Herbie Hancock

have loved head hunters forever. just bought maiden voyage at salzer's on the strength of ilm rec's. pretty amazing. it is a weird progression to go head hunters -> maiden voyage, though

every album should prbly have a blue note-esqe commentary on the back btw

I live near the pacific ocean, and the last 2 vinyl purchases are "Fred Neil" and "Maiden Voyage." The sea's influence no doubt

man, is this good. I need to check that ~best jazz albums poll~ thread and see if this made it. was distracted over crimbus break by all that back and forth over 'spiritual hat'

Anyone pick up the book by Bob Gluck about the Mwandishi era? Bout a third of the way through and it's pretty great so far...

(crickets)

anyway it's really good

I liked that book. I was surprised how fast the Mwandishi thing happened and how quickly it was over. Gluck is good on the music and also on the (somewhat depressing) business side.

must give endless thanks to tylerw for pointing me in the direction of inventions and dimensions some time ago, have been really quite obsessed with it ever since

Oh weird, Gluck teaches at the school literally one block away from me. I've seen him play a few times, really good stuff. I'll have to check out that book.

hmm, it'd have to be damn well-written for me to want to read an entire book on mwandishi

izzat warner brothers (incl fat albert), as on the album-threefer for that era, or just mwandishi?

Hurting - it covers quite a bit of ground, including Herbie's involvement with Donald Byrd and Miles, and touches on stuff that led up to the Mwandishi era like Maiden Voyage (which I actually prefer to anything he did with the Mwandishi band). Some deep analysis of a lot of (pre-Mwandishi) tunes and Herbie's general style, very thorough, if a tad academic in places. Sorta like a less intimidating version of the Robin Kelly book on Monk in that its very short on anything resembling gossip, but long on analysis (and hyperbole, natch). I'm a little over halfway through and I've been sorta savoring it at this point.

Inventions and Dimensions is such a neat record.

otm
just saw this is coming out
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81-oyN38flL._SL1500_.jpg
http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Columbia-Collection-Herbie-Hancock/dp/B003M3UJIK/?tag=smarturl-20

it is expensive

It's definitely not as cheap as some of the complete album collections coming out, but this does look like a great collection of music.

I've got most of the earlier funky Hancock records on Colombia. The thing that catches my eye is the eight Japanese releases, some of which are some more traditional jazz group setups. The trio record with Ron Carter and Tony Williams is one I would definitely like to hear.

The Japan only-album with the Kimiko Kasai is very cool, nice to see that it's included. It has some nice & soulful vocal arrangements of Herbie's 70s jazz-funk tunes, and Kasai is a surprisingly good in interpreting those. The price for the comp is awfully steep though, especially considering that nowadays you can buy most of Herbie's Columbia albums like 5 bucks a piece (i.e. for less than their price-per-disc is on the compilation).

read herbie's autobio a couple weekends back -- pretty good stuff, though there were definitely parts i wish were longer (and other parts I wish were shorter).
*spoiler*
the period where he's addicted to crack in the 90s is bizarre! and a bummer! just really at odds w/ pretty much everything else in the book... but i'm glad he seems to have made it out of all that intact.

wtf Herbie was on crack?! has every awesome black musician of a certain age been on crack at some point?

yeah he doesn't really give the exact timeline, but it seems like a good portion of the 90s he was addicted. i had always thought of him as a generally clean living kind of dude.

That's nuts. I had no idea. Didn't seem to affect his profile or sales much, though.

doesn't seem like anyone knew about it at the time (not even his family) and the autobio is the first time he's gone public about it.
but yeah, he was fairly productive even w/ the addiction it seems.

I just feel like I've read a bunch of bios over the years where it turns out some hugely influential black musician had some down-n-out crack problem period (usually well after their commercial heyday) - Fred Wesley, George Clinton (ok here I was just more surprised at the *length* of the period tbf), etc.

and then there was The One chronicling JB's ultra-depressing final decades on the sherm

how's Al Green, did he manage to stay off the crack?

Maybe Herbie made it up.

"Man, this is a boring book...I come off like the Ned Flanders of jazz. Wait, I know! I'll just sprinkle a little crack addiction here...yeah, the 90s...that'll work...this is gold!"

haha i mean it almost comes across like that -- otherwise the last third of the book would be like "hey i made a record w/ christina aguilera singing on it i guess that was ok. won a grammy! cool."

He's definitely not high on the list of jazz musicians I would have expected to have a crack addiction.

I usually think of him as a guy that disproves the theory that a musician has to be crazy and/or drug-addled and/or unhappy to be interesting.

I have a hard time imagining Hancock drinking a glass of red wine much less a drug problem.

might've been tough to be anywhere in the LA music bizzzz in the late 70s/80s w/o getting pretty into cocaine

True, I just think of him as being such a dork

Matt Shipp reviewed Hancock's book for The Talkhouse; what he has to say is actually really interesting.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fFTt8VZ5V1I/T8V1YL0ugVI/AAAAAAAACEw/Tpqqfwv2jbA/s1600/Hancock_Herbie-_MrBonzai.jpg
he does pretty much cop to being a super geek in the book.

