Chelsea unveiled its mural of Chick Corea on Thursday under the Tobin Bridge, a few steps from where the jazz pianist grew up. The wall celebrates the music. For most of his adult life, Corea also wanted people to know about something else: he was a Scientologist, and he said the religion’s teachings changed both his life and the way he made music.
Corea, born in Chelsea in 1941, died in 2021 with more than two dozen Grammy awards. He talked about his faith openly for five decades. He put L. Ron Hubbard’s name in his record credits, built two late career albums around Hubbard’s fiction, played on church-produced Hubbard records, and went to court in Germany and to Congress in Washington after German officials cut him out of state-funded concerts because of his membership.
He was rarely shy about any of it. Asked about it by interviewers, he kept coming back to one idea he said he learned from Hubbard: that the point of playing was to communicate with the people listening.
How it started
Corea recorded his first album as a leader, Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, in 1968, and that fall he joined Miles Davis’s band as it moved toward electric jazz. That same year he picked up Hubbard’s book Dianetics.
“That was around the time I was with Miles,” he told NPR’s Morning Edition in 2006. “I came into contact with L. Ron Hubbard’s material in 1968 with Dianetics and it kind of opened my mind up and it got me into seeing that my potential for communication was a lot greater than I thought it was.” NPR’s reporter, Ashley Kahn, described it as the book Corea “credits with changing his life.”
Within a few years Corea left Circle, the experimental free jazz quartet he led after leaving Davis, and started Return to Forever. The new band played bright, melodic fusion built on Latin rhythms, and it reached far bigger audiences than Circle ever did. Corea tied the change directly to what he was studying. “I no longer wanted to satisfy myself,” he told Down Beat in 1976. “I really want to connect with the world and make my music mean something to people.”
What he said it did for him
His fullest explanation came in 1978, in an interview with the British jazz writer Les Tomkins that is now kept by the National Jazz Archive in England. Tomkins asked about the “indebtedness to Scientology” that Corea acknowledged on his album sleeves, and whether it had been a direct motivation for his music.
“It’s actually been just a refreshing breath of fresh air in my life in general,” Corea answered. He called Hubbard “an American philosopher, and a very beautiful and very brilliant man.” Studying Scientology, he said, “has helped me clarify for myself my own philosophy” and helped him separate his own views from what “has stuck to me through education, through social upbringing, through the agreements of society.”
“It’s helped me become more myself,” he said, “and it’s really taught me a basic ability that I think we all innately have, which is a willingness and desire to communicate with one another. That, I think, has been the major thing that has helped and been like a relief in my life.”
That change, he said, was the one that reached his music most directly. Where he had once been content to work out ideas in his own head, his goal had become to take his art “and actually reach people, communicate to them, and have good experiences.” He summed it up as “nothing but positive learning for me.”
Tomkins pressed him on the mind itself. Corea described Scientology as teaching that there are “dormant areas of the mind” that act as “hindrances,” the parts “that tend to hit us and make us react, not out of our own choice.” Learning to tell those apart from the parts “that we can actually causatively use towards creating something better,” he said, was “a great relief.”
He also explained what it meant on stage. “It’s a much nicer feeling to be extroverted, and have my attention on what’s around me, than to be introverted, and have my attention stuck on what’s going around in my head,” he said. “So, in order to get out of that, I have to understand what’s in my head, so I can take my attention off of it and talk to you, or play to an audience.”
Letters to Hubbard
Corea’s admiration for Hubbard never faded. In a 2004 interview with All About Jazz, recorded at a New York studio where copies of his new album were displayed beside the Hubbard novel it was based on, he called Hubbard “a great man” and said the best way to learn about Scientology was “to know who Ron Hubbard was.”
He said the two had corresponded. “I used to write to him and thank him for his work,” Corea said. “Later on I sent him a couple records and he wrote back and was very encouraging.”
He described the religion’s values as “universal values” of “health and improvement” that “any good mother or father or friend couldn’t possibly disagree with,” and said people of other faiths study Hubbard too. He said it shaped how he ran his bands as well: “I require a certain amount of ethics from anybody I work with.”
Hubbard in the records
The influence shows up plainly in his discography. The credits of Romantic Warrior, the 1976 Return to Forever album that became the band’s most popular record and was later certified gold, state that the title composition is dedicated to L. Ron Hubbard.
In 1982 Corea and Return to Forever bassist Stanley Clarke, also a Scientologist at the time, played on Space Jazz, an album released as a soundtrack to Hubbard’s novel Battlefield Earth. Corea appeared on later church-produced Hubbard albums as well, including The Road to Freedom in 1986.
Late in his career he went further. In 2004 his Elektric Band released To the Stars, based on a Hubbard science fiction novel of the same name, written in 1949, that turns on Einstein’s idea of time dilation: travelers moving near the speed of light age slowly while decades pass at home. Corea said he had read the book eight or nine times. “When I would read his fiction, I would get all kind of musical ideas,” he told NPR.
The 2006 follow-up, The Ultimate Adventure, took its name and story from a 1939 Hubbard tale that updates the Arabian Nights. Corea told NPR he heard flamenco and samba in the story and wrote pieces as portraits of its characters, such as the track “Queen Tedmur,” for the hero’s romantic interest. The album won the Grammy for best jazz instrumental album.
The fight in Germany
His faith also cost him work. In 1993 a state-commissioned agency in Baden-Wurttemberg broke off talks for a Corea concert tied to the World Athletics Championships in Stuttgart once his Scientology membership became known. According to the later appeals court ruling, the state said Corea could play anywhere in the state he liked, but that it would not contract with him; its administration said it did not consider Scientology a religious community.
Corea sued, calling it religious discrimination; a church official in Frankfurt said at the time that he was not seeking money. He lost at trial and again on appeal in 1996.
He kept pressing the case in Washington. In June 2000 he testified before the House International Relations Committee. “Only in Germany have I ever been denied the right to perform my art because of my religion,” he told the committee. He said Bavaria had barred him from future state-subsidized festivals after a sold-out 1996 concert there, that a 2000 orchestral date in Bremen had been canceled under political pressure, and that his German concerts had dropped from 16 or 17 a year to one or two.
“People listen to my music not because of my religion, my politics, or my personal beliefs, but because they like it,” he said.
How others saw it
Scientology has long been controversial, and not every listener accepted Corea’s account of where his music came from. After he died, the religion news site GetReligion pointed out that the New York Times obituary said the religion’s teachings “informed much of his music” without offering a single example of how.
Corea’s own words suggest an answer. He rarely claimed that Scientology wrote a chord for him. What he said, again and again over 40 years, was that it changed whom he was playing for: that it turned him outward, toward the audience, and that the audiences followed.
Corea died at his home in the Tampa Bay area of Florida on February 9, 2021, of a rare form of cancer that his family said had been found only shortly before. He was 79.
The mural on Everett Avenue at Chestnut Street, by lead artist Max Corona, is on view now. Our story on the unveiling has how the project came about.