The Complete Columbia Albums Collection

This chapter in the Complete Columbia Albums series showcases the end of Return to Forever's initial run that had begun on Polydor with a very different band. The best-known line-up -- Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, Lenny White, and guitarist Al di Meola -- appears only on the first album in this set, the iconic 1975 session Romantic Warrior, which was issued in 1976 (the rest of their recordings together are all on Polydor). According to many, it is the apotheosis and end of jazz-rock fusion proper. The lackluster Musicmagic was issued in 1977 with only Corea and Clarke remaining in the lineup -- though saxophonist and flutist Joe Farrell had returned from the band's earliest incarnation in the early '70s. The last three discs in this collection are made up of Return to Forever's Live: The Complete Concert, with the same basic lineup as Musicmagic. This live album had a checkered release history in the United States. It initially appeared as a single LP simply called Live -- single because it had been edited down from the two-and-a-half-hour concert. Two years later, in 1979, it was issued as a four-album set, unedited. On compact disc, it first appeared as a two-disc set that deleted all of the spoken intros and dialogue, and featured the LP-edited versions of "The Musician" and "So Long Mickey Mouse." In Japan, the complete concert was released as a triple-disc set, and it is that version which appears here. For this reason alone, it may be worth the entire purchase price for Return to Forever's America and European fans who didn't set out the big money for the Japanese version. ~ Thom Jurek