Return to Forever

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

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 and Led Zeppelin; Ritchie Blackmore and Deep Purple; David Gilmour and Pink Floyd; Tony Geezer Iiomi and Black Sabbath.

In England, I lived like a king on a weekly allowance of $20 because my father did not appreciate that the five quid it converted to went so much farther in London. 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 Road to Marble Arch 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 the Baileys' front room, I heard a record that changed the music I began listening to: Jeff Beck’s amazing, genre-defying jazz-rock-funk album Blow by Blow, on which, even more amazingly to me, Richard, my friend, played all the drums. (They’d been recording the album during my first half-term break in London in 1975. 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 me a Weather Report album, 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 by Chick Corea. (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 on February 9, aged 79, the longest-running gig he ever got. He played keyboards; which is a sentence about as loaded as, “Jesus wept.”

Between his first album, 1968’s Tones for Joan’s Bones, and his last album, 2020’s Plays, he released 75 studio and 23 live albums. 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 through Herbie Hancock to Chaka Khan.

Of his hundreds of albums, though, six changed my own life, forever, and for the better, the three he did 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 Miles Davis albums I know that he played on: Filles de Kilimanjaro, 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 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 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