| Jazz |
Summary: Lisa Rich’s Highwire brings Chick Corea’s compositions, vocal jazz and a remarkable 32-year journey from 1987 to 2019 into sharp focus.
Lisa Rich’s Highwire: Chick Corea, Jazz, and a Voice Across Time
To understand Highwire, you have to go back to 1980, and to Chick Corea. That was the year the great pianist and composer gave Lisa Rich five compositions that would eventually find their way onto this album: “The Aerialist,” “Contessa,” “Bud Powell,” “The Jinn” and “Highwire.” By then, Corea’s writing was already unmistakably his own, increasingly unconcerned with conventional boundaries and demanding a high degree of flexibility from anyone willing to take it on. For a vocalist, these pieces are not simply melodies waiting for lyrics and a voice. They have movement, breath, sudden turns, spaces, silences and an underlying architecture rooted as much in instrumental jazz as in vocal music. To sing Corea is to enter that architecture and learn how to move within it. “Highwire” itself has a story within the story. Years after Lisa Rich recorded it, the Corea composition would take on another life through Chaka Khan. But Rich had already put her stamp on it in 1987, at a crucial point in her career, when her voice carried a particular freshness and elasticity that would become part of her identity. The album was recorded, worked on and put away. Then it waited. It would not finally be released until 2019, 32 years after the sessions. Between 1987 and 2019, an entire life unfolded, bringing changes, setbacks, silences and a prolonged absence that would take Lisa Rich away from the stage.
Thirty-two years is more than a release delay. It is an entire musical era. Between 1987 and 2019, recording technology changed, listening habits were transformed and the relationship between artists and audiences shifted in ways that would have been difficult to imagine when Rich first entered the studio. And yet, listening to Highwire today, the first thing you hear is not its age but its freshness. That 1987 voice sounds remarkably alive. There is freedom in it, flexibility and presence, a quality that gives the album an almost uncanny relationship with time, as if the years had somehow passed around the music without touching it. Rich, however, would eventually lose that voice and step away from the scene for many years before beginning her return in recent times. Highwire consequently becomes more than an unreleased album finally pulled from the vault. It is a sonic snapshot of a life in progress, captured at one moment and brought back into the present decades later. What once belonged to the past suddenly became part of Rich’s present. She tells the story with a disarming simplicity: “I recorded Highwire in 1987, just before I had to take a long break from my career. In 2018, while delivering the eulogy at my mother’s funeral, I suddenly realized that the feeling was not that different from being onstage for a concert. That was when I decided to try to release Highwire, even though the recording was 32 years old. I contacted Scott Yanow and asked him if he could find a way to explain what had happened to me during those 32 years so that I could release the record. And it eventually did very well, considering that it was a recording that was more than 30 years old. People often wondered why I was releasing something so old. But for me, it was a test. I wanted to see whether people would be interested in Lisa Rich at more than 65, rather than Lisa Rich at 35. And it turned out to be the beginning of my comeback.”
That history gives Highwire an added resonance because, in a very real sense, the album brings two Lisa Riches into the same room. There is the Rich of 1987, a 35-year-old singer entering the studio with a young voice and a career still unfolding before her. And there is the Rich of 2019, more than three decades older, looking back at that recording and deciding to put it back into circulation. What separates those two versions of the artist is not simply time. It is everything life can place between two creative moments: absence, hardship, change, loss and, finally, the possibility of opening a door that may have seemed permanently closed. Releasing Highwire was therefore almost an experiment. Rich was not merely asking whether an old recording could find an audience. She was asking whether the audience would still be interested in Lisa Rich herself — not the 35-year-old singer preserved on tape, but the woman and artist who had crossed the 65-year-old threshold. That question reaches beyond this particular album. It touches on the peculiar way music culture often treats youth as though it were a prerequisite for relevance. Rich turns the question around: What remains when the years have accumulated? What can a voice recorded decades earlier still communicate? Highwire answers without making a spectacle of the question. The music is simply there, with the sonic character of its era and a voice that has lost none of its essential freshness. The recording technology is unmistakably 1987, but that is hardly a liability. In fact, it is part of the album’s personality. There is no sense of a singer being cosmetically reshaped by the endless possibilities of contemporary studio technology. What you hear is a vocalist confronting demanding material and a group of musicians responding to it with the precision, sensitivity and restraint the music requires.
