BN-LA-399-H2

Herbie Hancock

Released - 1975

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, May 28, 1962
Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Dexter Gordon, tenor sax; Herbie Hancock, piano; Butch Warren, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.

tk.1 Empty Pockets
tk.4 Three Bags Full
tk.13 Driftin'

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, March 19, 1963
Donald Byrd, trumpet; Grachan Moncur III, trombone; Hank Mobley, tenor sax; Herbie Hancock, piano; Grant Green, guitar; Chuck Israels, bass; Anthony Williams, drums.

tk.10 Blind Man, Blind Man
tk.20 And What If I Don't

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, August 30, 1963
Herbie Hancock, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Willie Bobo, drums, timbales; Osvaldo "Chihuahau" Martinez, congas, bongos.

tk.2 (12568) Triangle

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, June 17, 1964
Freddie Hubbard, cornet; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Anthony Williams, drums.

1373 tk.14 Cantaloupe Island

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, March 17, 1965
Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; George Coleman, tenor sax; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Anthony Williams, drums.

1545 tk.2 Maiden Voyage

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, March 6, 1968
Thad Jones, flugelhorn; Peter Phillips, bass trombone; Jerry Dodgion, alto flute; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Mickey Roker, drums.

2059 tk.12 Speak Like A Child

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, March 9, 1968
Thad Jones, flugelhorn; Peter Phillips, bass trombone; Jerry Dodgion, alto flute; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Mickey Roker, drums.

2061 tk.23 Goodbye To Childhood
2063 tk.32 Toys

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, April 18, 1969
Johnny Coles, flugelhorn; Garnett Brown, trombone; Tony Studd, bass trombone; Hubert Laws, flute; Jerome Richardson, bass clarinet; Joe Henderson, tenor sax, alto flute; Herbie Hancock, piano, electric piano; Buster Williams, bass; Albert "Tootie" Heath, drums.

4011 tk.10 The Prisoner

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Maiden Voyage	Herbie Hancock	March 17 1965
Empty Pockets	Herbie Hancock	May 28 1962
Cantaloupe Island	Herbie Hancock	June 17 1964
Side Two
Speak Like A Child	Herbie Hancock	March 6 1968
Blind Man, Blind Man	Herbie Hancock	March 19 1963
The Prisoner	Herbie Hancock	April 18 1969
Side Three
Toys	Herbie Hancock	March 9 1968
Three Bags Full	Herbie Hancock	May 28 1962
Triangle	Herbie Hancock	August 30 1963
Side Four
And What If I Don't	Herbie Hancock	March 19 1963
Goodbye To Childhood	Herbie Hancock	March 9 1968
Driftin'	Herbie Hancock	May 28 1962

Liner Notes

HERBIE HANCOCK

Trumpeter Donald Byrd arrived in Chicago for a night club engagement in the winter of 1960 without a pianist. His keyboard man was driving in from the East Coast and was stranded by a blizzard and so Byrd was forced to look around town. Numerous musicians recommended a twenty-year-old local player named Herbie Hancock, who did so well as a last-minute substitute that Byrd took him to New York and put him up when the job was over. Soon Hancock was adding instinctively empathetic accompagiments to Byrd albums like A New Perspective, the classic "religious" lp that included the hit 'Christo Redentor." In 1963 Byrd talked Blue Note into sponsoring Hancock's first album as a leader and Takin' Off resulted. Take off it did, propelled by Hancock's "Watermelon Man."

The mid-1970's found Byrd and Hancock the best-selling "jazz" instrumentalists of all time, though their genre-hopping innovations had robbed that four-letter word of much of its meaning. They did improvise, as jazzmen are wont to do, and certainly their careers reflected a thorough grounding in the "mainstream"' jazz idiom of the 1950's and early '60's, with forays into the avant-garde. But they also used electronic instrumentation and played over "pop" rhythms of the kind pioneered by James Brown and Sly Stone. Writers argued the merits of their new music — "sell-out" versus "new wave" — while the public bought their records in unprecedented numbers.

