Now voyager

Herbie Hancock sails on

by Jon Garelick

The best "fusion" jazz show I ever saw was by Herbie Hancock and his Headhunters II band, in July of 1988 at Great Woods (the show was called "Contemporary Jazz Fusion" as part of a three-day mini Jazz and Blues Festival). Fusion sure delivered a lot of pap, and there was plenty of it at Great Woods that day (especially Chick Corea's squeaky clean Elektric Band). But Hancock -- with bassist Darryl Jones and drummer Charlie Drayton, hornman Michael Brecker, a DJ, and a percussionist, playing in front of a giant Keith Haring backdrop -- delivered a down and dirty sound in the tradition of his mentor, Miles Davis, all roiling rhythmic textures and barking beats.

The most exciting "traditional" piano-trio performance I've seen was by the Herbie Hancock Trio in February of 1990, at the Charles Hotel Ballroom. Hancock was playing "acoustic" piano with bassist Buster Williams and drummer Al Foster. His playing was light, fleet, but again the rhythmic drive carried through in the performance, a constant three-way conversation. In one of his signature moves, Hancock interrupted the dancing rise and fall of his single-note lines with a series of slamming, syncopated block chords. You could hear the audience rise with those chords, and somewhere a woman's high-pitched wail, "Herbie!"

Hancock has been a golden boy since the age of 11, when he played the Mozart D-major piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. At 21 he was playing with Donald Byrd. At 22 he recorded Takin' Off for Blue Note -- cited in Jazz: The Rough Guide as "one of the most accomplished and stunning debuts in the annals of jazz." It included the infinitely covered hit single "Watermelon Man." The next year he was playing with Miles Davis's pathbreaking quintet. In the meantime, he kept recording his own albums for Blue Note. And he recorded -- both with Miles and in his own sessions -- a series of tunes that would become standard. There were the hard-bop hits, "Watermelon Man" and "Cantaloupe Island," with their respective gospel and Caribbean-inflected supporting piano riffs. There were the pieces that gave Hancock a reputation for introspection, with their open, modal structures: "Dolphin Dance," "Maiden Voyage," "The Sorcerer," "Riot," "Speak like a Child."

Unlike most jazz artists, Hancock has a knack for pop hits. "Watermelon Man" did it for him in '62, and again on his breakthrough fusion hit, Headhunters (in 1973), as the B-side to "Chameleon"; then "Rockit" in 1983. "Cantaloupe Island" propelled US 3's "acid jazz" Hand on the Torch (Blue Note) to the top of the charts as "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)." And Hancock from just about any period has proved grist for the sampling mills of contemporary pop.

These days, he's again topping the jazz charts with Gershwin's World (Verve), celebrating George's 100th birthday with a guest-star-rich album (Kathleen Battle and Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder, along with more usual suspects like Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Eddie Henderson, and James Carter). And at 58, he's just finished a tour with a reunion of the Headhunters. What's more, Blue Note is using Hancock as the cornerstone of its 60th-anniversary campaign, reissuing all his classic material for the label in Herbie Hancock: The Complete Blue Note Sixties Sessions.

What's remarkable about Hancock's output isn't its infallibility but the level of consistency he achieved while continually exploring, from Mozart to Gershwin to Miles. The Blue Note box moves from hard bop to modal jazz to near free-jazz energy. Gershwin's World manages to segue from West African drumming to a wild reconfiguration of W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues" sung by Stevie Wonder to James P. Johnson's striding "Blueberry Rhythm" (as a piano duet with Corea) to an improvised-on slow movement from Ravel's G-major Piano Concerto to some of Gershwin's more standard fare presented in non-standard ways. Joni Mitchell is an utterly convincing jazz diva in her deliveries of "The Man I Love" and "Summertime." And Hancock goads Shorter to his rollin' and tumblin' best on Duke Ellington's "Cotton Tail" (Duke's take on the changes of Gershwin's perennial jazz touchstone "I Got Rhythm"). As varied as it is, the album sums up Herbie's world as well as Gershwin's.

"In the '60s, I was in my 20s," Hancock explains to me over the phone. "So those were my formative years, where I had a less developed style and approach to music. The approach I decided on was to have all kinds of approaches. It was during the '60s that I decided to have a large palette to choose from."

It's something Hancock's still following through on with Gershwin's World, which shows the components of Gershwin's music -- classical, blues, boogie-woogie piano -- as well as the music he helped influence. Even the African-drums "Overture" (which borrows a Gershwin subtitle, "Fascinatin' Rhythm") fits into the scheme. "Gershwin is known because of his association with jazz, even his popular music and his classical music all kind of have their roots in jazz and the blues. The roots of jazz and the blues both began in Africa. . . . That's why the name of the album is Gershwin's World, and that's why all of the pieces are not written by Gershwin."

