like to express myself and it’s a real blessing to be able to be versatile.”
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This year’s Maui Jazz & Blues Festival also features blues star Joe Louis Walker, Grammy-winning New Orleans’ trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis, acclaimed saxophonist Javon Jackson, trumpeter Gabriel Mark Hasselbach, saxophonist Rock Hendricks, and the Maui debut of Cajun music stars The Band Courtbouillon, featuring accordionists Wayne Toups, Steve Riley and Wilson Savoy. Plus Maui musicians Benny Uyetake, the King Kekaulike High School Jazz Band and the Jazz Alley TV Trio will be featured.
Leaders of three of the most successful contemporary Cajun bands, Toups, Riley and Savoy formed The Band Courtbouillon a few years ago. What began as a project by three of Louisiana’s preeminent accordion players resulted in a widely praised traditional Cajun music album that won them a Grammy Award. As The Band Courtbouillon, Savoy often picks up the fiddle while Riley plays guitar.
Among the other artists performing, Walker is a passionate, soulful musician adept at so many styles. Growing up in San Francisco in the late 1960s, Walker played on bills with Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King and Thelonious Monk, and shared a house with blues guitar legend Mike Bloomfield. “Boundary-pushing blues rocker Joe Louis Walker is a modern and legendary blues icon,” praised NPR.
Following the Saturday festival, on Tuesday evening Walker will perform at an intimate dinner show at Lumeria Maui in Makawao (Call 579-8877 for reservations).
And Marsalis is recognized as one of the top trombonists, composers and producers in jazz today. A brother of Branford and Wynton of the legendary Marsalis family, he was hailed by the San Francisco Examiner as “one of the best, most imaginative and musical of the trombonists of his generation.” He will also perform with other greats Friday at the Four Seasons Resort Maui in Wailea.
* For a full schedule of Maui Jazz & Blues Festival events, visit www.mauijazzandbluesfestival.com.
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Over the course of 40 years, jazz-fusion band Spyro Gyra has released more than 30 albums, scored platinum- and gold selling-recordings, and has continued to captivate audiences.
While the band is known for its smooth jazz hits “Shaker Song” and “Morning Dance,” Spyro Gyra has always been versatile embracing Latin, funk, world music and blues. Four-time Grammy winners, the band broke nationally in 1979 with its second album, “Morning Dance.”
Reviewing the band’s recent album, “The Rhinebeck Sessions,” Jazz Times proclaimed: “There is really no band out there that can produce a sense of pure joy as consistently and as often as Spyro Gyra.”
* Spyro Gyra will perform at 6 p.m. Sunday in the Maui Arts & Cultural Center’s Castle Theater in Kahului. Tickets are $60, $75 and $85 (plus applicable fees) and are available at the box office, by calling 242-7469 or online at www.mauiarts.org.
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Exciting news for reggae fans, drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare will perform at Lahaina’s Maui Theatre at 8 p.m. Oct. 1.
From their early days touring with reggae icon Peter Tosh, Jamaica’s most famous rhythm duo have played with numerous reggae legends from Black Uhuru, Gregory Isaacs and Jimmy Cliff, to Dennis Brown, Shaggy and Toots and the Maytals. In the rock world they’ve recorded with the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Sting. Marty Dread will join Sly and Robbie and the Taxi Gang on vocals.
* General admission tickets are $40. For more details, call 856-7900.