Chick Corea's The Visitors (Live) - EP

Early in 2025, Kirill Gerstein rediscovered a unique live recording, made in 2012, of jazz vibraphone legend Gary Burton performing, with Gerstein, jazz pianist Chick Corea’s The Visitors. He instantly knew he had to find a way of releasing it. The piece not only brought Gerstein back together with Burton, his former teacher and mentor, but it also drew together the talents of Burton, Corea and producer Manfred Eicher, who in the 1970s collaborated on some of jazz’s most celebrated albums. Burton and Gerstein first met backstage at a jazz festival in St Petersburg in November 1991. “I thought Kirill was perhaps the son of one of the musicians that had performed,” Burton tells Apple Music Classical. But the 14-year-old Gerstein was one of the performers. And the two soon got talking. “Kirill agreed to drop off a cassette at my hotel,” continues Burton. “I don’t think I got to listen to it for a week or two, but then I was just blown away. It was so mature. It reminded me of Keith Jarrett’s solo piano style, and I immediately said, ‘This kid needs an exit. He needs to get out into the world.’” As vice president of Boston’s prestigious jazz conservatory, Berklee College of Music, Burton was determined to nurture Gerstein’s talent, and after a couple of years of legal and political bureaucracy, Gerstein found himself as Berklee’s youngest ever college student. “One of the amazing things at Berklee,” Gerstein remembers, “was that in an ensemble class or a teaching situation, the teacher would normally be playing with you. After getting up from his office desk, all of a sudden there was this vintage Gary Burton stuff coming out.” Fast forward to 2010, by which time Gerstein had long left his professional jazz life behind, embarking instead on a highly successful classical career—Burton and Gerstein had kept sporadically in touch throughout. That year, Gerstein became the sixth winner of the Gilmore Artist Award, securing him $300,000, a large part of which he decided to spend on commissioning a number of composers from the worlds of classical and jazz. The aim with the jazz composers, says Gerstein, was “to provoke them to be also in the medium where they have to notate more than perhaps they would in other situations. I like to show that these borders between written and improvised music are porous.” One of these composers was Chick Corea, one of jazz’s all-time greatest pianists and composers, with whom Gary Burton enjoyed a decades-long musical partnership, and who sadly died of cancer in 2021. “I remember buying [the ECM album] Crystal Silence with Gary and Chick,” says Gerstein. “Crystal Silence was off the beaten path and not many people would discover it,” reveals Burton. “[but] it actually became quite successful. We started getting endless requests for concerts. That began decades of touring and more records. It turned out to be the most important collaboration of my career.” Chick Corea’s The Visitors is heard here in a newly rediscovered live performance from the 2012 Gilmore International Piano Festival in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Scored for vibraphone and piano, the music is part through-written score, part improvisation, and explores the virtuosity, interpretative depth and spontaneous creativity for which both Burton and Gerstein are renowned. “I think Chick Corea could write it in a way that feels like I’m channeling some of him,” says Gerstein. “You can feel the composer at the piano.” At the same time, he adds, the music has a universal quality. The opening bars of The Visitors contains clear 20th-century Eastern European influences. “I think some of the great inspiration for Chick was Bartók’s music,” says Gerstein, “and he explored that early on in the '70s.” Indeed, the 1979 live album CoreaHancock, gathering together a collection of 1978 performances by Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, includes a wild two-piano version of the “Ostinato” from Book VI of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos collection of piano pieces. The interactions between Gerstein and Burton feel entirely natural, each responding to the other, and achieving the musical equivalent of finishing each other’s sentences. “A duet is unique in that, it's a conversation between two speakers,” says Burton, “but unlike language where you take turns speaking, answering back and forth, with playing music together you both talk at the same time. For Burton, who has now retired from performing, this recording has brought together multiple strands of his former musical life, including working with record producer Manfred Eicher, founder of ECM, who insisted he personally mix the live recording for release on his label. “Crystal Silence was the first record I made with Chick, in 1972,” says Burton; “I recorded for ECM for two decades. We have a long history. I really credit the fact that I learned finally how to make records from making them with Manfred over the period of time that we worked together. To come back, and with Chick posthumously, is this wonderful completion to the history that I had with ECM and with Manfred.” So, does an ECM album beckon for Kirill Gerstein? “Who knows? We take it a step at a time,” he says. “There are surprises in store. But then there are surprises that perhaps we’re all unaware of yet.”