On March 11, 1965, Herbie Hancock tried to record three new tunes at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: "Maiden Voyage," "Little One" and "Dolphin Dance." Freddie Hubbard was there on cornet and Stu Martin was on drums. Blue Note's logs show the session, and they also show that the takes were rejected and have since been lost. Six days later, on March 17, Hancock came back with a different band and recorded the album that Blue Note released on May 17 as Maiden Voyage, BLP 4195 in mono and BST 84195 in stereo. Alfred Lion produced it and Van Gelder engineered it.
Hancock was 24 that day. He had been born in Chicago on April 12, 1940, had started out in Donald Byrd's group, and had made his first album as a leader, Takin' Off, for Blue Note in 1962. Its "Watermelon Man" later became a hit single for Mongo Santamaría. In May 1963 Miles Davis hired him, personally seeking him out, according to Hancock's Wikipedia biography, as one of the most promising young players in jazz. Maiden Voyage was his fifth album as a leader, made while he was the pianist in Davis's quintet.
The title tune has a commercial history, and I like that it does. Hancock said he originally wrote "Maiden Voyage" for a television commercial, and the music was used in an advertisement for Yardley. His Wikipedia biography describes it as having started "as a cologne advertisement." On the album's master tape it was logged as "TV Jingle," and it kept that label until a friend of Hancock's sister came up with the new name. None of this was unusual for him. The same biography lists the advertising themes he recorded over the years, for Pillsbury's Space Food Sticks, Standard Oil, Tab and Virginia Slims, and a spy-style theme for Silva Thins that he later reworked as "He Who Lives in Fear" on The Prisoner in 1969. A working composer in New York took that money where it was, and Hancock took a piece of music written for a sponsor and turned it into one of the most recorded jazz tunes of the decade. In his own liner notes for the album he wrote that the piece was an attempt to capture "the splendor of a sea-going vessel on its maiden voyage." Interviewed for KCET in 2011, he called it his favorite of all his compositions.
The band on March 17 was Hubbard, now on trumpet, George Coleman on tenor saxophone, Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums. Hancock, Carter and Williams were the rhythm section of the Miles Davis Quintet at the time. Coleman had been in that band too: he joined in 1963 and left shortly after the February 1964 concert at Lincoln Center, Sam Rivers filled in briefly, and Wayne Shorter took the chair in September 1964. So this is very nearly the Davis rhythm section of 1963 and 1964 with Coleman back on tenor and Hubbard standing where Davis stood. Hubbard does not try to sound like Davis. He goes the other way, big and bright and sure of himself.
Tony Williams was 19, born in Chicago on December 12, 1945, and had joined Davis at 17. Davis later wrote that Williams was "the center that the group's sound revolved around," and by this session he had already cut his own first Blue Note album, Life Time, in August 1964. On the title track he barely plays time in the usual sense. It is cymbals and pulse, a rolling motion that never lands hard, and that drum part is a large part of why the tune feels like water. A drummer playing a conventional groove there would sink it.
The tune itself is built on four chords. Ted Gioia describes the progression as "four suspended chords," and Jerry Coker calls it "only sus. 4 chords," which is another way of saying that the harmony never resolves the way a standard does. Students have played it in rehearsal rooms for sixty years, and the original recording still sounds better than anything built on top of it.
I am usually wary of jazz concept albums, because the concept so often lives in the liner notes rather than the music. Maiden Voyage avoids that because the idea is loose. Many of the titles refer to the sea or to marine life, and the band builds the atmosphere through space, through what it leaves out. Nobody reads you a poem, and the idea lives in the sound.
The sequence is short and every track earns its place. All five tunes are Hancock's. Side one runs "Maiden Voyage" at 7:57, "The Eye of the Hurricane" at 6:01 and "Little One" at 8:47. "The Eye of the Hurricane" is the burner, fast and tense, with Hubbard and Coleman pushing hard while Williams stirs everything underneath. "Little One" is the ballad. Miles Davis recorded a different version of it on E.S.P., also released in 1965, with Shorter in Coleman's place, and I prefer Hancock's. Side two holds "Survival of the Fittest" at 10:03, the loosest piece on the record, where the band leans toward free playing without falling into it, and "Dolphin Dance" at 9:16. Hancock cited Count Basie's "Shiny Stockings" as the main inspiration for "Dolphin Dance," which is not what most listeners would guess, because the changes are strange and beautiful and nothing about the tune sounds like Basie on the surface. Every pianist learns it eventually. The original album runs about 42 minutes.
Some context helps here. Nine months earlier, on June 17, 1964, Hancock made Empyrean Isles in the same studio with Carter, Williams and Hubbard on cornet, and no saxophone. That record has "Cantaloupe Island" on it and it is very good, but next to Maiden Voyage it feels like a set of sketches. Maiden Voyage adds Coleman, adds the concept, and tightens everything. Three of its five tunes, "Maiden Voyage," "The Eye of the Hurricane" and "Dolphin Dance," became standards and sit in the New Real Book.
Later critics have been unreserved. The Penguin Guide to Jazz gave it four stars and its Core Collection designation and called it "a colossal achievement from a man still just 24 years old." Stephen Thomas Erlewine at AllMusic called it arguably Hancock's finest record of the 1960s, and it received a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1999, the same year Bob Blumenthal wrote notes for the CD reissue. In 2021, more than half a century after the session, it reached number two on Billboard's Top Jazz Albums chart.
A note on buying it. Original 1965 pressings cost serious money now, and the price keeps climbing. The Blue Note Classic Vinyl edition is an all-analog 180 gram pressing mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes and pressed at Optimal in Germany, and that is the copy on my shelf. Unless you collect first pressings, it is the one to get.
I have already written about the first ten seconds of this record, the bass and cymbal figure before the horns come in, in a separate piece. This one is about the whole album, and what stays with me is that a 24 year old picked one idea, part of it borrowed from a cologne advertisement, and carried it through five tunes without letting it go slack.