Head Hunters was a pivotal point in Herbie Hancock's career, bringing him into the vanguard of jazz fusion. Hancock had pushed avant-garde boundaries on his own albums and with Miles Davis, but he had never devoted himself to the groove as he did on Head Hunters. Drawing heavily from Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, and James Brown, Hancock developed ...
When Herbie Hancock released Possibilities (2005), a collaborative effort that paired the great pianist and composer with a group of pop and rock stocks from the world over, it was obvious the restless master was entering a new phase of his long career. In that context, River: The Joni Letters makes perfect sense. Hancock and his fine band -- ...
This Christmas jazz album has a wide variety of generally enjoyable performances by 16 different groups. High points include a funny version of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" by singers Dianne Reeves and Lou Rawls, a Herbie Hancock-Eliane Elias piano duet on "I'll Be Home for Christmas," and Holly Cole's "Christmas Blues." The other performers include ...
Possibilities is a Herbie Hancock adventure record. This ten-cut smorgasbord features the ever restless pianist, composer, and arranger in the company of literally dozens of artists, from pop singers like Christina Aguilera, Sting, and Annie Lennox to rock legends such as Santana and Paul Simon to relative newcomers like John Mayer, Jonny Lang, ...
Mirroring his onetime boss and mentor Miles Davis' own protean output, Herbie Hancock has explored hard bop, soul-jazz, fusion, funk-rock, soundtracks, hip-hop-inflected pop ("Rockit"), and many permutations in between. His early work for Blue Note, though, offers the best entrée for newcomers. Compiled from five of his albums for the label and ...
Herbie Hancock completely overhauled his sound and conquered MTV with his most radical step forward since the sextet days. He brought in Bill Laswell of Material as producer, along with Grand Mixer D.ST on turntables -- and the immediate result was "Rockit," which makes quite a post-industrial metallic racket. Frankly, the whole record is an ...
Gershwin's World is a tour de force for Herbie Hancock, transcending genre and label, and ranking among the finest recordings of his lengthy career. Released to coincide with the 100th anniversary of George Gershwin's birth, this disc features jazzman Hancock with a classy collection of special guests. The most surprising of Hancock's guest ...
Columbia through the years has had several Christmas jazz samplers. This album is mostly from the 1961-62 period, although there is an unusual version of "Deck the Halls" that features both Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea on pianos in 1969 with a nonet. Highlights include Duke Ellington's "Jingle Bells," the Chico Hamilton Quintet playing "Winter ...
On first glance this record would not seem to have much promise from a jazz standpoint. Herbie Hancock performs a set of tunes which include numbers from the likes of Peter Gabriel, Stevie Wonder, Sade, Paul Simon, Prince, the Beatles ("Norwegian Wood") and Kurt Cobain. However by adding vamps, reharmonizing the chord structures, sometimes quickly ...
By the late '90s Sony had begun to introduce budget sets that raided their vaults and often arbitrarily grouped songs together for mass consumption. Hits of the 80s, Vol. 1 and Forever Soul were two of the worst offenders. By 2001, the label decided to make better use of the CD time constraints by extending the running time of each disc. Make no ...
Beyond category or idiom, audacious in its very idea, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter perform a little over an hour of spontaneous improvised duets for grand piano and soprano sax. That's all -- no synthesizers, no rhythm sections, just wistful, introspective, elevated musings between two erudite old friends that must have made the accountants at ...
Takin' Off was an impressive debut effort from Herbie Hancock, and his second record, My Point of View, proved that it was no fluke. Hancock took two risks with the album -- his five original compositions covered more diverse stylistic ground than his debut, and he assembled a large septet for the sessions; the band features such stellar musicians ...
With the frenzied knocking of what sounds like a clock shop gone berserk, Crossings takes the Herbie Hancock Sextet even further into the electric avant-garde, creating its own idiom. Now, however, the sextet has become a septet with the addition of Dr. Patrick Gleeson on Moog synthesizer, whose electronic decorations, pitchless and not, give the ...
Herbie Hancock's debut as a leader, Takin' Off, revealed a composer and pianist able to balance sophistication and accessibility, somewhat in the vein of Blue Note's prototype hard bopper Horace Silver. Yet while Hancock could be just as funky and blues-rooted as Silver, their overall styles diverged in several ways: Hancock was lighter and more ...
Between 1965's Maiden Voyage and 1968's Speak Like a Child, Herbie Hancock was consumed with his duties as part of the Miles Davis Quintet, who happened to be at their creative and popular peak during those three years. When Hancock did return to a leadership position on Speak Like a Child, it was clear that he had assimilated not only the group's ...
The Best Blue Note Album in the World Ever may boast a silly title, but it's hard to argue with what's on this double-disc sampler. Not all of the label's greatest artists are here, but everything is representative, showing how hard bop like John Coltrane's "Blue Train" and Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder" coexisted with soul-jazz from Grant Green ( ...
A mini-retrospective of Herbie Hancock's early years as a jazz artist, this six-track CD touches on some of his best-known small-ensemble works from that period. Of his first five albums for Blue Note Records from 1963-1965, Takin' Off, My Point of View, Empyrean Isles, and Maiden Voyage are represented -- his third and perhaps most individually ...
Centered around some soundtrack music that Herbie Hancock wrote for Bill Cosby's Fat Albert cartoon show, Fat Albert Rotunda was Hancock's first full-fledged venture into jazz-funk -- and his last until Head Hunters -- making it a prophetic release. At the same time, it was far different in sound from his later funk ventures, concentrating on a ...
This album is a missing link in the discography of Herbie Hancock, so much so that many ardent fans didn't even know it existed. Hear, O Israel is the recorded version of a jazz concert comprised of lyric and sacred material from the Friday night prayer service in the Jewish synagogue. Privately released in an edition of a few hundred copies, the ...
Recorded after the funky fusion of Head Hunters, Thrust, Sextant, and other electric albums, and before the dawn of "Rockit" and more commercially viable and hip-hop-oriented material, Herbie Hancock took time out in 1978 to touch base again with his piano. Recorded completely solo, and live, direct to disc, where the tape is rolling and the ...
While no one can argue that Herbie Hancock's early Blue Note recordings aren't milestones in his career and some are as enduring as any other jazzman's in history, the mostly overlooked Warner Bros. period remains one of his most adventurous, creatively satisfying, and amazingly enduring. The three albums presented here all offer wildly different ...
Calling a two-disc retrospective of the varied and celebrated career of Herbie Hancock "essential" is a tall order to fill. Sony/BMG's Legacy does, as would be expected, an incomplete but decent job at offering a fine representative look at the artist, and at choosing best-known cuts to do so. This set is admirably cross-licensed by producer Bob ...
Herbie Hancock's V.S.O.P. project with his former bandmates from the Miles Davis Quintet -- Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams -- and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard was a band that almost single-handedly tried to re-establish acoustic jazz in the United States. And though they made three recordings, all of which were favorably reviewed and ...
With the formation of his great electric sextet, Herbie Hancock's music took off into outer and inner space, starting with the landmark Mwandishi album recorded in a single session on New Year's Eve. Ever the gadgeteer, Herbie plays with electronic effects devices -- reverb units, stereo tremelo, and Echoplex -- which all lead his music into ...
An excellent collection of 12" mixes of influential dance records from the early '80s, it's essential for any funk, rap, and dance collection. ~ All Music Guide, All Music Guide
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