Ode to the Rhodes - Part 1

I can't have been the first one to write that sentence, to title something that way with a nostalgic longing for a time when technology was goofy and ridiculously and totally not portable.

I used to be in a band with an incredibly talented keyboardist/guitarist/singer named Joe Kennedy, who is now a professional touring musician. Joe owned a Fender Rhodes and used it quite a bit in our songs. When the band broke up, I remember Joe throwing the Rhodes down the stairs of our rehearsal studio and howling with laughter like someone who just did something totally forbidden. If my memory is anywhere near reality, Joe commented that he was "psyched" to "never have to carry that f*ckin' thing anywhere ever again."

And that's the fact of it. The Rhodes probably weighed, in and of itself, as much as the rest of our equipment all lumped together -- 2 guitar amps, bass amp, trap kit, cymbals, and so on. It was horrendous. It made us all wish we had spent more time thinking about things rather than just "doing" them. Of course, as soon as we would get to a gig, and Joe plugged it in and played a major or minor seventh chord, all was forgiven, and Jesus could have only always been right.

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If you drop a Rhodes on your toe, you might as well go home, in other words. Or at least to the podiatrist....

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The Rhodes -- what was also considered an "electric piano" -- has a distinct sound, simultaneously distant and close, like the past and the right now glued front to back. A weird image, I know, but only as weird as an electric piano could be, since the piano is built to be acoustic by default, it is the naturally occurring sound of elongated strings ringing out in space beneath a sea of wood. The Rhodes evokes an entire era, and an entire world, of sound. Of the 70's, of funk, and fusion, and someone deciding that a wah and a distortion pedal could take the mellow sound of chorused chords and transform them into the stripes jumping off the back of an angry tiger. (Watch out for that growl in your ears -- we will get to Miles' electric music soon enough!)

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Chick Corea's Return to Forever, (ECM, 1972) begins with the track called, perfectly, "Return to Forever" (totally great and eerie Lord of the Rings still shot You Tube vid here) (as an aside, I imagine that Night Ranger's debut record Night Ranger, with the track "Night Ranger" is a kind of off-kilter homage to this triple-naming of band, debut record, and title track; why doesn't every band do this? I have no good answer). A creepy, slinky Rhodes drone doubled by a ghostly voice ushers in this iced earth world (if forever is in the past, our return to it would have to be from above, down into a world of ice, would it not?) before Chick hits, of course, a minor seventh/eleventh chord, and then begins a circular Rhodesian riff that rides the rhythm entire of the next 9+ minutes. Chick keeps everything, in his own words, "Light as a Feather", because the Rhodes is, for him, an instrument of white magic, where the magus of music rides in from the deep white north, where the grey light of the sky is part of the world we hear humming within us.

Eventually, of course, since this is 1972, and jazz hasn't fully succumbed to the rock that would soon enclose it, Chick and Stanley Clarke (Electronic Bass) and Airto Moreira (Brazilian Percussionist Surprisingly Agile on a Trap Kit), eventually freak out a little bit, letting the Rhodes lead them in a minor dance of flickering night light while Flora Purim (Crazy Vocals, and, I mean, Really Crazy) surfs through the Rhodes waves to the jagged edge of a sunless sea. Returning to where we would always have been is not so silent, after all...