Chick Corea and Gary Burton’s Hot House
Two of jazz’s busiest and most prolific players, pianist Chick Corea and vibraphone master Gary Burton, have managed to get together periodically to make beautiful and challenging music for 40 years. They celebrate that milestone on their forthcoming September release, Hot House (Concord/Jazz), on which the duo takes a spin through imaginatively arranged tunes by Jobim, Brubeck, Monk, Gershwin & Weil, The Beatles, Bill Evans and more. There’s also one track written by Corea featuring a string quartet—the delightful “Mozart Goes Dancing.”
The album was recorded by Corea’s longtime engineer, Bernie Kirsh, at the pianist’s Mad Hatter Studios East in Clearwater, Fla. (except “Mozart…,” which was cut at Avatar in New York City). “We set them up fairly close together with no baffles between the instruments,” Kirsh comments. “The vibes were set up to the left of the piano—on the side of the piano opposite the lid opening—and Chick and Gary were facing each other.
“I used two mics on each instrument—they were all the AKG C12 VR model. For preamps I used a pair of Neve 1073s for the piano and a pair of Neve 1081s for the vibes.
“The mic placement for the piano was a near coincident pair—like an ORTF setup—inside the piano, about where the curve of the piano is located. For the vibes, I used a spaced AB pair over the instrument. When I mixed, I panned the piano hard left and right, and panned the vibes somewhat less wide, which seemed to work out well.”
