Spaces is an album by jazz guitarist Larry Coryell that was released in 1970 by Vanguard Records. Coryell is accompanied by John McLaughlin on guitar, Chick Corea on electric piano, Miroslav Vitouà ¡ on bass, and Billy Cobham on drums. The album was produced by Daniel Weiss and engineered by David Baker and Paul Berkowitz.
The album is sometimes considered to have started the jazz fusion genre. All of the participating musicians went on to form prominent fusion bands in the 1970s: McLaughlin and Cobham co-founded Mahavishnu Orchestra, Corea founded Return to Forever, Vitouà ¡ formed Weather Report (with Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul), and Coryell went on to start the Eleventh House in 1972.
âÂÂThe first day was strangeâÂÂ, said Coryell of the sessions, âÂÂbecause Chick and Billy and John had just come from sessions with Miles. They had definitely been taking some different approaches to the music at those sessions, because when I threw down the first piece, âÂÂTyroneâ by Larry Young, the cats did not play it straight. They were all going into outer spaceâ¦almost nothing we played that first day made the cut: it seems as if we got most of the music that went on the record on the second day. It just took a while to get comfortable with each other and the materialâ¦Spaces did not do that great upon initial release, but when Vanguard reissued it a few years later, it sold 250,000 copies. Not bad for a record that sounded very little like traditional jazz and nothing like rock.âÂÂ
Two discarded tracks from the two-day Spaces sessions, âÂÂTyroneâ and âÂÂPlanet Endâ were released on Planet End in 1975, along with contemporary material by Coryell's then-current band (The Eleventh House). (From the book Bathed In Lightning by Colin Harper _ Jawbone Press 2014)
Production