Presented online for the first time as an exclusive at HerbieHancock.com is the following epic essay by Bob Belden, which originally appeared in the 2013 Sony Box Set ‘The Complete Columbia Album Collection, 1972-1988’. We invite you to press play on our jukebox and enjoy an annotated history of Herbie’s discography through the decades.
Part 1: INTRODUCTION
Herbie Hancock is a Chameleon. Not in the literal sense of the word but in the sense of an evolving, inclusive entity that flows with the waters and rhythms of life, embracing each moment for what it is: an opportunity to interact, communicate, and produce sounds and textures unique to the circumstances but meant for the human race as a whole. The Complete Herbie Hancock Columbia Album Collection reflects this inclusive nature, seeded in his Buddhist philosophy of life and exemplified by his music artistry. This collection spans 16 years in the life of Herbie Hancock from 1972-1988, a period which yielded a staggering total of 31 albums whose scope is beyond clarification by simplification. On these discs are contributions by Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Kimiko Kasai, Carlos Santana, Jaco Pastorius, Wynton Marsalis, Bennie Maupin, Paul Jackson, Harvey Mason, Mike Clark and Bill Summers, producers David Rubinson and Bill Laswell, and engineers Fred Catero, Dave Jerden, and Tomoo Suzuki. Represented in this collection are the hit songs, the rare Japan-only LPs, the special collaborations that were part artistic and part technological, the multifarious ever-changing soundscapes that illuminate the evolution of jazz music and popular music through a singular vision: that of Herbie Hancock.
Producer David Rubinson and engineer Fred Catero both transcended the norms of the commercial music market by facilitating the creation of music that appealed to the jazz fans, the pop music fans, and the audiophiles of their day. The state-of-the-art sound that Rubinson achieved on his productions was often enabled by Fred Catero, the in-house engineer for Rubinson’s Automatt recording studios, in San Francisco. Rubinson’s vision and sense of perfectionism maintained the highest level of production and artistic participation, and facilitated Herbie’s engagement in many musical and technological developments that were unique, innovative, and organic in the energized music world of those times.
Part 2: HISTORY
Herbert Jeffrey Hancock – named after Herb Jeffries, the Duke Ellington vocalist of the early 1940s – was born on April 12, 1940, in Chicago, Illinois. Considered to be a child prodigy, Herbie began an intense study of classical music, culminating in a performance with the Chicago Symphony at the age of 11, performing Mozart’s D Minor Piano Concerto. Herbie’s basic introduction to jazz came from an Art Blakey LP (Hard Bop) and his musical interests began to move in that direction. While a student attending Grinnell College in Iowa as an engineering major, Herbie began to think in terms of jazz music as a life’s work and eventually, this brought him back to Chicago which was, in 1960, a bustling city with a deep and self-sufficient jazz scene. Though initially Herbie had to support himself by working in the post office, he soon became successful and his reputation grew to the point where he quickly became a top-call musician. During the winter of 1960, Donald Byrd was in need of a pianist for an engagement and Herbie was recommended. After a quick one-song audition (“French Spice” was the song), Herbie was hired on the spot and proved to have such an impact on Donald that he brought Herbie to New York City with him.
The association with Donald Byrd led to Herbie being signed to Blue Note Records in 1962. His first LP, Takin’ Off(1962), gave him the chance to re-record “Watermelon Man” and this too proved successful for him and Blue Note (leading to many covers of the song that appeared soon after his jazz hit and Mongo Santamaria’s famous version.). Herbie’s association with Blue Note lasted eight years (1962-69), producing eight released LPs and generating many classic jazz compositions – “Watermelon Man,” “Cantaloupe Island,” “One Finger Snap,” “Maiden Voyage,” “The Eye Of The Hurricane,” “Dolphin Dance,” and “Speak Like A Child” among them. In 1963 Herbie’s talent caught the ear of Miles Davis, who hired him in May of 1963, beginning a fruitful collaboration for five years. During Herbie’s tenure with Miles, he made lifelong musical connections with his fellow band mates Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams (later to also be members of the V.S.O.P. group). It was with Miles Davis that Herbie first traveled outside the United States and learned the subtle art of leading a band. During Herbie’s years with Miles, his growth as a diversified artist was evident in his many appearances as a recording session musician on many classic Blue Note sessions with the likes of Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham, Bobby Hutcherson, and Jackie McLean, as well as performing in clubs with musicians as diverse as Sonny Rollins and Benny Goodman. In 1966 he was commissioned to compose his first film score for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. During this time he was also composing for television and pursued a successful career composing advertising jingles. A number of Herbie’s famous compositions, such as “Maiden Voyage,” began as TV commercials.
By the fall of 1968, Herbie left Miles to form The Herbie Hancock Sextet. This was the name used in live performances during the making of Herbie’s first Warner Brothers LP, Fat Albert Rotunda, a recording of music used for the Bill Cosby television show, Fat Albert. In a musical sense Herbie was realizing the coloristic opportunities to expand his own unique sense of orchestration and form. With a textural template exposed with the recording of Speak Like A Child (1968) of a three-horn frontline and the musical partnerships created from The Prisoner (1969) recording session (Johnny Coles, Garnett Brown, Joe Henderson, Buster Williams, and Albert “Tootie” Heath), the seeds for Mwandishi were being sown.
Part 3: THE MWANDISHI BAND
The new sextet that recorded both of Herbie’s next two Warner Brothers LPs, Mwandishi (Herbie’s Swahili name, meaning ‘Composer’) and Crossings, was formed in 1970, with Eddie Henderson, Julian Priester, Bennie Maupin, and Billy Hart (contextually replacing Coles, Brown, Henderson, and Heath) and Buster Williams (retained from the first sextet). Thus began Herbie’s odyssey of growth, change, exultation, and ultimate commercial disappointment leading to a re-invention and rebirth that had few, if any, precedents in jazz history.
