Mwandishi - Herbie Hancock

May

17

Mwandishi - Herbie Hancock

≡ Category: 1960s, 1970s, Avant-Guarde, Essential, Free Jazz, Fusion, Jazz Funk, Music Reviews |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING

Rating:

There are so many good reasons to own Mwandishi. First off, it’s an opportunity to own three of Herbie Hancock’s best dates as a leader for the price of one release. Secondly, it captures a time in Hancock’s development as an artist when he was undergoing a rapid process of change, which he was experiencing along with the rest of the jazz world at the time, so these dates have vast historical significance. Third, these dates are really hard to come by separately.

The first date included on Mwandishi is Fat Albert Rotunda. The music, which was written for Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert cartoon show, has a slightly retro feel, which is appropriate, because the music is meant to evoke childhood.

Most of the tunes are variations on a kind of lumbering funk. Chunky midtempto rhythms predominate, with three horns providing color and rhythmic accents, and Hancock’s electric piano emerging as the main solo voice. This is some of the most fun music Hancock has ever performed. It’s like a party, and really communicates what it’s like to be young and (relatively) carefree.

Tell Me a Bedtime Story is a different matter. Although gentle and sentimental in character, harmonically, it is resolutely modern, with harmony that is chromatic rather than functional. The cadence of major 7th chords which ends the A section was pretty daring at the time. Aside from all the technical aspects of the tune, Tell Me a Bedtime Story is just rapturously beautiful.

Jessica, another ballad, is just as creative, although not quite as successful for my money. It starts out with Hancock playing single note arpeggios outlining the harmony on acoustic piano while Garnett Brown lyrically blows the melody on trombone. The other horns come in with countermelodies. It all seems a little too on the nose for me. The tone of the piece is kind of gentle and sorrowful, but whereas Tell Me a Bedtime Story completely got me emotionally, it feels like Jessica tries to hard, straining for effect.

Fortunately for Hancock, when the executives as Warner Brothers heard the music he had composed for Bill Cosby’s special, they loved it, which gave him the freedom to be way more experimental the next time out.

On Mwandishi, only Buster Williams on bass remained from the earlier sextet. Instead of joyous funk, Hancock was trafficking in a kind of space funk. For example, Ostinato (Suite for Angela) is built on a 15/4 groove and an insistent bassline. Hancock uses all sorts of effects on his keyboards, like echoplex and chorus. Instead of chord changes, he sets a groove, a starting melody, and the rest is pretty much free jazz.

You’ll Know When You Get There is even more impressionistic than Ostinato (Suite for Angela). Eddie Henderson carries the melody on trumpet while Hancock and his rhythm section provide a loose rhythm underneath. Shortly thereafter, all that goes away and it’s completely free form. Henderson blows unaccompanied for awhile and then the band joins in little by little. The theme is restated and then it’s Benny Maupin’s turn to solo on alto flute.

The communication among the band members is so empathetic that you could be forgiven for thinking that the music is more structured that it is. The key is that Hancock has provided enough compositional signposts for the players to be able to play freely and still make meaningfully structured music. Of course, it wouldn’t work if his players didn’t have a strong grounding in bebop, free jazz, and modal music.

Hancock gets even spacier on Crossings, his final album for Warner Brothers.

Sleeping Giant, which takes up a whole side of the original vinyl long playing record, starts out with an introductory percussion freakout, with Hancock contributing keyboard effects along with Patrick Gleeson on moog synthesizer. This builds into the first proper section, which is built on a single implied chord taken at a midtempo funk groove, which the band improvises around. At the end of the section, there is a through composed bridge which leads to a rubato section, with the horn section playing the melody in different combinations. Then Hancock pulls a fast one. Instead of a ballad section, he has Buster Williams play an ostinato on bass, and the band briefly uses the melodic material from the rubato section to flesh out the improv. This leads into another midtempo funk groove which fades into silence while another rubato section takes over. And so it goes.

It’s evident that Hancock wants to take you on a trip, rather than just playing tunes. Naively, Hancock thought that this music was commercial, because “the direction is a direction that people are ready to receive. It relates to things that are happening today, like vegetarianism, yoga, the maharishi, organic foods, spirituality in general.” He was a little ahead of his time and a little too optimistic about the public’s ability and willingness to engage with such thorny, uncompromising music. When new age music finally took off, it was the cream of wheat for the mind doused in pancake syrup like Enya and Yanni that made the big bucks, not Hancock’s steel cut whole oats.

Fortunately for Herbie Hancock, he eventually noticed that none of his friends had his records in their collections, instead preferring Sly Stone and James Brown. He took the hint. He came out with Headhunters, which was a much more straightforward funk album, and made a mint in the process.

Fortunately for us, he gave the world Mwandishi and Crossings first.