Thanks for posting that Shipp piece! and looking good Herbie!

yes, good write-up!

^^^

Well, looky here:

http://www.vulture.com/2014/10/herbie-hancock-my-battle-with-crack.html

interesting that they promoted headhunters as "improvised rock"
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CX4x020WwAA2dIh.png:large
(this may have been an ad that showed up in Creem or Rolling Stone, I don't know)

And that they find it spacey? always sounded p grounded, physical, urban, sweaty to me. I dunno, maybe it is psychish...

yeah compared to sextant, it's definitely more grounded... maybe they thought prog-funk wouldn't get the rockers interested

The "improvised rock" bit funny considering Head Hunters is notable among crossover fusion albums for having no guitars on it. But I would assume the synths on it would've sounded pretty spacey... I think "Chameleon" is among the first notable pop tunes to have a synth bass play the main hook. Obviously it isn't as spacey as the Mwandishi albums that preceded it, but I doubt many of the people who saw this ad had heard them. AFAIK they sold pretty poorly, they've only become regarded as classics posthumously.

"would've sounded pretty spacey to Rolling Stone readers "

hey Tuomas, would you recommend a good book on Herbie Hancock/jazz in general? I get the impression you're well-read

Herbie's autobiography that came out a couple of years ago ("Possibilities") is quite good, there's some talk about it upthread. There's also a book-length analysis of Head Hunters (the album) called "Head Hunters: the Making of Jazz's First Platinum Album", which is okay, but it has a lot of music theory, so you might want to skip those bits if that's not your thing. And then there's the book by Bob Gluck focusing on the Mwandishi era ("You'll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band") which I haven't read yet (I should!), but some comments about it upthread too.

Cool, thanks!

Anyway, speaking of Herbie's futurism, I think it's a crucial fact that he was always a gear-head and tech nerd, as the autobioraphy makes abundantly clear... He was actually a studying engineering as well as music at the university, and the book has bits like him geeking out for several paragraphs for having seen an experimental prototype of one of the first laptops back in the 1970s. He also talks a lot about instruments like the Fairlight CMI and how they changed the musical landscape.

Anyway, my point is that while a some piano players (like Chick Corea or Stanley Cowell) turned to electronic keyboards and synths when it was hip to do so in the early 70s, only to abandon them when the became unfashionable again by the 80s (when the Young Lions started disparaging fusion in gerenal), Herbie just got deeper into them. The Mwandishi band was arguably the first band to successfully integrate synth textures into jazz music in way that wasn't merely ornamental of novelty-ish, and by 1980 Herbie was confident enough to have a track on Mr. Hands where every instrument (including the drums and guitar) is played by him on synths. The track itself may sound cheesy today, but at that point few musicians who had first found their fame in traditional acoustic music had gone that far in electronics.

So while Herbie himself admits in autobio that "Rockit" and Future Shock were mostly Laswell/Material projects he was attached to, I'd say he was pretty much the only major jazz musician open enough to the possibilities of sampling/DJing opened up by electro and rap music to pull it through. And it's not like he forgot all that when the Laswell collab ended, since he returned to rap and electronic music with Dis is da Drum and Future 2 Future.

It's only in the 00s that Herbie eased into an elder statesman position, playing mostly older music (though not jazz standards rather than famous tunes from other genres) and mostly on trad keyboards. But since he is already in his 70s, I can accept it, even though his post- Future 2 Future albums have not interested me that much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogKDBbi2thA

god i love Mr. Hands

one of the coolest album covers ever btw

So this is what's next for Herbie

http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/6913509/terrace-martin-producing-yg-herbie-hancock-albums

I've been playing with him every day -- which is very weird, that I play keyboard next to Herbie every day, a very weird thing. I try to be cool, since I'm "the producer" and everything, but then he throws these things at you harmonically, and you have to catch 'em! He is 75, and his ideas -- they're like he's 12 years old. They keep coming every second of the day.

I work with him five days a week. We usually start about 12 or 1 p.m. and I'm done about 5. That's a five-hour session. When I work with a rapper, I can do 15, 20 hours and not be tired. When I leave Herbie's, I'm exhausted. My brain is exhausted -- he stretches my brain so much that I have to leave his house, take a three-hour nap, and then go to work with YG.

...The album I'm doing with him, it's not what you think: Kendrick is on the album, Snoop is on the album. It's not like it's just Herbie Hancock over a hip-hop beat. It's like, I'm really digging into his world, and he's digging into the hip-hop, and we're just trying to figure out a thing. In the process of us trying to figure it out, something is happening magically through the music. Something that I've never heard and he's never heard. Kendrick came over the other day and he was like, "Yo, I hear so many ideas." We're just going in all different directions.