Herbie Hancock

Hancock was born April 12, 1940, which made him twenty-two when he walked into Van Gelder's on May 28, 1962 to cut his first record as a leader. Alfred Lion gave him a front line most established players would have taken gladly: Freddie Hubbard on trumpet and Dexter Gordon on tenor, with Butch Warren on bass and Billy Higgins on drums. One housekeeping note, since it comes up constantly in searches and dealer listings: the bassist is Warren, not Bob Cranshaw. Wikipedia, jazzdisco and the jacket all agree.

"Watermelon Man" is the reason most people know this record, and Hancock has said it was the first thing he wrote with a commercial goal in mind, and that worked out. Mongo Santamaria's cover version reached No. 10 on the Hot 100 in April 1963, and by Hancock's own account the royalties paid his bills for the next five or six years. Santamaria's recording went into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. You will also see claims that Hancock's own single charted. No position turned up anywhere, so treat it as unproven.

Dexter Gordon is the reason to keep the needle down after the hit. He was fifteen years older than the leader and plays like it in the best way, behind the beat, unhurried, letting the phrase finish before he decides where it goes. Hubbard is the opposite temperament, bright and forward, and the contrast gives a fairly conventional hard bop date more shape than it has any right to have. Blue Note pulled two 45s off the session, 45-1862 and 45-1863.

What makes this worth more than a historical footnote is how finished Hancock's piano already sounds. The voicings are his, the touch is his, and he accompanies with the same patience he would bring to Miles's rhythm section a year later. Eleven years after this session he tore "Watermelon Man" apart and rebuilt it as funk on Head Hunters. The two versions are the best short summary of his career you can get for the price of two records.

The follow-up went bigger. Where Takin' Off was a quintet, this one stacks three horns across the front: Donald Byrd on trumpet, Grachan Moncur III on trombone, Hank Mobley on tenor, with Chuck Israels on bass and Grant Green brought in on guitar for the soul-jazz numbers. Sources disagree about exactly how much Green plays. Wikipedia's personnel block says three tracks, its own opening paragraph says two, and jazzdisco lists him without qualification. Nobody should tell you he plays throughout, because nobody actually knows.

The name to stop on is the drummer. Tony Williams was born December 12, 1945, which put him at seventeen on March 19, 1963, and this is one of the first records he ever made. Listen to what he does behind the horn statements, the way he keeps the pulse in his right hand and then throws small explosions underneath it. Two months later he and Hancock both joined Miles Davis. The core of the Second Great Quintet is already sitting in this room.

Hancock told Ira Gitler in the original liner notes that "Blind Man, Blind Man" came out of a blind guitarist he used to see in his Chicago neighborhood, and that "King Cobra" was an attempt to push the flow past ordinary chord movement. Both explanations survive the listening. The first is a groove tune with a real melody sitting on top of it, and the second wanders in a way that a straight blues head cannot.

A small warning for anyone buying the CD. Wikipedia flags the reissue's stated 8:00 running time for "The Pleasure Is Mine" as an error; the track is actually 4:03. Not a reason to skip the record, just the sort of thing that makes you think you got a bad copy when you did not. This is the least famous of the early Blue Notes and the one people underrate.

No horns: that is the first thing you notice, and it changes everything about how this record breathes. On August 30, 1963 Hancock took Paul Chambers on bass, Willie Bobo on drums and timbales, and Osvaldo "Chihuahua" Martinez on conga and bongo into Van Gelder's, and nobody else. Martinez sits out "A Jump Ahead" entirely. Bobo covers both the kit and the timbales himself, so there is no separate trap drummer anywhere on the album.

That staffing decision is the whole sound. With one man handling both jobs, the pulse and the hand percussion come from the same set of instincts instead of two players negotiating. The Latin percussion is pushed right up front, but this is not a Latin jazz album, and calling it one gets the record wrong. Chambers holds the middle with that big woody tone, and Hancock plays over the top with a lot more space than he had used on the two dates before this.