That distinction matters because Highwire should be heard as music first and historical artifact second. The 32-year wait is a remarkable story, but it would mean very little if the music itself did not hold up. Once you know the backstory, the best thing you can do is put it aside and listen to Lisa Rich. That is when Highwire reveals itself as something far more substantial than an archival curiosity. These compositions have survived the decades because they remain musically alive, and Rich understands how to meet them on their own terms. Her greatest strength may be her instinct for space. She does not feel compelled to fill every opening simply because she has the voice to do so. She understands that silence is part of the music, that a breath can carry as much weight as a note, and that a phrase sometimes gains power by being allowed to disappear into the space around it. Corea’s material is formidable territory for a vocalist. The melodies can be intricate, the harmonic movement demanding and the rhythmic language unforgiving. But Rich never turns that complexity into a vocal obstacle course. She is not interested in proving that she can conquer the material. She wants to inhabit it. Melodic contour, breath, rhythmic displacement and silence all become part of her vocabulary. Rather than sitting on top of the instrumental arrangement, her voice enters it. It moves through the same architecture as the piano, bass and drums, becoming another instrument in the ensemble. That is the key to these performances: the compositions retain their sophistication without becoming academic, and the technical demands remain audible without ever becoming the point.
“The Aerialist” establishes that approach almost immediately. The piece requires control and agility, but Rich never telegraphs the work involved. She moves through its twists and turns with a relaxed authority, allowing phrases to breathe and silences to carry their own weight. The result is deceptive: the music can sound effortless precisely because the singer has done the hard work somewhere beyond the listener’s field of vision. “Contessa” takes a more elegant route. Its lyricism could easily invite an overly romantic treatment, yet Rich resists the temptation to overstate it. She trusts the melody, lets it unfold naturally and gives the emotion room to arrive on its own. Her restraint is not a lack of feeling; it is the means by which feeling becomes more palpable. “Bud Powell” opens another door. The title alone places the piece within a significant chapter of jazz history, and Rich approaches that lineage with obvious respect. But there is nothing museum-like about her reading. She does not merely reproduce a style or salute a tradition from a distance. She absorbs the reference and filters it through her own vocal language, allowing the music to exist in the present rather than simply pointing backward.
“The Jinn” continues the journey through material that demands an especially alert vocalist. Again, the technical challenges are there, but Rich keeps them backstage. The listener is never asked to admire the difficulty. Instead, you find yourself listening to the conversation between voice and instruments, following the way one phrase opens a space for another. That sense of interaction is what keeps the album moving. “Highwire,” naturally, carries the greatest symbolic weight. Its own journey did not end with Rich’s 1987 recording. The composition would later receive another notable interpretation from Chaka Khan, but Rich’s version remains inseparable from the moment in which she recorded it and from the career interruption that followed. The title begins to sound almost prophetic: music balanced in midair, suspended between one life and another, waiting decades before finding its way back to an audience. The rest of the repertoire is chosen with the same intelligence. Rich does not take the easy road. The program moves through different corners of the jazz tradition and reveals different aspects of her voice without ever losing its center. Each composition has its own personality, its own dramatic demands, and Rich allows each one to retain them.
