📍Chelsea, MA 02150, USA
1941 – 1959“I was born Armando Anthony Corea in June 1941 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a small, crowded, working-class city of immigrants across the Mystic River from Boston, the son of Armando J. Corea, a trumpeter, composer and arranger who led a Dixieland band in the Boston area, and Anna. My family was Italian-American, and music filled our home; my father's musician friends were always around, and my aunt gave me the nickname Chick. When I was about four, my parents hired a crane to lift an upright piano into our fourth-floor apartment, and from then on I never thought of doing anything else. By six I was sitting in on gigs with my dad and meeting other musicians. I tried the drums for a while too, and I played as a soloist with the St. Rose Scarlet Lancers, a drum and bugle corps based in Chelsea. At eight I began lessons with Salvatore Sullo, a concert pianist who introduced me to Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin, and to composing. At home I listened to my father's records of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Horace Silver, and I tried to play what I heard. After brief studies at Columbia University and the Juilliard School, I left to play in New York with Mongo Santamaría, Herbie Mann and Stan Getz, and in 1968 I joined Miles Davis's band during his electric years. I founded Return to Forever and wrote Spain, and won more than twenty Grammy Awards. Chelsea remembers the boy whose piano arrived by crane.”
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