The Mwandishi Band developed into a unique group, which created a conceptual music that mixed contemporary classical music with African textures, group improvisation and simultaneous individuality based on the varied personalities within the band. Crossings (Warner Bros., 1971-72) was a dramatic statement as to how far form and conception had come within the world of jazz music. The Mwandishi Band was an orchestra inside of a jazz septet. Each musician played a variety of instruments, all of them doubled on exotic percussion instruments, and in live performances an entire set of music could be one continuous suite. Herbie expanded the group to include the synthesist Patrick Gleeson in 1972, allowing for colors that were unheard of in music at the time. On Crossings, an artistic peak for this band, these fresh and inventive textures and formats for improvisations cemented the group’s place in contemporary jazz history. The next album by The Mwandishi Band was Sextant, Herbie’s very first for the Columbia label.
The group flowered during this current time of African-American self-awareness, and as this movement was defined as both a social and political movement, the musicians who embraced the moment (but not necessarily the movement) found themselves performing to small, enthusiastic but exclusive crowds, which made the sustaining of a seven-piece band with a lot of cargo more of a labor of love than a sound financial investment. In 1973, the tastes in jazz were changing rapidly. The jazz-fusion movement was moving in different directions, some purely populist and others hard-edged and rock-centric, while still other musicians were going into unique, individualist directions that could not be categorized. The audience for jazz music at the time wanted something that they could relate to in a direct way. Via fusion, jazz was gaining acceptance in the larger music public; for the first time a jazz musician could make a choice about the direction they wanted to take and find a way to make it viable either on a purely artistic level or on a mercantile level or, as in Herbie’s case, both. Herbie had that rare opportunity to make a choice, as his music was on the cutting edge of jazz and fusion jazz. After one fateful gig in Los Angeles, the direction options began to narrow.
Part 4: HEAD HUNTERS
Herbie and The Mwandishi Band were booked to headline a week of 16 shows in Los Angeles at the famed Troubadour club as part of their newly designed and expanded touring regime: rock clubs and college campuses. The nominal opening act was a newly signed group from San Francisco, the Pointer Sisters. David Rubinson managed and produced both the Pointers and Herbie, so it was only natural for one hand to help the other. From the opening notes of the Pointers’ set, there was an immediate ecstatic reaction from the crowd, and by the end of their short set the audience was standing on its feet wanting more. As The Mwandishi Band played its set, some of the audience was baffled and a few people began to leave the club (well documented in a review that appeared in Down Beat magazine in the summer of 1973). Herbie was struck by the energy and connection the Pointers had with the people, and resolved to find a way to reach a wider and more enthusiastic audience. Coupled with the financial strain that the septet was causing, plus Herbie’s growing spirituality and awareness of cause and effect, Herbie made a conscious decision to take his music in a new direction. He and Rubinson created a new band, retaining Bennie Maupin from The Mwandishi Band, and hiring jazz/funk electric bassist (and former jazz organist) Paul Jackson from Oakland, Afro-centric multi-cultural percussionist Bill Summers from New Orleans, and Harvey Mason on drums, a star of the Los Angeles studio scene. This newly formed quintet played low profile performances around Los Angeles and the Bay Area during the summer of 1973 and then went into the studio soon afterward to record the now-classic Head Hunters.
The impact of the recording started on Black College radio and campuses (particularly at Howard University in Washington DC), and exploded all over the U.S., Japan, and Europe. The LP went Gold in the U.S. within months and the edited single, “Chameleon,” ultimately became a hit at commercial radio and in the dance clubs, and was adopted by jazz-funk bands everywhere as an instrumental feature. On Head Hunters, Herbie returned to his roots as a composer of melodies and phrases that could take hold of the listener’s mind and wrapped them in a groove that went to the roots of public ritual music. With Mason and Summers, Herbie re-worked his first hit, “Watermelon Man,” to fit into the new sound of this group, and this new arrangement became a highlight on his concert tours. Live, Harvey Mason, whose studio commitments precluded touring with the band, was replaced by Paul Jackson’s old friend, Oakland-based drummer Mike Clark, completing the formation of the first touring edition of The Head Hunters Band, which was together from 1973-76, and their development into a cohesive and creative group was made evident on the release of the next LP Thrust (1974). Thrust was an extension of Head Hunters, and one of the songs originally recorded for the Head Hunters LP (“Actual Proof,” which had been recorded in 1973 with Mason), was re-recorded to allow for Mike Clark to appear on the entire LP.
In 1974 and 1975 Herbie’s Chameleonesque talents were vividly on display, as he created and recorded two extremely diverse projects: Death Wish and Man-Child. (Herbie’s score and soundtrack LP Death Wish will be discussed later). His last LP utilizing the full Head Hunters Band, and his first to feature Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Man-Child was an expression of Herbie’s unique and personal concept of orchestration and texture; a primer on how to blend and synergize synthesized and acoustic instruments. The LP was recorded by Fred Catero in such a way as to allow the listener to hear in the most vivid detail the different tonal shadings and details of the widely varied sound of the instruments. Overlooked since its first release, Man-Child charted a different direction in the language of jazz for ensemble writing in the progressive musical environment. During the summer of 1975, Herbie toured Japan, where he and The Head Hunters Band were captured live in concert for CBS/Sony (Flood).
As the band began to settle into a more focused groove, more dance-funk than jazz funk, he worked ever more closely with Wah Wah Watson, and replaced Mike Clark with James Levi. The result of this change was Secrets (1976), which retained some of the original sound of The Head Hunters Band, but foreshadowed the changes coming in the next stage of Herbie’s creative direction.
