500 Miles High

Chick Corea wrote this minor, modal tune for the second Return to Forever record, and Flora Purim's vocal on it made the piece her signature. The 500 Miles High chords and the backing track here can be taken at any tempo and moved to whatever key suits the player.

Who wrote "500 Miles High"

The music is Chick Corea's and the words are Neville Potter's, so the tune does have a lyric, though it is played as an instrumental at least as often as it is sung. It was recorded in 1972 by the first Return to Forever group — Corea on electric piano, Joe Farrell on flute and saxophone, Stanley Clarke on bass, Airto Moreira on drums and percussion, and Flora Purim singing — and appeared in 1973 on the album Light as a Feather. It is published by Universal Music Corporation and is still under copyright.

Recordings that made it a standard

• Return to Forever, Light as a Feather (1973) — the original. Purim sings over a light Brazilian feel and Farrell's flute takes the long solo; the performance floats rather than drives.
• Flora Purim, Butterfly Dreams (1973) — her Milestone debut, made the year after the Corea session. She took the tune with her when she began recording under her own name, and it stayed in her book from then on.
• Flora Purim, 500 Miles High (1974) — recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival on 6 July, with Ron Carter on bass and Airto Moreira among the drummers. A longer, looser reading that gave the album its title.
• Chick Corea, Christian McBride and Brian Blade, Trilogy 2 (2019) — the composer near the end of his life, taking it in an acoustic piano trio at eleven minutes, with none of the fusion instrumentation it was written for.