Memories are short. Even a casual perusal of the intertwined histories of Byrd and Hancock leads to the inescapable conclusion that the substantial reputations of both men have long been based on their ability to communicate with masses of listeners while satisfying the most demanding critics of all, their fellow musicians. Hancock, the subject of the present collection, scored audience identification right away with "Watermelon Man" (a track so familiar it's been left off this reissue in favor of even choicer selections) and went on to capture the attention of jazz players everywhere with his "Maiden Voyage," after "Watermelon" one of the most influential and most widely played and recorded jazz compositions of the sixties. Today (1975) "Voyage," Wayne Shorter's and a few other compositions from the same period, the mid-sixties, are tests by which the abilities of countless young improvisers are judged. In a very real sense they are the "Lady Be Good" and "I Got Rhythm" of the seventies. And now discotheque bands around the world are reproducing, as best they can, the funky cross-rhythms and electronic keyboard effects of "Hancock's "Chamelion."

It might surprise some student musicians, especially those who are eager to jump into contemporary sounds without absorbing classical basics, but Herbert Jeffery Hancock, who took up the piano at age seven, never thought about contemporary music until his sophomore year in high school. For the record, he was born April 12, 1940, and grew up on the South Side of the Windy City. At age eleven he performed Mozart's D Major Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony. He first became aware of the possibilities of jazz at a high school talent show when he heard a fellow student improvising. "I didn't know what he was playing," Hancock later recalled, "so I had to really find out what it was for myself." He then proceeded to shut himself up in his room with his record player, some staff paper, and jazz piano lp's by Oscar Peterson and George Shearing, and to transcribe the improvisations he heard, note for note. Only in this way could he play them. "The first one I tried," he remembers, "took me weeks. Then I got it down to days, then hours — and finally I found that I could recognize and write whole passages quickly, and away from the piano." In this time-consuming, arduous manner, Hancock developed the improvisational skills, the harmonic sophistication, and the other attributes which have helped him forge ahead to his present position of eminence.

After a fling at studying engineering, Hancock returned to Chicago and worked with, among others, the inventor of jazz saxophone, Coleman Hawkins. Then, in quick succession, came Byrd, the move to New York, a few months in Byrd's combo; Takin' Off, and, in 1963, the piano chair in the most influential small band of the time, the Miles Davis Quintet. He stayed in the band until 1968 and participated (as composer and pianist) in such ground-breaking albums as ESP, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, and Filles de Kilimanjaro, all of which served in one way or another as prototypes for the new electric sound which was to be Davis' principal contribution to the music of the seventies. In 1973, Hancock told Downbeat interviewer Ray Townley that Davis' music of that period moved "through ä lot of chord changes, a lot of different moods, lot of tempo changes. But it would be misleading to say it was just Miles' music. The music was not just a reflection of Miles, it was a reflection of all the guys in the band. He doesn't ever tell you what to play, you know. If what you play works, that's cool. Now if it doesn't work, he'll try to do something to make it work...

"I remember one time we were playing a concert in Germany, I think, and we were playing this one song and we got to one chord and I played the chord too soon, way too soon; it clashed with everything that was going on. Miles played it was during his solo - he played something on top of my chord to make it sound right. He made it fit and it blew my mind...I'm sure he didn't even think about it because it wasn't anything he could think about. He didn't hear it as a clash, he heard it as 'this is what's happening right now so I'll make the most of it,' and he did."

The bulk of Hancock's Blue Note work was recorded during this fruitful period, and, like Davis, Hancock makes the most of each situation. As a glance at the personnel listings for this album will confirm. Hancock approached each date as a new and more or less self-contained challenge. Rather than find a formula and stick to it — something many musicians would have done after scoring a hit on their first try Hancock explored a variety of possibilities. Thus "Maiden Voyage," with its simple, floating melodic lines and mysterious chord voicings, sets up a dream-like atmosphere rather like that established by the Davis group. "Empty Pockets," "Three Bags Full," and "Driftin' " feature instrumentation and the same trumpet player, but all three have to do with an entirely different set of moods and present a series of funkier, more deliberate grooves.

