Most “best songs” lists are written from a couch. This one is written from the bandstand. Chick Magnet is a Chick Corea tribute band — we’ve stress-tested this songbook in front of jazz-club listeners, wedding crowds, and gala rooms across Denver, and we know which tunes work on paper and which ones work at 9:40 PM on a Saturday when the dance floor is deciding whether to commit.
A note on the rules: we ranked compositions, not albums, and we weighed three things — the writing itself, the historical weight, and (our home-field criterion) how the tune plays live. Chick Corea died in February 2021 at 79 as the most-awarded jazz musician in Grammy history, with a catalog spanning six decades. Cutting it to ten was the hard part.
10. Got a Match? — The Chick Corea Elektric Band (1986)
The burner. “Got a Match?” comes from the Elektric Band’s 1986 debut, with John Patitucci on bass and Dave Weckl on drums — a rhythm section that redefined precision for a generation of players. The tune is a blistering line over a pedal that has become the standard-issue technique test for fusion players: if you’ve spent time in a college practice room, you’ve suffered over this melody. Live, it’s pure spectacle. We pull it out when the room wants fireworks, and it never fails to make the front tables put their drinks down.
9. Captain Marvel — Light as a Feather (1973)
Corea wrote “Captain Marvel” during the period when he was handing tunes to Stan Getz — Getz cut it as the title track of his 1972 album with Corea, Stanley Clarke, Airto Moreira, and Tony Williams in the band, and Return to Forever recorded it on Light as a Feather the same year. It’s the sound of samba jazz being strapped to a rocket: bright, relentless, melodic. As a rhythm section workout it’s one of the most fun tunes in the book, and it tends to be the sleeper hit of our club sets — nobody requests it, everybody asks what it was.
8. Humpty Dumpty — The Mad Hatter (1978)
From Corea’s Lewis Carroll concept album The Mad Hatter, “Humpty Dumpty” is the straight-ahead jewel in a very theatrical record — a quartet track with Joe Farrell on tenor that swings hard over a twisty, chromatic set of changes. Jazz musicians adopted it as a modern standard almost immediately. A grace note for the obsessives: a live version, “Humpty Dumpty (Set 2)” from Akoustic Band LIVE, won Corea a posthumous Grammy for Best Improvised Jazz Solo in 2022. He was winning awards for this tune 44 years after he wrote it. That’s a composition.
7. Matrix — Now He Sings, Now He Sobs (1968)
Before the Rhodes, before the fusion, there was the 1968 trio record with Miroslav Vitouš and Roy Haynes — one of the great piano trio albums, full stop. “Matrix” got its first recording there: a quick, angular blues that scrambles bebop logic into something thoroughly modern, with Haynes dancing underneath. When we play trio gigs — restaurants, galas, listening rooms — this is the tune that reminds everyone Corea was one of the greats of the acoustic piano tradition before he ever plugged in.
6. Windows — first recorded on Stan Getz’s Sweet Rain (1967)
“Windows” is the young composer announcing himself. Getz recorded it in March 1967 for Sweet Rain with a 25-year-old Corea in the piano chair, and the tune has lived in jazz fake books ever since: a gorgeous waltz whose melody floats down through shifting harmony like — well, like light through windows. It’s the Corea tune that other jazz musicians call most often on standards gigs. For dinner sets and cocktail hours it’s one of our quiet weapons: sophisticated enough for the jazz fans, lovely enough for everyone else.
5. Crystal Silence — Return to Forever (1972)
The ballad. “Crystal Silence” appeared on Corea’s 1972 ECM album Return to Forever, and later that year it became the title track of his first duet record with vibraphonist Gary Burton — the beginning of a duo partnership that lasted decades and collected Grammys of its own. The tune is barely a chord progression at all; it’s an atmosphere, a long exhale. We use it the way Corea did: as the moment the night gets still. At weddings it’s devastating in the best way.
4. 500 Miles High — Light as a Feather (1973)
The dark one. Where most of the early Return to Forever book is sunshine, “500 Miles High” smolders — a minor-key vehicle with lyrics by Neville Potter, sung by Flora Purim, that builds like weather coming over the mountains. Corea said the title isn’t about what you think; it’s about a spirit flying high. The solo section is one of the great blowing forms in jazz: tense, circular, demanding. Among musicians it’s arguably the most-jammed Corea tune after “Spain,” and when our quintet gets it rolling, it’s the moment of the night where the band stops being polite.
3. Armando’s Rhumba — My Spanish Heart (1976)
Chick’s full name was Armando Anthony Corea, so this one is literally him in tune form — and it sounds like it: playful, virtuosic, impossible not to move to. The original, on 1976’s My Spanish Heart, features Jean-Luc Ponty’s violin sparring with Corea over a strutting rhumba bass line. It has since become a jam-session standard worldwide. For us it might be the perfect gig tune — short enough for a wedding set, deep enough for a jazz club, and the melody gets actual laughs of delight. We’ve filmed it live; you can watch it on our media page.
2. La Fiesta — Return to Forever (1972)
The closer. “La Fiesta” got its first recording in February 1972 on Corea’s ECM album Return to Forever, and a month later he cut it again with Stan Getz on Captain Marvel — two definitive versions before the year was out. It’s flamenco by way of a jazz quintet: that unmistakable Spanish-Phrygian vamp, a melody that climbs like a festival procession, and an ending designed to leave nothing in the tank. We almost always close the tribute show with it, because nothing follows “La Fiesta.” If “Spain” makes a crowd fall in love, “La Fiesta” makes them stand up.
1. Spain — Light as a Feather (1973)
It was never going to be anything else. The rubato intro borrowed from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, the melody crowds sing back at the band, the unison hits, the solo cycle that every jazz student on earth has shedded — “Spain” is the rare composition that is simultaneously a masterpiece, a standard, a technique exam, and a party. It’s the center of gravity of our whole tribute show, and we’ve written a full anatomy of it — the form, the hits, why it’s a jam-session rite of passage — in Spain, Explained.
What makes it number one from the bandstand specifically: no other tune in the jazz repertoire works on this many audiences at once. The jazz heads get the harmony. The dancers get the samba. Everyone else gets a melody they’ll hum in the car. Corea’s whole philosophy — that profound music and joyful music are the same thing — compressed into one tune.
Honorable mentions
Ten is cruel. “Windows” nearly lost its spot to “Tones for Joan’s Bones.” “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs” deserves a list of its own, and the Elektric Band book (“Rumble,” anyone?) could fill a second show. And the deep Return to Forever cuts — “You’re Everything,” “Romantic Warrior” — are a story we tell in full in our beginner’s guide to Return to Forever.
Hear the songbook live
Every tune on this list is in Chick Magnet’s working repertoire, from duo to quintet, anywhere in Colorado. If you want this music at your wedding, private event, or venue, send us your date — custom quote within 24 hours. Want to scout us first? Upcoming public shows are listed at jordanlovinger.com/live.