The impact of Herbie’s recordings with The Head Hunters Band changed the world of jazz by opening up the mindset of both jazz musicians and the listening public to the fact that music could have the power of communicating to a larger set of minds and voices yet retain its musical complexity, quality, and integrity. The band had a string of hits that have become part of the global vocabulary of musicians (“Chameleon,” “Actual Proof,” “Hang Up Your Hang Ups”) and raised the bar for production standards.
This period was also marked by the vastly increased range of expression that the expansion of his keyboard arsenal afforded Herbie by the rapid development of the synthesizer. From simple monophonic keyboards (one note at a time) and sound effects commonly used merely to mimic brass and strings, synthesizers developed into acutely sensitive and expressive sound sources of their own, uniquely electronic but profoundly musical instruments. In Herbie’s hands, they are fully explored to their sonic and musical potential. On these recordings Herbie and his team continued their collaborative production practices that began with Mwandishi, and expanded thereafter. Herbie realized ever more fully that the studio itself is an instrument, and he became increasingly expert at recording techniques, post-production, mixing, and editing. Thus he would compose using the usual components of rhythm and melody and harmony, but with studio techniques part of the musical foundation, not just an afterthought.
Part 5: VSOP
In the spring of 1976, Hancock manager Rubinson asked impresario George Wein to produce a live retrospective of Herbie’s career at his Newport Jazz Festival that summer in New York City, to feature a reunion of the legendary Miles Davis Quintet of 1964-68, featuring Miles, Herbie, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. With Davis unavailable, Hancock and Rubinson decided instead to facilitate a concert called V.S.O.P. (a Very Special One-Time Performance), with programming centered around Herbie, and with Freddie Hubbard on trumpet in place of Miles. The flow of the concert was a mix of retrospective, reunion, and rejuvenation, apportioned equally as The Quintet, The Mwandishi Band, and The New Herbie Hancock Group (the band from Secrets, with Wah Wah Watson). Recorded by Rubinson and Catero for Columbia Records and released in the spring of 1977, V.S.O.P. in many ways was the springboard for the rebirth of acoustic jazz as a viable commercial entity. Newsweek even had V.S.O.P. on its cover declaring “Jazz Is Back.”
V.S.O.P. (The Quintet) began touring the summer of 1977 with Hubbard, Shorter, Hancock, Carter, and Williams, recording a follow-up live 2-LP set in 1977 for the U.S. market (V.S.O.P.: The Quintet) and the Japan-only live 2-LP set V.S.O.P.: Tempest In The Colosseum. The group clearly began to demonstrate in their recorded performances the characteristics of a real working band, with new music being composed exclusively for each musician within the ensemble. Rather than being an imitation of a historical association, V.S.O.P. had a unique sound that was a logical extension of a historical association. It was only after applying individual learned experiences cumulatively to this situation that V.S.O.P. could be called a band and not an artifact. After taking a year off, V.S.O.P. re-assembled for a tour of Japan, recording a live 2-LP set (V.S.O.P.: Live Under The Sky) (1979) and their only studio LP, Five Stars (1979) during their stay. At the time that V.S.O.P. was created, the U.S. market for jazz was in a complete state of flux as styles changed at a moment’s notice and the pressures for jazz musicians to keep both flames (acoustic and electric) alive started to take its toll on the audience. V.S.O.P. lit a fire in the jazz market, culminating in the eventual rejuvenation of acoustic jazz during the early eighties. This group proved that there was a need and an avid audience for acoustic jazz and they maintained a touring schedule well into the eighties, but without a recording contract. Alumni of V.S.O.P. include Freddie Hubbard, Wynton Marsalis, Wayne Shorter, Branford Marsalis, Bobby Hutcherson, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Buster Williams, Tony Williams, and Al Foster. It is within this collection that the world will hear the complete body of work created by the group V.S.O.P. (1976-79) for the first time in its entirety. Long overdue.
Part 6: POST HEAD HUNTERS: SECRETS AND BEYOND
At the very same time that Herbie was re-discovering his past with V.S.O.P., he was creating a new future – beginning with the recording of Secrets (1976). The core band was similar to the personnel that had recorded Manchild (Bennie Maupin, Wah Wah Watson, Paul Jackson, but now with James Levi on drums), but the direction that Herbie was going with his music required a break from the past. With the arrival of dance and funk music as the lingua franca of the American and international audience, Herbie transitioned his band from a free-wheeling jazz/funk fusion band to a more tight-knit funk band, yet still in a primarily instrumental setting.
On Secrets (1976), Herbie included background vocals on the dance track “Doin’ It,” but this was an adjunct to the instrumental melody and rhythm track. Then came even more conceptual changes with the release of Sunlight (1977) where Herbie began to fully realize the vocal possibilities enabled by the advance of synthesizer technology. Herbie’s creative use of the newly invented Sennheiser Vocoder allowed him to sing his songs in his own voice, and even harmonize them according to his own language, expanding his composing opportunities to include popular vocal music concepts. By increasingly developing his skills as a songwriter/collaborator, Herbie was able more fully to access and express the freedom of form that vocal music encouraged.
The method Herbie used for creating Sunlight and the next three “vocal” LPs – Feets Don’t Fail Me Now (1979), Monster (1980), and Magic Windows (1981) – was innovative and productive, and synergized and enabled as usual by further technological advances. Well before MIDI (Musical Instrumental Digital Interface) became a recognized standard for controlling and interfacing various digital devices, Herbie and his brilliant technical collaborator Bryan Bell were devising their own unique and increasingly efficient systems for controlling his growing collection of electronic instruments, and storing the data for recall and re-use. This meant that Herbie could assemble his entire sound array and create, edit and then recall and instantly re-assemble entire rhythm tracks and melodic concepts, essentially by himself. He developed a three-tiered compositional technique, first creating the rhythm track and basic harmonic/tonal structure, then the core melodies, and finally collaborating on the final song structures, melodies, and lyrics to create unique songs. The lyricists included his sister Jean, and the Grammy Award-winning writers Jeffrey Cohen and Allee Willis.