In its wide-ranging eclecticism, the album shows Hancock and Gershwin as soulmates. It's also typical of Hancock that the better-known tunes are completely reconfigured. "It Ain't Necessarily So" rides on a shuffling piano vamp and barely hints at the famous melody before introducing James Carter's husky, Ben Webster-like tenor. "St. Louis Blues" introduces Stevie Wonder's harmonica with churchy organ chords, and the tune again becomes a vehicle for improvisation -- both melodic and lyric. Wonder reaches stunning heights, testifying wildly on repeated lyrics, accompanied by Hancock's keyboard and his own harmonica.

When Hancock plays it straight, he offers another surprise -- Joni Mitchell delivering "The Man I Love" and "Summertime" with world-weary authority and rhythmic acuity. "Believe me," he says, "I was as shocked and surprised as you were that she could deliver that kind of song in that way. She sounds like a singer who's only been singing jazz all her life. Joni explained to me that when she got into folk music, she got into it because she was a poetess. She thought that might make a good vehicle for her poetry. That's why her songs are very wordy. Quite unlike many standards, especially these ballad standards from the '20s and '30s. She told me that before she got into folk music, she was listening to jazz -- Billie Holiday and many others. So this is really the music of her youth. These are the roots of Joni Mitchell. I just never knew, and I don't think anyone else ever knew."

Why Joni? For the same reason Hancock went for Wonder and Kathleen Battle (whose wordless vocalizing on "Prelude in C# Minor" recalls some of Duke Ellington's settings for Ivie Anderson). "I knew that everybody would expect me -- it being Gershwin -- to use jazz singers. Because it was so obvious, that's what I didn't want to do." He adds, "There's nothing here that's as Gershwin wrote it. I wanted to make it my record, and this is a way that I could really make it my record."

Hearing this, you wouldn't think of Hancock as someone with strong self-doubts. But he did go through a period of serious soul searching. After leaving Miles, and before putting the original Headhunters together, he made a series of electric sextet and quintet records with Columbia and Warner Bros. that took off from Bitches Brew fusion jazz -- they were of variable success, sometimes totally indulgent, jams that settled for propulsive riffs and cute effects with no solo development, a bloated instrumental take on Sly Stone, Isaac Hayes, and Curtis Mayfield that hasn't dated well. At other times (as on the Warner Bros. Crossings release) Hancock's music found itself in unfolding electric dreamscapes -- the fusion side of "Maiden Voyage" and "Dolphin Dance." Nonetheless, he abandoned the sextet (which at one time included Headhunter Bennie Maupin as well as trombonist Julian Priester and trumpeter Eddie Henderson); later he said, "I realized that I could never be a genius in the class of Miles, Charlie Parker, or Coltrane, so I might just as well forget about becoming a legend and just be satisfied to create some music to make people happy. I no longer wanted to create the Great American Masterpiece."

It's odd to read that now, when Hancock's entire corpus, whatever its wrong turns, stands as a legendary achievement. The work as a whole (which also includes soundtracks from Death Wish to Round Midnight) is the masterpiece. For every Return of the Headhunters (this year's enjoyable if bland reunion album), there's a Gershwin's World or the remarkable 1 + 1 (Verve), the Grammy-winning duets record with Wayne Shorter from 1997. In a JVC Jazz Festival -- Newport appearance, Shorter and Hancock re-created the intimacy and spontaneity of the recording before an open-air audience of thousands. And, there's the Blue Note set -- a collection that defines the "Blue Note sound," from its R&B and gospel-influenced hard bop to its near-free-jazz explorations and its all-star cast of characters (Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Tony Williams, et al.).

In light of that achievement, when I ask Hancock about his mid-'70s reappraisal, he says, "I was kind of getting caught up in sort of backing myself up against a wall, thinking about other people's expectations of me: I should be able to do this, I should be able to do that. Since then, I may be aware of other people's expectations of me, but I think what is more important is my expectations for myself, whether I'm living up to the highest level that I am able to produce."

Hancock says he's more interested these days in making "events, not just records. I want to approach a recording project in such a way that the character of the project sets it apart from other records, so that it has its own niche. And that doesn't mean that I always achieve that or want to achieve that. With the Gershwin Project, that's something we wanted to achieve. It was my decision, along with [producer and arranger] Bob Sadin, who knows my work, to have a non-standard approach to Gershwin and make a more personal statement. To have something that you couldn't compare to Miles Davis's Porgy & Bess. That you couldn't compare to anyone else's Gershwin project."

He chuckles and says, "Believe me, I wanted to stay away from Porgy & Bess -- Miles's record is the definitive recording for me." In his extraordinary career, Hancock's laid down some of his own definitions.