The relationship of the "funk" phenomenon to Hancock's music is worth investigating. "Watermelon Man," "Blind Man, Blind Man," and to a lesser extent, tunes like "Empty Pockets" and "Cantaloupe Island," were widely regarded as being examples of the funk idiom when they first appeared. Yet Hancock has been telling interviewers that his funky period really begins with his current direction. "Jazz musicians, generally speaking, don't really know how to play funky," he said to me in 1974, "but we think we do. We think there's nothing to it. I thought that, but I was wrong. Seventy-five per cent of the time what I thought was funky just wasn't; the criteria are different, as I found out little by little. Playing funky means, like knowing how to avoid destroying the rhythm for some nice harmonies. It means interplay between the bass line and drum pattern, and playing things that will fit into that."

If the word funk catches on in the sense that the word jazz has, as a standard generic noun for which no universally adopted replacement is conceivable, then musicians will doubtless begin to investigate its origins and to try to replace it with some more cumbersome but more meaningful description. The 1951 edition of The American College Dictionary defines "funk" ("Colloq, it notes) as "cowering fear; state of fright or terror, " while researchers into black slang have suggested original meanings even more disreputable than those attributed to "jazz." As a stock phrase in the vocabulary of white Americans, it was once associated with doldrums or melancholy, as in the sentence "I'm in a blue funk today." Musically, for some ultimately unknowable reason, funk has come to signify content deriving from the Afro-American musical heritage, and specifically from gospel music. In this sense, the gospel/ rock of Ray Charles, ca. 1955, was a major impetus to the development of funk as a distinct variety of black music, though Guitar Slim and other blues artists had been on the same wavelength since the late forties.

In a fifties sense, then, a number of Hancock's Blue Note recordings rate as funk. "Blind Man, Blind Man" employs piano and band voicings from gospel music, and a related backbeat (many musicians insist that the heavy beat of rock and roll came from sanctified churches to begin with). Blues feeling is supplied most prominently by guitarist Grant Green, who sounds in this instance like a more buttery and bigger-toned B. B, King, Note that the drummer is Tony Williams, who at the time was Hancock's bandmate in the Davis Quintet. In the mid-sixties Tony was known as an innovator of free patterns, a master of color and shadings. "Tony Williams turned me on to different rhythms," Hancock remembers, "overlapping this and that. Tony was really into Paul Bley, Gary Peacock...This was 1963. Ornette — like I never paid that much attention to Ornette when he first came out, but Tony got me interested in Ornette and got me to the point where I could get into it." Several years later, Williams left the Miles Davis band and formed his Lifetime, perhaps the first significant group to play jazz/rock from a jazz perspective. The guitarist was John McLaughlin, who had only recently arrived from England, and the organist was Larry Young (Khalid Yasin), a Blue Note artist at the time and later a participant in McLaughlin's Devotion and on the McLaughlin/Carlos Santana collaboration. "Blind Man" reveals that Williams was already into jazz/rock; his solid drumming helps make it a harbinger of the music of the seventies.

"Cantaloupe Island" rides along over a churchy 8/8 rhythm section figure that's a distant cousin of the "Watermelon Man" vamp and, again, Williams demonstrates his affinity for more basic rhythm playing than he was generally associated with at the time. "And What If I Don't" is introduced and internally paced by a recurring one-chord vamp not unlike the memorable, snaking riff that propelled Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder." Here and on "Blind Man," Donald Byrd, who was still, in Hancock's words, "like my older brother," fashions confidently bluesy solos, preaching storefront sermons and somehow managing to convey a certain elegance at the same time. This meeting of Byrd, Hancock, and Williams, three of the most important innovators in bringing "jazz to the people" during the early seventies, surely deserves to be ranked as one of the seminal sessions of the mid-sixties, at least as far as long-range trends and the music's commercial acceptance are concerned.

The quintet tracks are much more typical of the "Blue Note sound" of the period. Byrd has taken credit for organizing the Hancock-Butch Warren-Billy Higgins rhythm section, heard on his Royal Flush and on "Empty Pockets," "Three Bags Full," and "Driftin"' from Herbie's Takin' Off. The same trio appeared on Byrd's later Free Form, and the trumpeter was quoted in the liner notes to that album as follows: "Billy Higgins has a distinctive imagination. Also he's one of the two or three drummers in New York who plays with a time and feeling reminiscent of Kenny Clarke. With that as a base, he has a younger man's conception and daring. Butch is similarly imaginative, knows his instrument thoroughly, and reads well. The same is true of Herbie." In discussing one of Hancock's compositions, he said that "in works of Herbie like this one, the chord patterns are unexpected, They're deceptive in that you can never be sure exactly where the next chord is going to. Therefore, it's challenging to play."

