Herbie Hancock
January 5th, 2009I set myself two tasks over the Christmas/New Year period, the one was to read the whole of David Copperfield, the other was to listen to a CD a day from the wonderful 6 CD box set of Herbie Hancock’s Blue Note recordings from the 1960s, which I have owned for several years, but only listened to unsystematically. I accomplished both tasks successfully, but will concentrate here on the Herbie Hancock!
I listened to the Herbie Hancock box set partly because I had had mixed feelings about his concert at Symphony Hall in November and wanted to remind myself of the range of his playing in the years when his career as a bandleader was being launched, when he was playing with Miles Davis’ second great quintet and beginning to write some of the most memorable tunes of the 60s, tunes such as Watermelon Man, Maiden Voyage, Dolphin Dance and other tunes that have now become ‘new’ jazz standards.
It is, in fact, the range and variety of the music over the 6 CDs that is so impressive. The early material tends to be in the typical Blue Note mode, essentially hard bop played by the standard quintet; Takin’ Off, for example, features Freddy Hubbard on trumpet and fluegelhorn, and Dexter Gordon on saxophone. But even at this stage Herbie is extending the range and experimenting with different approaches to the harmony.
Two things really excited me about the music. One was to hear again the original versions of tunes mentioned above, also Canteloupe Island, and to be reminded just how good they are. The other was to hear how Herbie had absorbed the developments of Ornette Coleman by the mid-sixties and was on tracks such as The Egg made in 1964 and Survival of the Fittest made in 1965 adopting a much free-er, or ‘time no changes’ approach. On both tracks a very young Tony Williams contributes some brilliant drumming, which really make both tracks.
In the final two CDs, Herbie was given the opportunity – very unusually for Blue Note in those days – to record with larger ensembles. CD 5, which is based on the original Speak like a Child album, features some excellent writing for a sextet. This material serves largely to set off some excellent piano solos from Herbie in the piano bass drums trio format.
But the final album The Prisoner, inspired by the activities of Dr. Martin Luther King, integrates the writing for a nonet plus some strings, and the blowing much more fully and achieves a wonderful mix of composition and top class solos from Joe Henderson on sax, and Johnny Coles on fluegelhorn and Herbie on piano. Apparently, this was Herbie’s final Blue Note album before he switched to Warners and in it he adopted a much more ambitious approach that was radical both in the writing and the approach to harmony . The album has its weaknesses, notably that the ensemble does not sound totally familiar with the material, but it is a wonderful and strangely neglected part of Herbie Hancock’s recorded work and an approach that he has not adopted since then.
There are one or two interesting surprises in the collection. There is a brilliant unissued Wayne Shorter track recorded on the Adam’s Apple session, Herbie’s theme for Antonioni’s 60s film Blow Up recorded with vibes player Bobby Hutcherson, and an unissued, but very interesting experiment in creating a jazzy R & B band, specifically the one surviving track called Don’t Even Go There.
When we think of jazz in the 60s, we tend to think of the great revolutions of that period, Miles’ various bands, Coltrane’s great bands and recordings, Ornette’s continuing extensions of free jazz. What I took away from my extensive listening task was how Herbie was absorbing, some time before his Headhunters days, all of this activity and creating his own distinct and deeply satisfying interpretation of it all.
Finally, it was both inspiring and sad to be listening to so many excellent solos from trumpeter Freddy Hubbard at the time of his death.
Tony