You will read that most of this was improvised on the spot with little or nothing written down. That story traces back to the original liner notes rather than to anything anybody can verify now, so take it as the account that has been passed along rather than as established fact. What is audible is that the material sounds loose in construction and tight in execution, which is a hard combination to fake either way.

The reissue history is worth knowing before you buy. In the 1970s Blue Note put it back out as Succotash, credited to Hancock and Bobo, with the LP sides reversed, catalog number BN-LA152-F. Same music, different name, different running order. If you have been hunting for a Willie Bobo album called Succotash and it kept turning up in the Hancock bins, that is why.

A quartet with one horn and no saxophone. June 17, 1964, Van Gelder's, Hancock with Ron Carter and Tony Williams out of the Miles band and Freddie Hubbard on cornet, not trumpet. Both Wikipedia and jazzdisco's session sheet confirm the cornet, and it matters, because the cornet has a rounder edge that keeps Hubbard from cutting through the trio the way he would on a brighter horn. He sounds like a member here rather than a guest star.

The four compositions were written across roughly two years, not knocked out for one date, and the record has the shape of a collection someone lived with. "Cantaloupe Island" is the famous one, built on a vamp so plain it barely qualifies as a tune until you hear what the rhythm section does under it. Carter and Williams had spent a year learning how to move the beat around inside Miles's band, and they bring all of it.

Twenty-eight years later Us3 lifted that vamp for "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)", released October 1992, which reached No. 9 on the Hot 100 and was certified gold by the RIAA on March 25, 1994. A generation met Hancock through a hip hop single without knowing they were listening to a 1964 Blue Note date. The album also charted in Germany off a 2023 reissue, though the peak position could not be pinned down, so no number here.

AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine calls this the record that established Hancock as a major artist in his own right and gives it five stars. The Penguin Guide gives it four out of four. I agree with both, and I would add the practical argument: this is the Hancock album to hand somebody first, because the quartet format leaves nowhere to hide and everyone on it plays like they know that.

The version everybody owns was cut March 17, 1965, with George Coleman added on tenor to the Empyrean Isles quartet. What almost nobody owns is the first attempt. jazzdisco documents a Van Gelder session on March 11, six days earlier, that produced "Maiden Voyage", "Dolphin Dance" and "Little One", all three marked rejected by Blue Note and since lost. Bob Blumenthal's 1999 notes say Hubbard played cornet on that date with Stu Martin in place of Tony Williams, while jazzdisco says trumpet. They agree on Martin.

The record that survived is a concept album about the ocean, and the concept is carried almost entirely by the titles and by how much room the band leaves. Nobody rushes: Williams plays the whole thing on the front of the cymbal, Carter holds pedal tones instead of walking, and the horns enter late and leave early. It is one of the few jazz records where the empty space is doing as much work as the notes.

Hancock told KCET in 2011 that "Maiden Voyage" is his favorite of everything he has written, and told KTLA in 2020 that he originally wrote the tune for a television commercial. He did not name the product in that interview, so I will not put one in his mouth here. He has also said the main inspiration for "Dolphin Dance" was Count Basie's "Shiny Stockings", which is not the connection you would guess and is audible once you know.

It took the Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1999 and sits in the Penguin Guide's Core Collection at four stars, described there as a colossal achievement from a man who was still only twenty-four. No US chart position for the original 1965 release could be verified, for whatever that is worth. One footnote for completists: a completely different "Little One" turns up on Miles Davis's E.S.P. the same year, by which point Wayne Shorter had replaced Coleman.

Two sessions, March 6 and March 9, 1968, same personnel both days. The first gave up "Riot", the title track and "First Trip"; the second gave "Toys", "Goodbye to Childhood" and "The Sorcerer". The working unit is a trio, Hancock with Ron Carter and Mickey Roker, wrapped in three winds: Thad Jones on flugelhorn, Peter Phillips on bass trombone, Jerry Dodgion on alto flute. All three sit out "The Sorcerer". Retail and reissue listings credit Duke Pearson as producer, though the Wikipedia article text does not.

