In October 2020, Chick Corea walked onstage at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, Florida. He had spent months in lockdown, performing livestream recitals from his home studio, and he wanted what every musician wants: a live audience. Florida’s pandemic restrictions had loosened just enough. His team made it work. He gave two solo piano concerts across two evenings.

Four months later, on February 9, 2021, Corea died of a rare form of cancer. He was seventy-nine. The concerts at Ruth Eckerd Hall were the last public performances he ever gave.

Forever Yours: The Farewell Performance, released on Candid Records in February 2026, captures highlights from both evenings. It won the Grammy for Best Jazz Performance (for Trilogy 3) in the same year it appeared — an unusual circumstance in which an artist is being honored for past work while new work is simultaneously reminding everyone why the honors were deserved.

The Program

Corea’s setlist ranges across his career and his enthusiasms with the prodigal generosity that was his signature. “Armando’s Rhumba” arrives early, its cascading figures tumbling with the combination of technical command and rhythmic buoyancy that Corea made look effortless and that no other pianist has successfully replicated. A mini-recital of pieces from the Children’s Songs cycle — Nos. 1, 2, 10, 17, 19, and 20 — demonstrates his belief that simplicity and sophistication are not opposites but collaborators.

The tributes to other composers form the album’s emotional spine. His “Round Midnight” is a conversation with Monk — not an imitation but a response, the kind of thing that only a pianist who has spent decades thinking about another pianist’s music can produce. “Trinkle Tinkle” extends the Monk meditation. “Waltz for Debby” pays tribute to Bill Evans with a tenderness that borders on the devotional. A movement from Mozart’s Piano Sonata in F Major (K. 332) sits comfortably alongside Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed” — a programming decision that, in lesser hands, might seem like affectation but in Corea’s hands simply reflects the absence of boundaries in his listening.

The Voice

What makes this album something more than an excellent solo piano recording is the spoken material. Corea’s between-song patter is left intact — he introduces tunes, explains his relationship with the composers, invites audience members to the stage for improvised “Portrait” compositions. His voice is warm, unhurried, familial. He sounds like a man talking to friends, which is how he treated every audience he ever played for.

Jordin Pinkus, president of Chick Corea Productions, has described Corea’s generosity as the quality that distinguished him most. He would meet fans for the first time and ask about their music, their instruments, their lives. The between-song moments on Forever Yours capture this quality exactly: a musician whose curiosity about other people was as genuine as his curiosity about harmony.

The Recording

Mixed and mastered by longtime collaborator Bernie Kirsh, the recording is intimate without being claustrophobic. You hear the room — the quality of air around the piano, the occasional response from the audience. This is important. Studio recordings of Corea abound. What is rare is a document that captures the specific energy exchange between this particular musician and a live room.

The bonus track, “Pannonica” — Monk’s ballad for the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter — is the album’s most poignant moment. It was not part of the original concert program. Its inclusion feels like a closing benediction, the last note of the last set of the last concert of a career that lasted half a century.

What Remains in the Room

The liner notes include messages from Alicia Keys, Herbie Hancock, Hans Zimmer, Robert Glasper, Bobby McFerrin, Stanley Clarke, and Lang Lang, among others. The range of contributors — from hip-hop to film scoring to classical piano — reflects the scope of Corea’s influence. He belonged to no single tradition. He was a jazz musician who played with Return to Forever and scored films and collaborated with Béla Fleck and recorded duets with Gary Burton across four decades. The common thread was always the same: an insatiable appetite for musical conversation and a refusal to treat any genre as beneath his attention.

Forever Yours is not the definitive Chick Corea album. His catalog is too vast and too varied for any single release to hold that title. What it is, instead, is a farewell that sounds nothing like a farewell — a man at the piano, in a room full of people, doing the thing he loved most, with the generosity and technical command that made him irreplaceable. The concerts were never meant to be goodbyes. They became goodbyes anyway. The music, as always with Corea, carries no weight that it cannot also transform into light.