Feets Don’t Fail Me Now was focused on dance/vocal music. Monster, while a mix of dance music, pop, and hard rock, most fully realized Herbie’s development as a songwriter and creator of pop vocal music. Recorded largely in L.A., the core recording band included Wah Wah, Ray Parker Jr. (later to become widely successful as a solo artist [Raydio] and the composer of the theme from Ghostbusters), Alphonse Mouzon on drums, and Sheila Escovedo (later known as Sheila E.) on percussion, plus Gavin Christopher and The Waters Family on vocals. Monster also featured Carlos Santana on the dance single “Saturday Night,” which crossed over from the dance charts to pop music formats.
As Sunlight was defining a new sound and direction for Herbie while still maintaining an intricate balance between acoustic and synthesized textures, by contrast, Mr. Hands (1980) was an LP that was, in a way, a collection of outtakes and musings, as exemplified by Herbie’s then recent pairings with Ron Carter and Tony Williams from V.S.O.P., and on bassist Jaco Pastorius’ debut LP. Included on Mr. Hands is a remixing of a track recorded on the original Head Hunters session, “Shiftless Shuffle.”
From 1977 until 1981, the sound of most of the Hancock recordings was dominated by synthesizers. Polyphonic instruments were being designed and manufactured at an alarming rate until musicians were overwhelmed by the choices. Herbie found that some synthesizers had unique tonal qualities, and polyphonality, such as the Prophet models and Yamaha CS-80. In this period, Herbie’s and sound technician Bryan Bell’s programming yielded soundscapes that recalled “real” acoustic instruments – but synthesized, created, and controlled by Herbie alone. Bennie Maupin developed skills on the Lyricon, a wind synthesizer, first used in touches on Man-Child. The instrument became an integral part of the sound of the band, opening up new textures and enabling a wind musician’s technical facility to have influence on presenting electronic sounds.
Magic Windows (1981) and Lite Me Up (1982) found Herbie in the studio environment favored by L.A. singer/songwriters. Lite Me Up was the first time that Herbie was basically the sole producer of his own album (except for two tracks which were produced by Narada Michael Walden and Jay Graydon). On Lite Me Up Herbie emulated his long-time friend, Quincy Jones, collaborating with songwriter and Jones collaborator Rod Temperton, while using Earth, Wind & Fire engineer George Massenburg and their studios, and a variety of L.A. session singers for the vocals. But, one more time, the Chameleon Herbie was poised to make another monumental, paradigm shift, a conceptually re-organizing and re-defining move that paralleled his shift in 1973 when Head Hunters was first constructed.
Part 7: THE ROCKIT BAND
The music industry was suffering financial and esthetic woes as the seventies turned to the eighties. The Chicago Disco Riot in 1979 was a signal that things were changing in the public’s perception of what kind of music they wanted; a demand to segregate (or categorize by specific genres) music according to specific tastes, thereby limiting music and musicians intellectually from the ability to develop a broad, general audience for their music. Punk rock became new wave, tamed and commercialized. R&B and soul music slowly became hip-hop and then rap music. Music Television (MTV), a new video jukebox channel, began using promotional videos to create a successful cable broadcast company that had a profound effect on the music industry, replacing radio as the prime driver for a successful single or new artist. And MTV was dominated by pop music and had no R&B or jazz artists in their performance rotation. As for the state of jazz, the harder edges of fusion morphed into funk and then disco and then into an emerging concept that eventually became known as smooth jazz. With the success of V.S.O.P. and the recent trend of former fusion artists returning to acoustic jazz, many younger musicians began to look back to the past as inspiration for the future.
Nature abhors a vacuum, so kids in New York’s South Bronx in the late seventies, following closely the revolution in sound and music that had exploded in Jamaica, largely in Kingston, and lacking funds for fancy instruments and sound systems, turned to indigenous devices close at hand to create new songs, forms, and textures. As with the DJs in Kingston, the turntable became an essential instrument. The cheap microphone being broadcast over a boom box. Mouth percussion. Dancing. No-holds-barred words and rhymes. The U.S. version of this music was at first called breakbeat (and eventually hip-hop), but one thing was clear: this music was developing in an urban setting and one in particular – the South Bronx. To capture the energy and excitement of this new sound and direction, you had best be a musician and producer living in New York City in 1981-1982 and have your ear to the street. One such person was producer/musician Bill Laswell.
Herbie met Laswell at a time when conjunction meant something. Herbie had been involved in every major development in modern jazz and pop music since 1962 and he was at a crossroads by the end of 1982. With Herbie’s immense intellectual curiosity and quick-to-comprehend sensibility when encountering new music concepts, the collaboration of Herbie Hancock and Bill Laswell flourished. Credit is also due to the mutual respect of musicianship shared between Herbie and Laswell and his band Material, which was the springboard for this collaborative project. The musicians created a positive environment to move a conjunctive idea into a complete summation of an emerging art form. What Herbie was looking to find in Monster, a mix of funk and rock, he found with the LP Future Shock (1983), and the globally mold-shattering single “Rockit.”