Here is the part that makes the album strange and good. None of the wind players solos. Not once, anywhere on the record. They exist to color the trio, three voices in a register nobody else was scoring for in 1968, and then they get out of the way. The arrangements are Thad Jones's, uncredited on the jacket, and they are the reason a piano trio album sounds like something much larger without ever sounding like a big band.

The cover is Hancock in silhouette kissing Gigi Meixner, who would become his wife, and Francis Wolff came up with the album title after seeing the photograph. "The Sorcerer" was written for Miles Davis. "First Trip" is not a Hancock tune at all; Ron Carter wrote it for his son. Small facts, but they explain why a record this carefully arranged still feels warm rather than clinical. One note before you go shopping: Wikipedia and jazzdisco both give only the BST stereo number here, so do not let a seller talk you into a BLP 4279 mono original.

Blumenthal's 2004 notes carry the best story attached to this album, and it concerns a different session entirely. On July 19, 1966 Hancock cut a nonet date with Stanley Turrentine, Pepper Adams, Julian Priester, Melvin Lastie, Eric Gale, Bernard Purdie and Bob Cranshaw, and Blue Note rejected five of the six titles. His own summary: "I was trying to make a funk record without knowing a thing about funk." Two years later he had this instead, and said afterward that once he made it, there was no doubt his own band would be a sextet.

Even the recording date is contested. Wikipedia puts these sessions in January 1971; jazzdisco and the Discogs jackets say December 1970. Either way the room was Wally Heider Recording in San Francisco, David Rubinson produced, Fred Catero engineered, and Warner Bros. put it out in March 1971. This is the first album by the sextet as a working band. Every member took a Swahili name for the project, and Hancock's, Mwandishi, means composer.

The instrumentation tells you what changed. Hancock is on Fender Rhodes and nothing else. Bennie Maupin brings bass clarinet and alto flute rather than a tenor, Julian Priester plays tenor and bass trombone, Eddie Henderson takes trumpet and flugelhorn, Buster Williams moves between bass guitar and upright, and Billy Hart drums. That is a front line built entirely out of dark middle-register instruments, which is why the record sounds like it is happening underwater even when the tempo is up.

"Ostinato (Suite for Angela)" is in 15/8 and brings in reinforcements: Leon Chancler on second drums and percussion, Jose "Chepito" Areas on congas and timbales, Ronnie Montrose on electric guitar, all three on that track only. Fifteen beats to the bar should feel like homework. It does not. The figure locks so hard that you stop counting inside about twenty seconds, which is the best possible outcome for an odd meter.

One credit correction, because it circulates. There is no synthesizer on this album. None is listed in the personnel, and Patrick Gleeson, who people associate with this band, does not appear until Crossings. Wikipedia's body text refers loosely to synthesizer, but the credits do not back it. Maupin's piccolo on this particular record could not be confirmed either; jazzdisco leaves it off. What you are hearing is six players, one electric piano, and a lot of nerve.

Hancock's first record for Columbia and the last one the Mwandishi sextet ever made. The sessions ran across Wally Heider Recording and Different Fur Trading Co. in San Francisco, and the dating is genuinely vague: jazzdisco says 1972, summaries built off Discogs say early 1973, and no source gives a specific day. Columbia released it March 30, 1973. David Rubinson produced again, with Fred Catero, Jerry Zatkin and John Vieira engineering.

Patrick Gleeson is on board now, playing ARP 2600 and ARP Pro Soloist, and Hancock's own gear list has gone from one Rhodes to eight lines of type: Steinway, Rhodes, Hohner D6 Clavinet, Mellotron, ARP 2600, ARP Pro Soloist, Moog, plus percussion. Buster Williams is running a Fender electric bass through wah-wah and fuzz, and that is a printed jacket credit rather than something anyone inferred by ear. Buck Clarke adds conga and bongo.

