“When people listen to our music, there are so many different ideas about what it is,” Chick Corea told TIME in 2011. “You can survey the audience from young to old…they’ll put it in a lot of different categories of music.” It was this ability to embrace and synthesize so many types of music—hard bop, Latin jazz, rock, classical and Spanish folk influences—that made Chick Corea, who died of cancer on Feb.