It took a dancer to bring Chick Corea’s flying visit to London to life. As he fronted his new world-music-meets- jazz quintet Touchstone with his customary dexterity at the keyboard, much of their first set was too slick and lightweight to connect with the capacity audience, some of whom were even squeezed on to the stage behind the band.
Despite a brooding bass clarinet solo from Corea’s special guest, the British saxophonist Tim Garland, which raised some local cheers, the opening numbers breezed past efficiently — even brilliantly at times — without igniting the spark of excitement that has made Corea such an exceptional pianist.
Then, in the opening section of the second half, King and Queen, the flamenco dancer Auxi Fernández suddenly appeared, her accompaniment pared down from the full sound of the band to sparse handclapped rhythms. Her twirling fingers, relaxed rhythmic arm gestures and stamping feet created a dazzling improvised dance, expertly melding her Spanish heritage with contemporary steps. Her charismatic presence, conjuring up a sense of visual and musical space, equally full of humour and sexual suggestion, pushed the entire band to a higher level of playing.
This was particularly true of her Spanish compatriots. The bass guitarist Carles Benavent displayed a remarkable individual style, mixing stabbing flamenco-style chords with a full-toned bass line. Meanwhile the flautist Jorge Pardo found new reserves of energy for some punchy alto flute solos.
However the player who raised his game the farthest was Corea himself. His electric piano solo on City of Brass moved into an exultant 4/4 groove in contrast to the prevailing Latin mood, and he produced the evening’s most fluent and inventive playing. As with all jazz, his inspiration on the night was what mattered, not the set of new tunes on which the band’s improvisation was based. These, frankly, were rather mundane themes, inspired, in common with much of Corea’s recent work, by Scientology. In this case, the prompt was L. Ron Hubbard’s fantasy novel The Ultimate Adventure, a title of which both the compositions and at least half the performance fell a long way short.