As with his life philosophy of inclusive participation, “Rockit” desegregated and de-ghettoized pop music, if only for a brief moment. The composition reflected the emerging breakbeat sound with the use of actual rhythm breaks (spaces left open in the performance for improvisation, usually in between choruses and verses), the turntable, heavy metal crunch guitars, a Fairlight Synthesizer sequence, the Linn Drum, and a techno-driven groove. The composition reflected the mixing of an inclusive and collaborative urban culture but was produced with such elegance that the sound of urbanism was embraced worldwide. The music video for “Rockit” also broke vast new ground. MTV played the “Rockit” video in heavy rotation, and Herbie was seen picture-in-picture, among the very first African-Americans to actually be seen and featured on the historically all-white MTV.
Following Future Shock were two more Laswell produced projects, Sound-System (1984) and Perfect Machine (1988). Each LP/CD (as Columbia moved into full time CD production) was shaped around the basic sound of the “Rockit” band – turntable, samplers, drum machines, sequencers – but with subtle differences. Sound-System was more Afro-Centric and Perfect Machine tends towards real techno-metal and is intently computer driven.
Future Shock re-aligned the balance between electronic and acoustic music, street music and pop music, in favor of the electronic. Herbie’s “vocal” LPs and Future Shock opened doors for composing music that was created electronically first, using sequencers. In 1973 Head Hunters and the single “Chameleon” caused a revolution in which jazz and funk merged perfectly. Future Shock and “Rockit” from 1983 caused a similar revolution. While the effects were not felt as strongly in the jazz community at the time, they were embraced wholeheartedly in the global electronica and digital arts communities and on the streets and dance clubs of the world.
Part 8: SPECIAL PROJECTS
Herbie’s contract with Columbia was structured specifically to allow him artistic and creative freedom. He could deliver various projects which were ostensibly not “commercial,” and thus was afforded wide artistic freedom for an artist with an exclusive obligation to a single company. In Japan, Columbia/CBS Records partnered with Sony to form CBS/Sony. The people at Sony Japan had been long-time jazz fans and Herbie aficionados, and they proposed various recording projects, conceived strictly for the Japanese market.
His first project with Sony Japan was Dedication (1974). Taking advantage of Sony’s interest in audio technology, Herbie was able to utilize the advances that Sony engineers were developing at the time, often years ahead of the commercial application of the concept. Dedication was a live to PCM digital recording. This was one of the first recordings to use this new technology. One side was acoustic piano and the other side was all synthesized, both recorded live in real time, without any overdubbing.
Herbie continued to record for CBS/Sony until 1981 and his output included The Piano and Directstep, early examples of direct-to-disc recordings. Direct-to-disc meant recording live to the actual master disc, which was then used to make stampers to press multiple copies, eliminating the middle elements which affected audio quality.
Directstep was also one of the first analog recording projects to be converted into a digital format for release as one of the earliest compact discs. The audio quality of these recordings is a tribute to Fred Catero and Tomoo Suzuki, with whom Rubinson and Hancock worked intensively.
Herbie recorded two trio LPs, both direct to digital, that featured Ron Carter and Tony Williams (The Herbie Hancock Trio (1977) and The Herbie Hancock Trio With Ron Carter + Tony Williams (1981). Both LPs – the only piano trio albums Hancock ever recorded under his own name – demonstrated the synergy that these musicians possessed, a deep level of communication that was only obtained by years of conscious effort.
Herbie rekindled the friendship and the musical spirituality he shared with Chick Corea by partnering for a series of duo concerts, which resulted in a collection of performances released as An Evening With Herbie Hancock And Chick Corea In Concert (1978). The following year, Herbie traveled to Japan for a series of concerts with his current group and recorded an all-vocal LP featuring the Japanese singer Kimiko Kasai (Butterfly, 1979). This LP featured many songs with lyrics by Jean Hancock, Herbie’s sister.
Before Wynton Marsalis became the jazz icon of today, and fresh from working with Art Blakey, his first major tour was with Herbie, Ron, and Tony. Quartet (1982) represents this collaborative juncture for both of these musicians. After the tour, Herbie went to New York and produced and performed on Wynton’s first Columbia LP.
A Herbie Hancock project produced by Bill Laswell and Herbie that was not part of the Future Shock, Sound-System, Perfect Machine trilogy was the collaborative album with Foday Musa Suso, Village Life (1985), a one-of-a-kind recording mating Herbie’s synthesizers with the kora and talking drum of Suso.
In 1974, Herbie did the score for the motion picture Death Wish (1974). Within that project were musicians from The Head Hunters Band mixed with strings, woodwinds, and brass. At times the music goes beyond the limitations of a film score into a singular conception of a composition not dependent on a visual narrative.
Ten years later, Herbie was asked to be involved in the motion picture Round Midnight (1986). His role was that of a music supervisor, composer, arranger, and actor. It led to Herbie’s first Oscar, an Academy Award for Original Music Score in 1986. Round Midnight is a rare film soundtrack that works on and off the screen as a complete musical statement.
Herbie left CBS (Columbia) Records in 1988 to embark on a continuing, multifarious recording career, culminating in his ground-breaking The New Standard (Verve, 1995), the elegant celebration of Gershwin’s World (Verve, 1998), the Album Of The Year Grammy Award-winning The River (Verve, 2007), and his grand opus, The Imagine Project (Hancock Records, 2010), which is the summation of all of his experiences in creating music, and expands this to embrace the extant inclusionary principles that make the music of Herbie Hancock so special.
Part 9: SUMMARY
Behind every successful artist lies a philosophy of life, whether it is spiritual, mercantile, or technological. It makes no specific limitation, and inside these elements of a life structure come evocations; in the case of musicians, these evocations are manifested in the form of a song, arrangement, recording, concert, and lasting personal connections. Taken in its entirety, The Complete Herbie Hancock Columbia Album Collection gives the listener and reader a glimpse into the internal philosophy of life of Herbie Hancock. Rarely does a collection of sound contain so much of a human being’s revelatory process. In this collection, you can listen to a musician reinvent himself time and time again, all on his own terms. You can understand one aspect of Buddhism, that of inclusion, as Herbie fought against the trends of exclusion by letting his music reach out beyond the restrictions of the status quo. The scope of his music, his person, his outlook on life and the human existence, can be taken as a whole when appreciating the legacy presented in this treasure chest of sound and human soul.
