Music review: Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea at the Civic

Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock.

Two jazz keyboard giants deliver a loose entertaining and often surprising concert.

Two great big grand pianos head-to-head on a stage is an impressive sight. From above, their curves interlock in a yin-yang kind of way. Add two jazz musicians who have been exploring the infinite possibilities of what you can extract from those instruments for 50 or so years, and you had the makings of a cosmic experience.

And so it was with the return of Herbie Hancock - a regular visitor here in past years - with fellow traveller Chick Corea as part of a world tour which revives the men's past occasional partnership and intersections in their CVs.

Corea had taken over in 1968 from Hancock in the Miles Davis Quintet just as the trumpeter headed into jazz-rock fusion. Both established themselves as envelope-pushing giants of jazz in their own right. Hancock has embraced hip-hop along the way; Corea's fusion ventures led him to Latin forays and contemporary classical.

It was that vast shared legacy that got them a rapturous welcome from a Civic audience of a wide age range, and a standing ovation some 90 minutes later.

In between, the relaxed and chatty pair delivered an informal recital which swung from a make-it-up-as-you-go-along beginnings to jazz standards, to touchstone compositions from both men who are now in their mid seventies but who both look much younger.

After ambling on together, Hancock warned of the avant-garde beginning: "If you don't mind we are going to start with nothing and create something."

Off they went into a musical space race that splashed down after a very high orbit some ten minutes later. It also also established what this show this about -- less a wander down some very long and broad memory lanes, more a chance to experience the interplay of two stellar musicians unencumbered by a band.

True, it had some lesser moments. The workout on the electric keyboards with Hancock firing off vocal samples felt like a funky demo program for the technology. Elsewhere, though, the electronics - and the plucked piano strings - added some neatly unsettling cinematic textures. If the paired pianos were the brushstroked impressionist canvases, the synthesizers were spray-canning walls in strange shades.

But the experimental sonic edges couldn't top the synergy of when both musicians were at the piano playing with and off each other on the likes of Hancock's Maiden Voyage or the bluesy Canteloupe Island.

As the pair eyeballed and grinned at each other across the expanse of those pianos, their playing frequently found transcendent moments.

Hancock dedicated the standard Green Dolphin Street because of the New Zealand setting of the 1947 Hollywood movie it sprang from. But the country with the night's most evocative treatment was Spain via Corea's symphonic composition of the same name in the encore.

It came complete with a five-part harmony from a hastily trained audience, which the men later challenged to a vocal call-and-response on increasingly impossible piano melody lines.

It was a loose entertaining end to a fine show, one which managed to surprise as well as nod to these grand masters' deep history.