The same can be said of "Empty Pockets" even though it's a blues, and of "Driftin'" and "Three Bags Full" and "Maiden Voyage." In his quintet music Hancock expanded the so-called Blue Note style principally through his continuing use of interesting fresh chord changes and voicings, "Three Bags" is of interest rhythmically; it's one of the rare recorded examples of drummer Higgins' approach to 6/8, and a comparison of the groove with some of Elvin Jones' recordings under John Coltrane's ship in instructive, Dexter Gordon's treatment of the meter is quite original, especially in the first part of his solo. Later, he shows he's been listening to 'Trane. Freddie Hubbard is performing at peak power throughout these selections; his old-style note bending and talking effects on "Cantaloupe Island," a quartet selection, are exceptionally delightful.

"Triangle" is the album's most extended sampling of Hancock's abilities as a soloist. It's a multi-directional piece which calls forth several improvisational approaches and showcases a number of characteristic techniques. The octave doubling early on shifts gears into a Latin-flavored montuno, and as the composition develops Herbie varies the music's focus from percussive to linear to densely harmonic to contrapuntal. The rhythm section — the great Paul Chambers and Latin/jazz stalwarts Willie Bobo and Osvaldo Martinez — plays with restrained clarity, but hot. Nevertheless, the overall effect is rather cool and progressive, certainly not the churchy sort of atmosphere so evident in some of the quintet and sextet pieces.

The three selections from Speak Like A Child feature horn arrangements but, again, Hancock is the only soloist. His creative scoring for bass trombone, alto flute, and flugelhorn is richer than anything from the earlier dates, and certainly a far cry from his more familiar gospel/blues style. Having transferred his exceptional ear for chord voicings to his writing and arranging, Hancock gets a sound from the closely-voiced lines played by this studio sextet that is much larger than the number of players would suggest. A similar approach characterizes "The Prisoner," but here there are horn solos, and the ensembles underline and extend rather than merely frame them. For the first time the rhythm section is controlled as deliberately as the horns throughout the performance, so that, for example, saxophonist Joe Henderson's passionate solo is backed mostly by bass and drums, and the entire rhythm section drops in and out dramatically under Johnny Coles' flugelhorn improvisation. There are tempo and rhythm changes as well.

Taken together, these selections present an unusually broad gamut of styles, each of which is executed with conspicuous success. It seems obvious that Hancock could have pursued almost any direction after leaving Blue Note, from funk to free jazz, without deviating from precedents in his own work. Certainly everything he has done subsequently, from the space music of his sextet/septet to the overwhelmingly popular neo-funk of his Headhunters band, is at least suggested in the tunes which make up this package. We have seen that Hancock differed from his fellow Blue Note artists at the time primarily in his influential harmonic style. But from the perspective of 1975 we can hear in the orchestrated rhythm section patterns which hold tunes like "Blind Man, Blind Man," "Cantaloupe Island," and "And What If I Don't" together the roots of his current approach, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, and numerous other artists were employing similar structures at the time, but it took Hancock to combine them with more varied harmonies on the one hand and the new electronic instrumentation on the other. The colorful scoring that highlighted Speak Like A Child and The Prisoner continues to turn up, most notably in Hancock's film scores.

The pianist's seventies music has earned him much of the large audience he now enjoys; but for many aficionados his work on acoustic piano, as documented in this set, is the best of his career. Certainly the combination of accomplished playing, writing, and arranging with an unusually clear sense of purpose and roots makes for a body of work which is easy to get into and yet, hearing after hearing, completely satisfying. Fortunately, now that the fruits of all Hancock's creative periods are available on record, it isn't really necessary to choose one over another.

—Robert Palmer Robert Palmer writes regularly on jazz for Rolling Stone and The New York Times and teaches Afro-American Music History and Improvisation at Bowdoin College.