On Wednesday, June 17, 1964, Herbie Hancock took four new compositions to Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and recorded all of them in one day with Freddie Hubbard on cornet, Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums. Alfred Lion produced the date for Blue Note, and the album, Empyrean Isles, came out that November as BLP 4175 in mono and BST 84175 in stereo. "Cantaloupe Island" opened the second side. Of everything the four of them played that day, it is the one most people can hum.
Hancock was 24, and his position in the business was unusual for a young pianist. Since May 1963 he had been a member of Miles Davis's new quintet, with Carter and the seventeen-year-old Williams beside him, which meant steady work in the most closely watched band in jazz. He also had his own contract with Blue Note, and he already had a hit to his name as a composer. His 1962 debut, Takin' Off, included "Watermelon Man," and Mongo Santamaría's Latin version of it reached No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1963. Hancock had grown up in Chicago, played the first movement of a Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at eleven, and finished Grinnell College in 1960 with degrees in electrical engineering and music. He remembered "the cry of the watermelon man making the rounds through the back streets and alleys of Chicago," and he turned that memory into the tune that first made his name outside jazz.
Empyrean Isles was his fourth album for Blue Note, and it went in a different direction from the two before it. My Point of View, in 1963, had used a larger band with flugelhorn, alto flute and bass trombone. Inventions and Dimensions had been almost entirely improvised, with Paul Chambers on bass and the Latin percussionists Willie Bobo and Osvaldo "Chihuahua" Martinez. For this one Hancock cut the band down to a single horn at a time when two horns in front was the normal Blue Note format, and he brought in the bass and drums he worked with every night in the Davis band. The album is, among other things, a record of what that rhythm section sounded like when its pianist was the one in charge.
The horn player was an old associate. Hubbard, born in Indianapolis in 1938, had played on Takin' Off, and since 1961 he had been the trumpeter in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He was busy in 1964: his own Breaking Point! for Blue Note, and a sideman's chair on Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch!, a session that also used Williams. On this date he played cornet instead of his usual trumpet. The cornet is the smaller, rounder-sounding horn, and on "Cantaloupe Island" you can hear the difference in the attack. His phrases start softly and the long notes have less edge, which suits a melody that is mostly held tones over a moving piano part.
Williams was the youngest man in the room. Born December 12, 1945, in Chicago and raised in Boston, he had started studying with the drummer Alan Dawson at eleven, played professionally with Sam Rivers at thirteen, and been hired by Jackie McLean at sixteen. In the same year as this session he recorded Out to Lunch! and Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, and two months after Empyrean Isles he made Life Time, his own first album for Blue Note, all before he turned nineteen.
The tune itself is simple on paper. It is sixteen bars long, four bars each of F minor seventh, D-flat seventh, D minor seventh and F minor seventh again, and it rests on a two-bar figure that Hancock plays in his left hand and chords from the first seconds of the track. In the D minor section the groove breaks off into a set of stabbing chords and then falls back into the riff. The relation to "Watermelon Man" is in the title and in the construction: both tunes run sixteen bars, both are built on a repeating bass and piano figure, and the main difference is harmonic, since "Watermelon Man" moves through dominant sevenths and "Cantaloupe Island" stays in minor sevenths. The drum part is different too: Williams plays a funky groove on straight eighth notes that has little in common with the beat under the earlier tune.
If you follow one instrument through this track, make it the drums. The tempo sits around 115 beats a minute and drifts up a couple of notches by the end, which is what happens when people play rather than follow a click. Williams sets up a groove, varies it, holds each variation for several measures, then moves on. He keeps the hi-hat going mostly with his foot, especially under Hubbard, and he follows the soloists' dynamics instead of hitting hard at the start of each phrase. He sounds less like a timekeeper than like someone adding color to a picture he can already see. Carter stays with the bass figure, and between the two of them the riff never sags.
Hubbard solos first, for three choruses, and Hancock follows with three of his own. Hubbard plays the blues inside the modal frame, and the D-flat bars do some of the work for him, because the change of color there is strong enough to carry a phrase by itself. Hancock's solo is quieter and lighter in touch, and the groove under it never lets up, so the piano solo feels like a continuation of the riff rather than a break from it. Then the riff comes back and the melody goes out. The whole track runs five and a half minutes. Blue Note also put it out as a single.
The rest of the album is less direct. "One Finger Snap" opens it with a short unison theme, solos by Hubbard and Hancock, and a drum solo from Williams. "Oliloqui Valley" is driven by Carter's bass line and ends with a Carter solo. "The Egg," which takes up fourteen minutes of side two, is built on a repeated piano ostinato and breaks in the middle for Carter playing with the bow and Hancock alone at the keyboard before the groove returns. Nora Kelly wrote the liner notes, Reid Miles designed the cover and Francis Wolff took the photographs. The 1999 CD, remastered by Van Gelder, added alternate takes of "One Finger Snap" and "Oliloqui Valley"; no alternate of "Cantaloupe Island" appears there.
Nine months later, on March 17, 1965, Hancock went back to Van Gelder's with Hubbard (on trumpet this time), Carter, Williams and the tenor saxophonist George Coleman and recorded Maiden Voyage, which Blue Note released in May. That is the album most critics name first. Empyrean Isles is the looser of the two, and "Cantaloupe Island" is the tune from that period I actually reach for on a work morning, because it settles into its groove within a few bars and stays there for the whole trip in.
The tune had a second life that nobody in the studio could have planned. In 1991 Blue Note's London office noticed an independent hip-hop single by Geoff Wilkinson and Mel Simpson that sampled a Grant Green record from the label's catalog without permission, and the label considered suing. Wilkinson talked it into a deal instead, and Bruce Lundvall, then running Blue Note, opened the archives to the pair on one condition. In Wilkinson's words, "he made me record some demos first, to prove I could do it." The demo that got them signed was built on Hancock's piano figure from "Cantaloupe Island." As Us3, they released it as "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)" in October 1992, with a spoken introduction lifted from Pee Wee Marquette's announcement on Art Blakey's A Night at Birdland and a trumpet solo by Gerard Presencer. It did nothing in Britain at first. After a reissue it reached No. 23 there in September 1993, and in the United States it climbed to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified gold on March 25, 1994. The album it came from, Hand on the Torch, became the first Blue Note album to go platinum.
Hancock kept playing the tune himself, in a long jazz-funk version on the Japan-only Dedication in 1974 and again on Secrets in 1976, and other musicians took it up quickly. Donald Byrd recorded it in 1964 on Up With Donald Byrd, in a longer arrangement with a choir that Hancock wrote and played on. But the 1964 recording is still the version the sample came from and the one most players learn. Three of its four players had spent the previous year together on the bandstand with Davis, and you can hear that familiarity in how little anyone has to do to keep it moving.