– Bob Belden
Very special thanks to Richard Seidel, Seth Rothstein, Hal Miller, Max Schlueter, and Melinda Murphy.
Sidebar: JEAN HANCOCK
This box set allows, for the first time, a chance for the listener to fathom the lyrics created for Herbie Hancock’s music by his sister, Jean Hancock. Jean created lyrics that reflected her vision of a world filled with love, hope, beauty, and, above all, optimism. Her words were aspirational, in that she wanted the listener to dream of the environment she would describe in a phrase or rhyme (not in the contemporary sense of rhyming as in hip-hop, but in the more classical poetic sense). In Jean’s vision, “Maiden Voyage” was transformed into an epic journey of self-discovery. Using the premise that love, in and of itself, is a profound human experience, “Satisfied With Love” promises that the only way to true love is to fill the cup of life to capacity. Jean reaches into heartache and the redemption of the soul with her words for “Harvest Time.” “Tell Me A Bedtime Story” is an elegant narrative that recalls the universal desire of children to enter the world of dreams, awaiting all of the fantastical rewards those dreams create.
Her words reflected a gentleness that was poetic and sensitive, soulful and graceful, the meaning and impact of the poetry flowering with Herbie’s melodies and harmonies. The music that she and her brother created was in temperamental contrast to much of Herbie’s other songwriting collaborations, making these songs unique, artistic gems worthy of consideration.
Sidebar: DAVID RUBINSON
David Rubinson, while less known to the wider public, was a revolutionary innovator in the world of production and recording. When studying Herbie Hancock’s work, it quickly becomes apparent that his long-time collaborator, Rubinson, had a strong influence on most of Hancock’s musical explorations. As producer of 25 of Hancock’s albums on CBS/Columbia, Rubinson’s role and importance in the development of Hancock’s career cannot be understated.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Rubinson began his career in 1963 at the age of 21 with a short stint as Associate Producer at Capitol Records, and in 1964 produced the Obie-Award winning off-Broadway production of The Cradle Will Rock, which led to his joining Columbia Records. He worked as a staff producer at Columbia from 1964-69, signing and producing important West Coast acts such as The Chambers Brothers, Taj Mahal, Moby Grape, and Santana. Growing increasingly disenchanted with restrictive union rules as well as Columbia’s corporate environment and the label’s initial unwillingness to set up a studio facility in San Francisco, Rubinson relocated to the Bay Area in 1969 as a partner with Bill Graham in The Fillmore Corporation, bringing with him his longtime colleague, the legendary Columbia staff engineer Fred Catero.
Partnered with Graham and attorney Brian Rohan, The Fillmore Corporation was designed to produce, record, engineer, promote, manage, publish and book artists all under one roof, but quickly dissolved in November 1971 after mounting discord among the partners. In January 1972, Rubinson formed his own production and management company, David Rubinson & Friends Inc./Adamsdad Management. By this time, Hancock and Rubinson were already busy working together.
The collaboration between Hancock and Rubinson had started in 1970, when Warner Brothers Records and Hancock’s then manager, Lee Weisel, were seeking ways to develop Hancock into a more commercially viable artist and assigned Rubinson to this task following his success with Warners’ group Malo. But instead of pushing Hancock to pursue the soul- and funk-infused direction of Fat Albert Rotunda and catering to a larger audience, Rubinson advocated the increasingly avant-garde route that Hancock’s sextet was beginning to travel. In fact, Rubinson had earlier developed a keen interest in experimental electronic music back in New York City, employing it extensively while producing the band, The United States of America, whose 1967 LP includes many early examples of the use of the Moog and custom built synthesizers, sampling and ring modulators in a textual and largely non-melodic manner. A more widely known and earlier example of Rubinson’s pioneering use of technology was The Chambers Brothers’ 1967 genre-shattering “Time Has Come Today,” which makes unique and extensive use of echo reinsertion and tape feedback effects. Warner Brothers, however, was not at all happy with Hancock’s and Rubinson’s first collaboration, Mwandishi nor with their brilliant second effort, Crossings, and dropped Hancock from their roster at the same time they dropped Labelle and Earth, Wind & Fire. Shortly thereafter, Hancock and Rubinson (now Hancock’s manager as well) clinched a deal with Columbia via Herbie’s long-time fan and Rubinson’s old friend Bruce Lundvall, paving the way for a remarkable string of productions for this label.
With masterful mixing skills at their disposal, David Rubinson and Fred Catero spearheaded the nascence of a new level of production in jazz. But the most profound impact the two had on Hancock’s music, and indeed on most of their jazz and fusion productions beginning with Mwandishi, was their COLLABORATION – working together with exceptional creativity and vision in experimenting with studio post-production. After tracking extensive live takes to capture the group’s intimacy and cohesiveness, the duo, with full participation by Hancock, set about sculpting the music by treating the studio, and mixing and post-production as fully realized creative tools, that is, as another instrument. The degree to which Hancock was involved in this process was unprecedented in jazz. While having always taken a keen interest in new technologies, it was only then that he delved deep into production techniques for the first time and conceived these as forms of composition, expression and art. This marked a radical shift from the old style when artists would record their albums quickly, often in one day, and with little involvement or voice in the post-production process.