Then comes Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman,” and the larger aesthetic of the album comes into even sharper focus. Rich is not interested in making the piece more comfortable than it is. She does not sand down its tension or turn its emotional ambiguity into easy sentiment. Instead, she allows the drama already present in the composition to pass through her voice. “Lonely Woman” becomes revealing precisely because she is not attempting to erase the history behind it. She extends that history. There is a deep knowledge of jazz here, but it is never worn like a badge. Rich can evoke different eras through phrasing alone, introducing romance or poetry when the music calls for it and leaving both alone when it does not. She understands that emotion does not need to be announced. Sometimes it is contained in a slight inflection, the shape of a sustained note, a breath or the silence that follows. That sensitivity is central to Highwire. This is not an album built around vocal technique for its own sake. It is built around musical understanding. Rich knows what she is singing before she decides how to sing it, and that difference is enormous. A singer can have impeccable technique and remain emotionally outside a composition. Rich does the opposite. She enters the music, makes it her own and somehow manages to do so without disturbing its essential character. Her recordings consequently tend to develop their own sound and their own interior life. The material feels lived with before it ever reaches the microphone. You can imagine the preparation: the pieces absorbed, the structures understood, the details internalized. Then, once the red light comes on, that preparation disappears into performance. Nothing is calculated to impress, yet almost everything sounds deliberate.
The collective musicianship is equally important. Rich’s freedom depends on players who understand how to listen, not merely how to accompany. Piano, bass, drums and voice are not separate departments here. They function as a single organism, constantly adjusting to one another without turning the music into a contest for attention. That is why Highwire can draw in listeners who may not know every chapter of jazz history represented here. You do not need to analyze Corea’s architecture before entering the music. You do not need to understand every harmonic or rhythmic implication on first listen. Rich’s phrasing gives you a way in. She makes sophisticated material feel approachable without ever simplifying it, which is a much harder accomplishment than it sounds.
This is where Lisa Rich’s interpretation, much like that of our friend Jennifer Roberts, rises into something larger than vocal craftsmanship. Singing in tune, possessing a beautiful instrument and navigating difficult repertoire are only the starting points. The real achievement is turning interpretation into creation — giving a composition another life without taking it away from the composer. For anyone drawn to vocal jazz at its most fully realized, Highwire deserves close attention. The album is as carefully conceived as Rich’s other work, but what stands out is how completely at ease she sounds inside complexity. She never seems to wrestle the material into submission. She inhabits it. That difference changes the listening experience. Once the singer makes the difficult seem natural, the listener is free to stop thinking about technique and start hearing the music itself.
As the album unfolds, that sense of momentum only grows. Each track seems to deepen the one before it. Corea’s compositions form something of a spine, while the other selections gradually widen the musical landscape. Rich remains the connecting thread, but she never tries to impose a single sound on everything she sings. She allows each piece its own character, period, color and dramatic identity. The result is an album that feels coherent without ever becoming uniform.
That may also explain why Highwire has aged so gracefully. It is not dependent on a particular production aesthetic that now feels tied to another era. Its foundation is simpler and more durable: a singer, a group of musicians and compositions strong enough to sustain that relationship. When that connection is genuine, decades can pass without stripping the music of its meaning.
There is something undeniably moving about a voice recorded in 1987 having to wait 32 years before being heard in this context. What could easily have been considered a weakness becomes part of the album’s strength. Highwire arrives carrying its own history, but it never sounds trapped inside it. The record asks to be heard in the present. Time becomes almost another musician in the story, separating the recording from its release, the young Lisa Rich from the artist who would eventually return to it, and the silence of her absence from her reappearance onstage. Yet time did not destroy the music. It preserved it. By the time Highwire appeared in 2019, listening to it meant hearing more than a 1987 performance. It meant hearing how three decades can alter the meaning of a recording without necessarily altering the music itself. Rich wanted to know whether audiences would respond to Lisa Rich at more than 65 rather than Lisa Rich at 35. That question now hangs over the album in an unexpectedly powerful way. We are not simply hearing a singer preserved in an earlier moment. We are hearing an artist place that earlier self alongside her present self and allow the listener to experience the distance between them.
