Chick Corea/John Patitucci – Bass

This was the album that brought John Patitucci to the attention of the wider world. He had recorded before this but Corea’s showcasing of Patitucci’s bass playing was instrumental in the promotion of what was for most of us a new face. Patitucci was encouraged to take on the big by Corea and it was the album that gave us that astonishing piece ‘Gat A Match’, something that most of us still can’t pull of even now, 49 years later (it’s one of those tunes we all tried to nail with varying degrees of success – I played it on a gig once – I shouldn’t have. It was a disaster).

This tune is a bit of a bucket list tune in so far as I have long thought I should work out that bridge but, when I went to do it, I thought, this is not a difficult tune to do a full transcription of. The tune is called ‘Sidewalk’ and is from the 1986 album that introduced us to the Chick Corea Elektric Band. I labelled it with Corea and Patitucci because, whilst Patitucci plays the track on the videos, it sounds to me like a synth and I can’t hear any ‘real’ bass in there at all. Can anyone enlighten me?