With an ever-growing artist portfolio and the seminal successes of Hancock’s Head Hunters and the Pointer Sisters’ hits, including “Yes We Can Can,” among others, Rubinson was quickly expanding his business and his art in the mid-seventies. When CBS, who had opened a studio in San Francisco, decided to divest itself of this property, Rubinson took over the lease, and in 1978, established The Automatt. The best-equipped and the only automated studio in the Bay Area at the time, it was Rubinson’s creative base for many of Hancock’s albums, as well as albums by Patti LaBelle, Santana and numerous other artists (Rubinson produced the music and soundtrack LP for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now there as well).
The music production part of the relationship between Herbie Hancock and David Rubinson, which spanned the entire 1970s, was disrupted suddenly when Rubinson, who was usually working 12 to 16 hour days, suffered a heart attack in February 1982 and had to undergo bypass surgery later that year. His illness precluded continuing his career in the studio, mandating that he turn full time to artist management, including Herbie. Two years later, Rubinson reluctantly closed The Automatt after the owner quadrupled his rent. Gratefully, we are left with his extraordinary legacy of working with great and innovative artists – none more notable than Herbie Hancock.
Sidebar: HERBIE HANCOCK – COMPOSER
As much as Herbie Hancock is known for both his piano virtuosity and highly influential style, his wider public influence has been realized in his compositions. Since 1962, when Mongo Santamaria recorded “Watermelon Man,” Herbie has nurtured, developed, and matured as a composer of music that is beyond genre or limitations of style. At once immediately recognizable and possessed with a flow, rhythmic and harmonic, and topped with a melody that can be remembered from the moment of discovery, the compositions of Herbie Hancock will take the listener on a journey into his life and experiences.
In simple terms, a musical composition can be qualified as having an organized melody with harmony and rhythm. Individuality, experience, curiosity, and virtuosity are what set apart the great composers.
Herbie can create music that is from his mind alone, such as “Watermelon Man” (on Head Hunters and Flood), “Maiden Voyage” (on Dedication, Flood, V.S.O.P., Tempest In The Colosseum, An Evening With Herbie Hancock & Chick Corea In Concert, Butterfly w/ Kimiko Kasai, and Perfect Machine), and “Actual Proof” (on Thrust and Flood), and he can collaborate with other composers as demonstrated by “Chameleon” (on Head Hunters and Flood), “Come Running To Me” (on Sunlight), “Hang Up Your Hang Ups” (on Flood, Man-Child, and V.S.O.P), and “Paradise” (on Feets Don’t Fail Me Now). This is a rare flexibility for a musician so closely associated with jazz. The range of imagination held in the compositions in this box is staggering. From the very abstract “Hidden Shadows” (from Sextant) to the impressionistic “Sun Touch” (from Man-Child) to electronica (Sound-System) to classic jazz such as “Domo” (from V.S.O.P.: Live Under The Sky), there is no path that is discarded in the process of complete self-discovery as a composer.
There are the popular songs from Herbie’s catalog of music that are constantly being transformed by the various musical situations in which Herbie presents himself. “Maiden Voyage,” for example, has evolved not only as a form of improvisation, but also as varied musical coloration on his numerous tours. On this box set “Maiden Voyage” morphs from solo piano (Dedication) to duo (An Evening With Herbie Hancock & Chick Corea In Concert) to acoustic jazz quintet (the V.S.O.P. recordings, to electric funk (Flood) to techno (Perfect Machine) in ways that demonstrate the dual flexibility of performer and composer, with both disciplines evolving in parallel.
An undervalued aspect of Herbie’s compositions is the variety of orchestration that he employs. A true pioneer in the mixing of acoustic and electronic instruments, this merging of aesthetics gave his music a very personal sound, so unique that it was instantly recognizable. From the three-horn front line of the Mwandishi band, he still managed to incorporate that sound in his later music, most noticeably on Man-Child and Death Wish, both recorded in a similar time frame. With “Sun Touch” (Man-Child), Herbie added a small brass ensemble, employed alto and bass flutes (overdubbed), used the natural textural differences to give electronic jazz a warmth that could not be achieved solely by synthesizers, and brought the bass clarinet into the forefront. Death Wish is another overlooked recording, owing in large part to its chronic un-availability since its release in 1974. “Joanna’s Theme” is the singular track from the album that mixes the intense emotional drama required for film scoring with the signature Hancock harmonic twists and turns. Both of these recordings – Man-Child and Death Wish – are ultimate extensions of a singular train of thought.
As the 1970s moved towards broader formats for composers to incorporate into their creative potential, Herbie was able to explore the effects of common socialization on popular music. As he approached funk and dance music with the same ideas that he applied to jazz and film music, one can hear exploration and experimentation with the goal of being able to imprint your DNA onto everything you touched. That is why this continuity can be heard in songs such as “I Thought It Was You” (on Sunlight, Directstep, and Butterfly) which combines the newly explored multi-part dance music form with hard core jazz fusion. When Herbie collaborated with contemporary pop songwriters, the music took on a different direction, but the sound of the presentation remained totally in the world of Herbie, as exemplified by Lite Me Up.
In his work with Bill Laswell, Herbie did not focus on composition in the classic sense. In an abstract way, Laswell brought Herbie back to his Headhunters roots, with music created collectively by musicians on the spot and in tune with society. This return to his instinctive roots laid the groundwork for Herbie’s creative output from the ’90s onwards. He composed less music but rearranged his own music, spontaneously customizing it for the occasion. By the mid-nineties, he started to explore other music through the eyes of an arranger. It was a natural and logical evolution for such an accomplished musician yearning to reflect contemporary society.