Ultimately, the answer is in the music. It is in the precision of the melodies, the use of silence, the intelligence of the repertoire, the way Rich moves from Chick Corea to Ornette Coleman, and in her ability to introduce romance or poetry without ever tipping into sentimentality. Most of all, it is in that voice, still carrying an extraordinary freshness after all those years. By the time “The Silence of a Candle” arrives, Highwire has reached its natural resting place. After the complexity, tension, shifting atmospheres and references to several generations of jazz, the music gradually settles. There is no grand gesture required. The title itself seems to capture something essential about the album: the understanding that music exists not only in what is sung, but also in what is left unsaid. “The Silence of a Candle” closes the record without forcing a conclusion. Rich has nothing left to prove. She simply lets the music finish its journey. And perhaps that is when the album’s central idea becomes clearest: a voice can disappear, a record can remain unheard, a career can go silent for years, but music has a patience that human beings rarely possess. Highwire is therefore much more than an album recorded in 1987 and released in 2019. It is the story of a voice crossing time, an artist returning to a chapter of her own history, and a body of music that never stopped being alive. Those 32 years between recording and release are no longer merely an absence. They are part of the record’s identity. Perhaps that is why the listening experience grows richer as it moves toward the final track. The deeper you go, the more apparent it becomes that Rich is not trying to go backward. She is not attempting to become the singer she was in 1987. Instead, she allows us to hear what that singer created, now viewed through the distance of a life lived in the years since. Time changes everything, but certain musical emotions remain stubbornly resistant to it.
Highwire ultimately becomes a meeting between a voice and its own past, but also between that voice and the listeners encountering it now. Chick Corea is here. Ornette Coleman is here. So are the other composers and the musicians who surround Rich. But at the center is her unmistakable way of making each composition breathe, revealing its character without trying to possess it. Nothing feels gratuitous. Nothing feels like a technical exercise for its own sake. Every choice contributes to the same larger narrative. In 1987, Lisa Rich recorded this music without knowing that it would wait 32 years for an audience. In 2019, she took the chance of putting it out there and discovering whether a voice recorded at 35 could still reach listeners when the singer herself was past 65. She called it a test. It became something much larger: the beginning of a return.
So listen to Highwire for what it is, without reducing it to its remarkable backstory and without ignoring that backstory either. The two cannot really be separated. The music arrives carrying the weight of the years, yet it still feels remarkably light on its feet. The voice belongs to another moment, but it speaks directly to the present. And after waiting all those years, Highwire sounds less like a record that was late than a record that finally arrived when it was ready to be heard.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, September 22nd, 2026
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Musicians :
Lisa Rich – vocals
Marc Copland – piano
Drew Gress – acoustic bass
Michael Smith – drums
David Kane – piano (track 3 & 6)
Track Listing :
1. Highwire The Aerialist (For Philippe Petit) 3:00
(Chick Corea & Tony Cohan)
2. Contesssa 5:43
(Chick Corea & Tony Cohan)
3. Celeste/PreludeTo A Kiss 4:27
(Ralph Towner & Norma Winstone Duke Ellington & Irving Gordon)
4. Bud Powell 3:00
(Chick Corea & Tony Cohan)
5. Stardancer 3:15
(Chick Corea & Tony Cohan)
6. Lonely Woman 5:53
(Ornette Coleman & Margo Guryan)
7. Songbird 3:52
(Loonis McGlohon)
8. The Jinn 2:14
(Chick Corea & Tony Cohan)
9. We’ll Be Together Again 5:19
(Carl T. Fischer & Frankie Laine)
10. The Silence Of A Candle 4:49
(Ralph Towner)
Produced by Lisa Rich
Co-produced & Engineered by Bob Dawson
Recorded at Bias Recording Studio, Springfield, VA, January 12, 1987
Mixed by Bob Dawson, June 2019
Mastered by Mike Monseur