Herbie Hancock

Essential Albums

  • Head Hunters
    Head Hunters
    Head Hunters

    Jazz purists didn't always thrill to Herbie Hancock's musical innovations. But whether or not they dug it, there was no denying that, with Head Hunters, Hancock opened doors and minds, lending to the birth of jazz fusion and to electronic music. Using an Arp, Fender Rhodes and other synths and keyboards, Hancock gave this 1973 album a feel that somehow remains timeless. And the rest of the ensemble locked right into this funk-jazz vision. Bennie Maupin's reeds lend just the right warmth to these sessions. Bassist Paul Jackson puts a bottom on "Chameleon" that rips floorboards clean from their roots. It's the perfect groove for Hancock's funky, screechy, and lucid solos. Hancock reworks his own standard, "Watermelon Man," in a completely new mode, creating a more tribal, urgent statement than anyone knew the song could elicit.

  • Sextant
    Sextant
    Sextant

    After two albums for Warner Bros.—Mwandishi and Crossings—with his important but short-lived sextet, Herbie Hancock made the move to Columbia in 1973 with Sextant. It would be the final studio outing by the sextet, aka the Mwandishi band. But it marked the beginning of a Columbia stint that lasted all the way up to Perfect Machine in 1988. The three extended tunes on Sextant also mark Hancock’s first documented foray on Moog and ARP synthesisers, which are heavily in use from the start of the opening track, “Rain Dance”. Synth pioneer Patrick Gleeson, who had appeared on Crossings as well, is credited on the same gizmos as Hancock, making it hard to know who‘s doing what. But we can certainly pick out Hancock’s magical sound on Fender Rhodes, as well as acoustic piano, which he utterly dominates in a virtuosic solo on “Hidden Shadows”. The band members all took Swahili names for the Mwandishi project, and those remain in play on Sextant, which is credited to Mwandishi Herbie Hancock: trumpeter Mganga Eddie Henderson; soprano saxophonist, bass clarinetist and flutist Mwile Bennie Maupin; bass/tenor/alto trombonist Pepo Julian Priester; bassist Mchezaji Buster Williams; and drummer Jabali Billy Hart. Together, they create a glorious fabric of sound from raw, percolating vamps, modernist harmony and sonic abstraction. The aesthetic is close at times to early Weather Report, though the clavinet, half-closed hi-hat cymbal groove and electric bass distortion of “Hornets” would sound at home on a Stevie Wonder album from this period. And the acoustic piano element found on Sextant serves as a reminder that no one could touch Hancock on the instrument, and that acoustic jazz would remain at the core of his artistry for years to come, even as he delved further and further into beats and electronics—journeys that would eventually take him to the pop charts, not to mention the Grammys.

  • Speak Like a Child
    Speak Like a Child
    Speak Like a Child

    Herbie Hancock debuted as a leader in 1962, starting a Blue Note streak that would come to include such 1960s classics as Inventions & Dimensions, Empyrean Isles and Maiden Voyage. The next album in this historic run, 1968’s Speak Like a Child, would represent another triumph of imagination, melodic acuity, masterful pianism and sheer band chemistry. At the heart of it all is a trio featuring Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Philadelphia legend Mickey Roker on drums. That’s a solid musical foundation—one that Hancock augmented with an unusual section of warm, chamber-like brass and winds, featuring Jerry Dodgion on alto flute, Thad Jones on flugelhorn and Peter Phillips on bass trombone. This configuration, influenced in part by Gil Evans, had a mysterious aura, one that set the stage for the bass clarinet and alto flute of Bennie Maupin in Hancock’s first major post-Blue Note ensemble, the Mwandishi band. Ron Carter’s original “First Trip”, a solidly bluesy midtempo workhorse that remained in Hancock’s book for years, is one of two Speak Like a Child tracks to feature the trio without the chamber group. The other is “The Sorcerer”, previously recorded in 1967 on the Miles Davis quintet album Sorcerer. Hancock takes it a good 20 clicks slower on the metronome, giving the tune’s complex changes a satisfying lilt as the trio shreds mightily. The horns paint with dark and vibrant colours on the opening track, “Riot” (which appeared on Davis’ Nefertiti album the very month Hancock recorded this version). It’s just one of several standout cuts here, alongside the glorious “Speak Like a Child,” the eerily chromatic “Toys” and the richly contrapuntal ballad “Goodbye to Childhood”.

  • Maiden Voyage
    Maiden Voyage
    Maiden Voyage

    Maiden Voyage sounds like the title of a debut, but it was Herbie Hancock’s fifth outing for Blue Note, recorded all in one day in March 1965, when the young piano master was in the thick of his association with the trailblazing Miles Davis Quintet. The Maiden Voyage line-up was in fact a version of Davis’ band, with Freddie Hubbard on trumpet in place of Davis, Wayne Shorter’s predecessor George Coleman on tenor saxophone, and the unrivalled rhythm section of bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams. (The same line-up, without Coleman, appeared on Hancock’s Empyrean Isles in 1964.) The short yet impactful program includes some of Hancock’s most famous and widely played compositions, including the title track, with its mesmerising vamp and hovering chords; “The Eye of the Hurricane”, with its darting obstacle course of a theme leading to galloping minor-key blues; and “Dolphin Dance”, a model of advanced harmony and lyrical songcraft, the perfect modern midtempo swing tune to bring it to a close. “Survival of the Fittest” points to a kind of open-form improvisation that Tony Williams and others on Blue Note were exploring at this time. (“The Egg” from Empyrean Isles is another specimen.) And “Little One”, recorded in rawer form by the Miles Davis Quintet two months earlier for the album E.S.P., gains a bit more expressive clarity here in the out-of-tempo passages (the contrast between the Shorter and Coleman tenor solos also proves fascinating). Arguably, it’s “Little One” that best captures the album’s dark and magical mood, which Nora Kelly sought to evoke in her impressionist liner notes: “A single ship, perhaps on her maiden voyage, her mast a black spike against the sky, hovers near the horizon, until the curving waters sink her sail from view.”

  • Empyrean Isles (Expanded Edition)
    Empyrean Isles (Expanded Edition)
    Empyrean Isles (Expanded Edition)

    1964

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About Herbie Hancock

If Herbie Hancock had faded from view after his momentous mid-’60s stint with the Miles Davis Quintet and his pioneering Blue Note releases in the same period, his reputation as one of the most consequential pianists in jazz history would still have been assured. But Hancock repeatedly changed course, from the abstract electric jazz of his Mwandishi sextet to the tightly coiled jazz-funk fusion of Head Hunters to his prescient electronic experimentation with producer Bill Laswell in the ’80s. The Chicago-born Hancock achieved commercial success on his own terms, following a genuine creative path while ignoring barriers between jazz and pop (the title shared by his 2005 album and his 2014 memoir, Possibilities, said much about his worldview). He remains a “Chameleon”, true to his signature track from 1973, covering songs by his friend and collaborator Joni Mitchell and working alongside Kendrick Lamar, Thundercat and Flying Lotus in the studio.

HOMETOWN
Chicago, United States of America
BORN
1940
GENRE
Jazz

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