NY TIMES
April 24, 2009
By NATE CHINEN

The Five Peace Band, a jazz-rock juggernaut, presents a parody of abundance. Led by the guitarist John McLaughlin and the keyboardist Chick Corea — both restless virtuosos, and legends at 67 — the group works hard and fast, with heroic stamina and superhuman technique. Its overall effect can be exhilarating and exhausting. On Thursday, in its first of several sold-out nights at the Rose Theater, a three-hour concert became a tempest, extravagant in almost every sense.

But it wasn’t as if the crowd came unprepared. Mr. McLaughlin and Mr. Corea initiated their partnership last year, touring widely and generating a glut of bootleg videos online. More to the point, the Five Peace Band can’t help recalling a pair of fusion flagships from the 1970s: the Mahavishnu Orchestra, led by Mr. McLaughlin, and Return to Forever, led by Mr. Corea. And as Mr. McLaughlin acknowledged near the top of the show, it has been 40 years since he and Mr. Corea worked on the Miles Davis album “In a Silent Way,” a calmer touchstone of the jazz-rock era.

Here they made some effort to turn the page, opting not to play “In a Silent Way” or its companion piece, “It’s About That Time.” Yet there was a ’70s-era notion of valor coded into much of their playing. Mr. McLaughlin’s solos were marvels of velocity and precision, and though he introduced the occasional quirk — say, a pitch slightly bent with his guitar’s tremolo arm — the outcome always felt resolute.  Full Article…