Chick Corea

Chick Corea has attained iconic status in music. The keyboardist, composer and bandleader was a DownBeat Hall of Famer and NEA Jazz Master, as well as one of the most-nominated and awarded artists in GRAMMY Awards history with 71 nods and 27 wins, in addition to 5 Latin GRAMMYs. From straight-ahead to avant-garde, bebop to jazz-rock fusion, children’s songs to chamber and symphonic works, Chick had touched an astonishing number of musical bases in his career since playing with the genre-shattering bands of Miles Davis in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Yet Chick had never been more productive than in the 21st century, whether playing acoustic piano or electric keyboards, leading multiple bands, performing solo or collaborating with a who’s who of music. Underscoring this, he had been named Artist of the Year three times this decade in the DownBeat Readers Poll. Throughout his life and career, Chick remained a tireless creative spirit, continually reinventing himself through his art. As The New York Times said, he was “a luminary, ebullient and eternally youthful.”