Headhunters - Herbie Hancock

Sep

19

Headhunters - Herbie Hancock

≡ Category: 1970s, Jazz Funk, Music Reviews, Recommended |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES RECOMMENDED RECORDING

Rating:

Headhunters has no doubt been hugely influential, particularly in hip hop circles. At the time, it broke sales records for a jazz release. It was also often roundly decried by jazz critics.

Frankly, 35 years later, it’s hard to see what all the fuss was about.

The grooves are (then) modern funk, which was new for Herbie Hancock at the time — he and his band pull them off well. From a modern standpoint, the most revolutionary aspect is Herbie’s clavinet work. If you want to avoid using a guitar as a rhythm instrument in a funk band, Herbie wrote the textbook on how to do it. A few years later, Max Middleton used clavinet in a similar way on the Jeff Beck releases Blow By Blow and Wired. In my opinion, the technique hasn’t been used nearly enough since then.

The first track, the celebrated Chameleon, is rather dull actually. I mean, it’s well played, and it’s a nice enough groove, I suppose, but there’s nothing much going on, really. I suppose you could say that the genius of the tune is it’s simplicity, but to me that’s just a rationalization.

The same goes for Watermelon Man. For me, the most interesting part of that tune is the African chant that opens and closes it.

Now understand, I’m not saying that the first two tunes on Headhunters suck. They’re perfectly entertaining and listenable. No doubt the instrumental sounds were new at the time, but so what. From a modern standpoint, this music is merely pleasant, not mindblowing.

Let’s keep in mind the reason that Herbie Hancock made this album in the first place. In the liner notes, Herbie says that he was tired of playing heavy music, and he wanted to play something lighter. Personally, I think that’s historic revisionism. In an earlier interview, Herbie expressed his frustration that when he went over to his friend’s houses, he couldn’t find his releases on their record shelves. Instead, they owned records by Sly and the Family Stone, James Brown and people like that. So Herbie made a record that his friends would want to own, and in that, he certainly succeeded.

The next tune, Sly, which is dedicated to Sly Stone, accomplishes a bit more than that modest aim. The music doesn’t really sound a whole lot like Sly, except that it does honor him by being funky. The tune is laid out in thematically related sections, with the solo space for each instrumentalist demarcated by a cadenza. Like the rest of the tunes on Headhunters, the melodic and harmonic material is relatively simple, but on Sly, that doesn’t mean simpleminded. The form of the tune is ABCBA. The tune starts out with a bluesy and rhythmic statement before settling into a languid melody. For the improvisations, the tune shifts into a doubletime repetitive groove which gets so intense it feels like your earphones are going to melt. Then the previous sections are mirrored to end the tune. Sly is sufficiently cool to warrant a JAZZBO NOTES RECOMMENDED RECORDING label from me.

Hancock ends Headhunters in an odd way, with the mellow downtempo tune Vein Melter. Then again, he couldn’t very well top the intensity of Sly.