Sidebar: THE PIANIST
Herbie Hancock’s acoustic piano style is a reflection of his early influences, not only jazz, but classical. His love of Mozart, Chopin, Lizst, and Beethoven taught his hands to phrase fluidly (while educating his ear) and this translated well to jazz. Gravitating to the styles and ideas of Horace Silver, Bill Evans, and Wynton Kelly, it soon became apparent that he could take elements from each and create his own unique harmonic and rhythmic approach to the piano.
One of the hallmarks of Herbie’s piano performances is his touch and sensitivity to the colors and overtones that a piano is able to offer. With Miles Davis, he used the overtones to his advantage and literally invented ‘accompaniment as orchestration.’ As he began to lead groups of his own, it was only natural for his style to become more assertive.
With the advent of the Fender Rhodes electric piano in the mid-sixties, the concept of keyboard touch began to evolve. More and more, the performer had to adjust to the various levels of resistance that electric keyboards provided when pressing a key. The increase of volume also changed the way pianists adjusted to electric keyboards, and in general, they became more aware of the percussive nature of the instruments.
Herbie was one of the first pianists to develop a distinctive touch on both the acoustic piano and the Fender Rhodes. Being a mechanical engineer by nature, Herbie began to customize his instruments, giving him his signature Rhodes sound – that of a soft, silky sheen. If you listen to the sound of the Rhodes from Head Hunters to Man-Child to Sunlight, you will find the texture and color of the instrument remain consistent and very personal.
With the development of the Yamaha Electric Grand Piano, Herbie was able to translate the percussive approach that came from his performances on the Rhodes and Hohner Clavinet in such a way that he transformed his approach to acoustic jazz. On acoustic piano, the dialogue that Herbie and Tony Williams maintained on the V.S.O.P. recordings demonstrates this new approach, in that the role of the piano became equal in strength to the drums. Yet during his sojourn with V.S.O.P., where his playing leaned towards the aggressive, Herbie returned to a softer-edged approach with the acoustic solo piano recording, The Piano. And on his duo recording with Chick Corea, you can hear him combine and fully exploit both the lyrical and the percussive signatures of his technique.
For examples of this evolutionary process listen to the following examples:
Fender Rhodes:
Head Hunters – “Chameleon”
Thrust – “Butterfly”
Man-Child – “Sun-Touch”
Sunlight – “Come Running To Me”
Acoustic Piano:
The Piano – “My Funny Valentine”
An Evening With Herbie Hancock & Chick Corea In Concert – “Someday My Prince Will Come”
Herbie Hancock Trio – “Speak Like A Child”
Herbie Hancock Trio With Ron Carter + Tony Williams – “That Old Black Magic”
Sidebar: THE SYNTHESIST
As the electric guitar defined the sixties as the ‘it’ instrument, by the end of the seventies, the synthesizer was honored with this distinction. No other group of instruments changed the way music was conceptualized, created, and perceived more than the various synthesizers that developed during the 16 years covered in this collection. From the simple, monophonic (one note at a time) ARP synthesizers that lent an exotic nature to Sextant (1973), to the multi-voice (many notes at one time), computer-based instruments such as the Fairlight used on Sound-System (1984), Herbie Hancock was involved artistically, scientifically, and musically in the advancement of the challenging and ever-changing world of synthesis.
Early synthesizers were created without keyboards and their sounds were imitative of nature or things totally beyond description. Moog created the Minimoog in the late sixties, and ARP followed with the 2600, which gave the performer more options to alter the sound and included a primitive sequencer used most effectively on “Rain Dance” from Sextant. Most importantly, the ARP laid out the basic design for polyphonic synthesizers. Herbie settled on the ARP and the Moog, and on Head Hunters (1974), one can hear both instruments used to their fullest possibilities. The bass line on “Chameleon” is performed on a polyphonic Minimoog (giving the bass two voices to fatten up the sound) and the strings and otherworldly colors are performed on the ARP 2600 and the ARP String Ensemble.
Using Head Hunters as a starting point, one can take a journey through the history of the synthesizer as used in popular music. The subtle mixing of synthetic instruments and acoustic instruments was never exemplified better than by “Sun Touch” from Man-Child (1976). By the time Sunlight was recorded (1977), the synthesizer could become the voice (as with the use of the Vocoder). Other instruments expanded the multi-purpose uses, in essence replacing winds, brass, and strings with names like Prophet Brass or Oberheim strings. The best examples of the Prophet and Oberheim are on Magic Windows (1981) and Lite Me Up (1982).
On the ground-breaking Future Shock (1983), the production took advantage of the recent developments in computer-based analog synthesizers such as the Fairlight. The Fairlight, as well as the Synclavier, were forerunners of the modern Keyboard Workstation. It was during this period that the drum machine (the Linn Drum) began to have prominence in production methodology and a large impact on the way music was created. Ultimately, digital synthesis was developed using a computer program to imitate what an analog synthesizer could do. PCM, developed by Sony, was the concept used to make Herbie’s early digital recordings such as the Japan-only V.S.O.P. live albums from the seventies. In 1983, MIDI (Music Instrument Digital Interface) allowed for different instruments to be synchronized. With digital synthesis and MIDI, you could reduce the amount of keyboards and increase the amount of sounds (with the sound module coming soon after). You can hear this sound module effect on Sound-System (1984) and Perfect Machine (1988).
Herbie was able to absorb all of the technical (and sometimes problematic) movements in commercial synthesis and construct a personal approach, unique sound, and sense of color. He could find the right sound from a particular instrument for the perfect moment, creating demand in the marketplace for that instrument. The logical reason he used the synthesizer was to expand his orchestration potential on recordings with larger acoustic ensembles (Death Wish and Man Child). Herbie, as well, has always had a love of mechanical engineering and all things technical. If you put those two sides of the thought process together, you could end up with one word—curiosity.