A couple of days ago I was driving home from teaching, and turned on KCSM, our Bay Area jazz station. Miles' recording of "Someday My Prince Will Come" was playing, and I tuned in just in time for John Coltrane's solo. The first notes in the solo are pretty much exactly the beginning of the second theme in Chick Corea's "La Fiesta." I had never noticed that before.
Here's the Miles recording on Youtube. Coltrane's solo starts at about 5:50. Here's a transcription of the solo, scrolling while the music plays. (Sorry I can't just post these videos here - apparently Sony has blocked any access except viewing them directly on Youtube.) Here's Chick Corea's tune. The second theme (the part in question) starts at 1:45:
Both tunes are in 3/4 time, and the chord progressions are the same for four measures. The Miles recording was done in 1961; "La Fiesta" was recorded in 1972. It seems pretty clear that Corea got some initial inspiration from the Miles/Coltrane recording. As you might expect, I was not the first person to notice this. Here's a discussion from 2003; check out the first comment from Mike Fitzgerald (fourth comment from the top), with some very good information on this question. The comments also point out the similarity of the first theme of La Fiesta to the Coltrane tune "Olé" (recorded in 1961 also). Coltrane's "Olé" definitely uses the same chord progression as the first theme in "La Fiesta," but as Fitzgerald points out (quoting Lewis Porter's Coltrane bio), the progression was not original with Coltrane.
The song "El Vito" is a likely source, both for "Olé" and for the first theme of "La Fiesta":
I'm on a few jazz mailing lists that I may not have actually signed up for. I haven't asked to be removed, though, because the mailings sometimes call my attention to interesting stuff. For example, I was just made aware of Donald Clarke's website, donaldclarkemusicbox.com. Clarke is a jazz writer with several books to his credit, three of which he has made available for free on his website: All Or Nothing At All: A Life Of Frank Sinatra (I just finished that one - an excellent read), The Rise And Fall Of Popular Music [A Polemical History] (just started it - looks promising), and Donald's Encyclopedia Of Popular Music (over 4000 entries). He is also the author of Billie Holiday: Wishing On The Moon (haven't read it yet; it's still in print, and available on Amazon). Donald has also posted a complete archive of Gene Lees' Jazzletter, from 1981 to 2008. Gene was a great writer, and a legend in the jazz world. If you don't already know about Gene Lees, click here to check his bio in Donald's Encyclopedia Of Popular Music. Donald has done us all a big favor by posting the Jazzletter archive, as well as his own books. It looks like I'll have to make reading through this collection one of my long-term projects.