Three tracks total, and "Hornets" runs 19:35 by itself, filling side two. Rolling Stone framed the album as Hancock going further out than either Bitches Brew or On the Corner, and called it a primitive version of what would later be called ambient music in the nineties. That reads as a stretch until about eight minutes into side two, when the horns drop away and the electronics keep going on their own.

One credit on the jacket has defeated me. "Random Resonator" is credited to somebody called FUNDI, and I could not establish who that is or what the device actually was. Rather than invent an explanation, I will leave it as an open question. The album flopped commercially, and Hancock's response was to dissolve the sextet entirely and keep exactly one member, Bennie Maupin, for what came next.

New band, one holdover. Bennie Maupin came over from the sextet; Paul Jackson took bass guitar and marimbula, Harvey Mason the drums, Bill Summers a percussion arsenal that runs from balafon and shekere to surdo and log drum. The sessions happened in the evenings at Wally Heider and Different Fur in early 1973, and Columbia released the album October 26. You will see September 1973 given as the recording date all over the internet. Nothing I checked actually asserts it.

The famous "Chameleon" bassline is not played by the bass player. Hancock plays it himself on an ARP Odyssey, and he plays every synthesizer part on the album. There is also no guitar anywhere on the record, which was a deliberate call, with the Hohner Clavinet taking over that job. Once you know both of those things the whole texture reorganizes itself in your head. What sounds like a rhythm guitar band is a keyboard player with two hands and a plan.

The "Watermelon Man" remake is the other reason to own this. Summers opens it by blowing across the mouth of a beer bottle, imitating the hindewho flute of the Mbuti, and it may be the strangest introduction to a hit single anybody put on a jazz record. "Sly" is dedicated to Sly Stone, which explains a fair amount about the drum feel. The cover mask is based on the kple kple mask of the Baoule people of Ivory Coast.

It reached No. 13 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums, went into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry with the class of 2007, and landed at 254 in Rolling Stone's 2020 revision of its 500 Greatest Albums. You will also hear that it was the best-selling jazz album ever until 1976. That claim is tagged citation needed on Wikipedia itself, so I am leaving it where I found it.

This one was not really Hancock's idea, and the record is better for it. Much of the material was written by Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn and road-tested by their group Material through 1982 before Hancock was brought in. Material produced the album with him. Basic tracks were cut at OAO Studios in Brooklyn, overdubs went down at RPM in New York, the keyboard overdubs happened at Garage Sale Recording in Los Angeles, and Dave Jerden and company mixed it at Eldorado.

The credit that changed things is Grand Mixer D.ST on turntables, on "Rockit", "Earth Beat" and "Rough". A jazz pianist put a scratch DJ on a major label record in 1983 and treated the turntable as an instrument with its own part. Around that, the personnel is stranger than the reputation suggests: Pete Cosey plays guitar on the title track only, Sly Dunbar drums on that track and "Rough", Daniel Ponce adds bata drum to "Rockit" and "Earth Beat".

"Rockit" won the Grammy for Best R&B Instrumental Performance at the 1984 ceremony. It is worth getting that category right, since it usually gets shortened to something vaguer. At the first MTV Video Music Awards that same year Hancock walked out the night's most-awarded artist with five wins, including Best Concept Video and Most Experimental Video, for a clip Godley and Creme directed with robots built by Jim Whiting. The singles chart numbers you will find quoted for "Rockit" come from a fan site rather than Billboard, so I am not printing them.

The album itself hit No. 43 on the Billboard 200, No. 10 R&B and No. 2 on Top Jazz Albums, and the RIAA certified it platinum on October 17, 1994. Two details for the people who write this record off as a novelty: the title track is a Curtis Mayfield cover from about a decade earlier, and "TFS" and "Autodrive" are trio performances by Hancock, Beinhorn and Laswell with nobody else in the room.