Day 225: Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters
Today I listened to something that just melted into the background so much that I forgot that it was on, so it’s time for album number two instead. Herbie Hancock’s electro-funk fusion jazz seemed like it’d be hard to forget that it’s playing, so I went for his classic 1973 release, Head Hunters.
Album cover courtesy of Columbia Records
Herbie Hancock is a musician, composer and bandleader from Chicago. He started off as a child prodigy in piano who discovered jazz at 14 years old. In his 20s, he joined the Miles Davis Quintet and made a name for himself as a key figure in post-bop. After exiting the Quintet, he started his own sextet.
Herbie and The Mwandishi Band were booked to play on the same night as the Pointer Sisters and he was inspired by the energy and connection that they had with their audiences, and later he’d been chanting and had a vision of himself playing something in the style of Sly Stone. This led to him wanting to bend the parameters of what he was doing and try something a little bit different:
I was beginning to feel that we (the sextet) were playing this heavy kind of music, and was tired of everything being heavy. I wanted to play something lighter … Would I like to have a funky band that played the kind of music Sly or someone like that was playing? My response was, “Actually, yes.”
Apparently it wasn’t that big of a deal until it started spreading through college campuses through word of mouth, and you can easily see how that’d happen: the earthy, funky fusion jazz mixed with the subversiveness of the electronic elements of the album (along with the slightly saucy name) makes it peak material for college students to say that they’ve been listening to in order to appear like they’re cultured and cool. Some 50 years later, I bet it’d still work.
I think it’d still work because it is a pretty cool album. I couldn’t be more pleased with my second choice, Head Hunters is an absolute romp. You can hear that he had some higher spiritual pursuits of thinking of how his music would affect people: it’s something that feels like it’s made to make you feel good. It’s an album that I can comfortably put into my pile of things to play to make your day just that little bit better.
The album has a bit of something for everyone, from the version of Hancock’s jazz standard “Watermelon Man” that starts off with Bill Summers playing a beer bottle, to “Sly”, Hancock’s tribute to the big man himself, it’s a solid listen from beginning to end and it’s definitely up there as a top way to spend 42 minutes. It’s beyond easy to appreciate, even if you don’t have much knowledge of or interest in jazz. Head Hunters is easily a 9/10, it’s going into regular rotation.