More than 35 years have passed since Chick Corea and Gary Burton came together to record the classic album Crystal Silence. The two have now recorded once again, this time for Concord to produce a two-CD set with a big difference as the first disc of The New Crystal Silence finds Corea and Burton performing with a symphony orchestra using new arrangements by saxophonist Tim Garland.

The disc includes ‘Crystal Silence’ itself and a 13-and-a-half minute version of Corea’s celebrated and much loved piece ‘La Fiesta’. The second features ‘Senor Mouse’ and a tune inspired by Monk called ‘Sweet and Lovely’. Keith Shadwick talks to Chick and Gary about the new arrangements, how they reharmonised Monk and how jazz communicates to a worldwide audience.

Perspective and sensibility can sometimes tug in opposite directions. When Chick Corea and Gary Burton met up in Oslo in November 1972 to make Crystal Silence, their first duet album together, neither they nor anyone else foresaw that it would become the founding stone of a formidable sometime partnership that has been sporadically renewed right up to the present day.

Many people now see that first album as historic, while their major tour that started in September 2006 and will finish this spring which resulted in this month’s release of The New Crystal Silence, the latest recorded document of their joint endeavours, is seen as a hugely significant musical event. Talking
separately to both Corea and Burton, neither man saw it that way. Burton, for example, preferred to talk about the ability to keep growing musically together, often through the long and deep knowledge of each other’s way of thinking about music and playing it, and the shared ability to listen very closely.

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