However he didn’t consider in musical classes. “It’s the media which can be so focused on categorizing music,” he informed The Instances in 1983, “the media and the businessmen, who, in spite of everything, have a vested curiosity in maintaining advertising and marketing clear lower and separate. If critics would ask musicians their views about what is occurring, you’d discover that there’s at all times a fusion of types going down. All this implies is a continuing improvement — a continuing merging of various streams.”
Mr. Corea’s first marriage resulted in divorce. He met Gayle Moran, who grew to become his second spouse, within the Seventies, when he was in Return to Without end and she or he was a singer and keyboardist with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, one other top-flight fusion band.
She survives him, as do a son, Thaddeus; a daughter, Liana Corea; and two grandchildren. Within the early Seventies, Mr. Corea transformed to Scientology, and the faith’s teachings knowledgeable a lot of his music from then on, together with his work with Return to Without end.
Armando Anthony Corea was born on June 12, 1941, in Chelsea, Mass., close to Boston. His father, additionally named Armando Corea, was a trumpeter and bandleader in Boston, and his mom, Anna (Zaccone) Corea, was a homemaker. He started learning piano when he was 4.
He picked up his nickname from an aunt, who typically pinched his huge cheeks and known as him “cheeky.” The identify morphed into the pithier “Chick.”
He moved to New York Metropolis within the late Fifties to review at Columbia College and Juilliard, however that lasted just a few months. As Miles Davis had a era earlier than, when Davis arrived at Juilliard from East St. Louis, Unwell., Mr. Corea shortly discovered himself lured out of the classroom and into the golf equipment. A few of his earliest gigs got here within the bands of the famed Latin jazz percussionists Mongo Santamaría and Willie Bobo, in addition to with the swing-era vocalist and bandleader Cab Calloway.