HERBIE HANCOCK
The Herbie Hancock Box
Columbia
Legacy
Herbie Hancock may just be the most comfortable
performer ever with the jazz dichotomy between the funky,
earthy, gospel-influenced and the lyrical, abstract. He's
balanced the two admirably since his first recording for
the Blue Note Label, Takin' Off, recorded in 1962.
At that time he had already penned "Watermelon Man",
a track so funky it continues to pop up in commercials and
as a sample on hip-hop records, yet he went on to the gorgeous
impressionism of "Maiden Voyage" and the entire
Empyrean Isles album. The only musician as comfortable
with this dichotomy was Hancock's mid-'60s employer, Miles
Davis. Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that Hancock
has long been a practicing Buddhist, and understands the
necessity of abandoning expectations about how things should
be. Whatever the reason, Herbie Hancock has been able to
inhabit various spheres of the musical universe at the same
time: jazz musician and pop musician, electric and acoustic,
structured and unstructured.
The Herbie Hancock Box, a 4-CD set
that examines the totality of Hancock's work on the Columbia
label, gives good insight into just how varied the keyboardist's
output has been. Much of the first two discs draw on the
late '70s/early '80s work done with VSOP, essentially a
recreation of Miles Davis' second great quintet from the
'60s with Freddie Hubbard substituted for Davis. There is
also solo piano work and a duet with Chick Corea. The third
disc focuses more heavily on Hancock's electric work with
a variety of bands from his Mawandishi sextet to Headhunters
and beyond. The final disc is meant to present the music
of Hancock that has most directly influenced other trends
in modern music, such as his groundbreaking single "Rockit."
The set isn't chronological, instead grouping Hancock's
music into blocks that are similar in mood or in style.
It's an impressive array of music, and as long as the listener
isn't coming to this purely as a jazz listener or (less
likely) a rock or techno listener, it provides an outstanding
opportunity to sample Hancock's work through the '70s and
'80s. One caveat: the package design is no doubt meant to
reflect the futuristic nature of Hancock's work, but it
is a real annoyance. The discs and accompanying booklet
are enclosed in an acrylic box that has slots into which
each disc is supposed to slide, making them look like they
are suspended. It's a cool effect, but it's impossible to
open the thing without knocking the discs out of their slots
and against each other. I took the discs out and put them
into four slim cases and found that much easier to handle.
The second great Miles Davis quintet, comprised
of Davis, Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams,
is now considered one of Davis' best and most influential
groups, but in the decade or so after their recordings (1965-1968)
they were largely ignored in the hubbub that surrounded
Davis' electric work. VSOP was originally part of a tribute
to the music of Herbie Hancock for the Newport/New York
Jazz Festival. Hancock asked Davis about performing with
the group , and Miles initially said yes,
then thought better of it. "How do you think that would
be, to be a sideman for one of my sidemen? That'd be a little
funny" was Davis' response. It's interesting, though,
that the year VSOP first appeared, 1976, was the beginning
of Miles' self-imposed exile from the music scene. The group
ended up touring and recording repeatedly between 1976-1979,
and not only caused a reevaluation of the music of the second
great quintet, it provided up and coming musicians who were
not interested in pursuing the electric and fusion directions
that Miles and Herbie had helped create with an alternative
model. VSOP demonstrated that there was still a market for
acoustic jazz, and the rhythm section played on Wynton Marsalis'
debut album, which Hancock produced. In short, the second
great quintet eventually made the impression it should have
the first time around and allowed the New Traditionalists
to pretend that fusion had never happened. Neat trick, huh?
The leadoff tune is "Maiden Voyage",
after a brief solo introduction by Herbie. The inclusion
of Freddie Hubbard on trumpet is a natural since Hubbard
was recording with the group, sans Shorter, on Hancock's
early Blue Note sessions. The tunes are mostly Hancock's,
with the exception of "The Sorcerer", recorded
as a quartet with Wynton Marsalis on trumpet. It's great
to hear these guys playing together again, but the band
sometimes seems to be a little overly tight, devoid of the
risk taking and abstraction that defined Miles' quintet.
It's likely the live recording of many of these tracks that
creates what seems like a distance between the musicians
that didn't exist on those older recordings, not to mention
the fact that the group had been playing these songs in
some form for over a decade by the time these recordings
were made. Still, overall, the performances are all top
drawer, and it's really heartening to be reminded of why
everyone got so excited about Freddie Hubbard as well. This
set also offers a nice selection of material currently only
available as pricey imports from Sony Japan. "Para
Oriente", a Tony Williams composition from the import-only
Live Under the Sky, gets a really funky reading
here and is reminiscent of this group at their best. "Listening
to this piece…I'm aware of the overlap between the
electric music most of us had been playing, as we returned
to the acoustic style…We were playing funk and we
were dealing with rock and R&B energies. So, when we
turned once again to acoustic music, the energy of VSOP
reflected all that" says Hancock in his liner notes.
"Harvest Time", a solo piece from The Piano
is harmonically and melodically gorgeous, and was co-written
by Hancock's younger sister, Jean. We also get fantastic
performances of Wayne Shorter's "Diana" from VSOP:
Tempest in the Colosseum and an incendiary "The
Eye of the Hurricane." And that's just Disc 1. The
second disc mines many of these same obscure albums, offering
the funky Ron Carter/Miles Davis composition "Eighty-one"
originally featured on Davis' ESP album. There's
also some nice trio work and a piano duo with Chick Corea
on "Liza (All the Clouds'll Roll Away)" and a
previously unreleased version of Freddie Hubbard's "Red
Clay" recorded in 1977. So packed with goodies are
these first two discs, that had Columbia decided to simply
release these as a VSOP or acoustic Hancock retrospective,
one could scarcely have complained.
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