Return engagement

ANY TIME a group of old friends gets together, memories inevitably get rehashed and discrepancies in the varied accounts just as inevitably emerge. The same is true for members of seminal 1970s fusion supergroup Return To Forever, who have been revisiting past glories on the road together for the past two months.

According to pianist and bandleader Chick Corea, plenty of diverging stories have arisen as the quartet has reminisced. Even now, new contradictions are being forged on such seemingly objective matters as the audience makeup for a tour that stops tonight at the Mann Center, with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones in the opening slot.

"The surprise is that the audiences that turn up are, for the most part, young," said Corea from his hotel room in Spain. "They're sprinkled with fans who obviously knew the band back in the day, but it's mostly young people who are very excitable and receiving the music very enthusiastically. That's been a big surprise for me. I didn't know what to expect."

But a week later bassist Stanley Clarke, en route to a gig in Orlando, Fla., had a very different perception of Return To Forever's 2008 fanbase.

"It's funny," Clarke said. "You go into a room where the average age is 45 to 65 and you see guys jumping up like they're 19 or 20. We put the music together, and we didn't realize until we got on the stage that all our fans had aged with us."

Perhaps there's truth to both impressions.

As Corea, Clarke, guitarist Al Di Meola and drummer Lenny White hit the road for the first time in 25 years (there was a brief 1983 tour seven years after the quartet disbanded), the influence of RTF has become undeniable.

The fusion of jazz and rock peppered with classical and world-music influences that the band helped pioneer is re-emerging in a new generation of musicians who ignore genre boundaries. More than a nostalgia trip for the first wave of fusion fans, the tour also is a chance for the music's new wave to witness their forebears in action.

In the 1970s, RTF stood beside several other bands melding virtuosic jazz chops with hypnotic grooves and New Age mysticism: John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra; Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul's Weather Report; Herbie Hancock's Headhunters. For some, the era forged a pathway toward the future of music; for others, it was a sellout of the jazz tradition for arena-rock success. Almost all these bands had Miles Davis' electric group experiments in their DNA, led by musicians, like Corea, who had served time at the legendary trumpeter's side.

After his stint with Davis, Corea formed the cooperative group Circle with bassist Dave Holland, saxophonist Anthony Braxton, and drummer Barry Altschul. "Circle was completely out of the box," Corea recalled, "playing all kinds of music but mostly on the edge. Very improvised, kind of wild music. But toward the end I was really wanting to experience getting grooving rhythms and lyrical melodies across to an audience. I became more interested in how to reach an audience with music, so that was the basic intent of Return To Forever: to take everything I knew with music and put it in a form that could reach out to a lot of people."

Around the same time, Corea became interested in Scientology, the religion founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, which also influenced RTF's inception.

"It's hard to say specifically what comes out of what," Corea said, "but one thing that came about through studying the works of Hubbard was a rediscovery of the importance of communication in life in general. So I started to apply that kind of realization that I had to music."

The original Return To Forever lineup featured drummer Airto Moreira and his wife, singer Flora Purim, saxophonist/flutist Joe Farrell and Clarke, who was the only member besides Corea to remain through each of the group's incarnations.

"It's like anything where two guys just start out doing something together," Clarke shrugged when asked recently about the longevity of his partnership with Corea. "It's like two guys who open up a restaurant or open up a shoe store. When we started out, Chick had maybe 10 cents in his pocket and I probably had 15 . . . we just went for it and that was it."

The original lineup, which Corea expressed interest in also reuniting at some point, released two albums before disbanding in 1973. Inspired by the jazz-rock experiments of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Corea recruited White and guitarist Bill Connors for the band's third album. With Connors leaving to concentrate on a solo career, 19-year-old guitar prodigy Al Di Meola was enlisted, surviving a trial by fire: his first gig was in front of a sold-out house at Carnegie Hall.

Between 1974 and 1976, RTF released three albums and toured nonstop before another breakup. "A lot of life went down during those years and a lot of changes," Corea recalled. "A lot of growing, I think, too. It came to a point where each guy was thinking more toward doing his own music. I actually encouraged that to happen, because it was a natural thing."

Corea and Clarke assembled one final incarnation, a horn- and synth-based amalgam that released two inferior albums before bringing RTF to an end.

Over the 25 years since the quartet's short-lived 1983 reunion, fans have clamored for another go-round, and all four members have faced persistent questions about the group. It was something that the members mulled also.

"It's just a synergy between the four guys," he said. "We've been talking about it for years. Whenever we cross paths or join each other on a project, the subject of the band always comes up. But everyone has developed a pretty active, if not intense, career. So it's just that the discussions about putting it together got a little bit more intense over the past couple of years, and we decided to just get down to brass tacks and carve out a schedule."

Unlike the 1983 tour, on which the band performed new music, this time out they've dug back into their classic repertoire, due both to time constraints and the demands of their audience. As the tour winds down, any future for RTF is unclear, though Corea did express a desire to continue.

Observed Clarke, "Everyone is much wiser. Not to say that the adolescent quality that we all love in music from young people is bad, but we're older and we still have a lot of passion. I actually think the band is much more soulful now than it ever was.

"Chick said a really cool thing to me the other night. He said, 'I have to finally admit it, Return To Forever is the most successful, powerful thing I've done in my entire career.' And I actually agree with him. In my own life it's probably the most significant musical adventure that I've had." *

Send e-mail to bradys@phillynews.com.

Mann Center for the Performing Arts, 5201 Parkside Ave., 8 tonight, $29-$64, 215-893-1999, www.manncenter.org.