Herbie Hancock, Head Hunters
Featured Album
The album that blew jazz up and destroyed it
The best-selling jazz album of all time, the album that blew jazz up and destroyed it, the album that spurred hundreds of imitations, the album that invented jazz-rock fusion…do we need to make it any clearer that when Head Hunters came out in 1973 it was, shall we say, a bit controversial?
Listening to it today, you might wonder what all the fuss was about. It even sounds a bit quaint, given how far keyboard technology (and Hancock's use of it) has evolved since it was recorded. But there's no doubt that a gauntlet was thrown. Opening with "Chameleon," a piece of springy funk anchored by drummer Harvey Mason playing figures obviously based on Jerome "Bigfoot" Braley's work with Funkadelic and Gregg Errico's work with Sly and the Family Stone, and then going on to a complete rethinking of his classic "Watermelon Man," Hancock served notice that Miles Davis wasn't the only master out there re-casting jazz. Reed-man Bennie Maupin, like Hancock a Miles Davis veteran, was able to find a way to make the saxophone speak this new language, and bassist Paul Jackson and percussionist Bill Summers rounded out this tight little group very nicely. Don't blame Hancock for the fusoid excrescences which followed this milestone (even the ones he committed), and hear it for what it is: the sound of the rules being broken by someone who had a new vision.
