“Head Hunters” by Herbie Hancock
Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Herbie Hancock’s jazz-funk masterpiece.
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Welcome to a new edition of the Daily Music Picks newsletter!
Today’s music pick celebrates the 50th anniversary of Herbie Hancock’s jazz-funk masterpiece.
Genre: Jazz Fusion, Funk
Label: Columbia
Release Date: October 26, 1973
Vibe: 💯
If Miles Davis blew the doors off traditional notions of jazz’s sonic boundaries with In a Silent Way and set the resulting debris on fire with Bitches Brew, it was his disciple Herbie Hancock who poured gasoline on the already-raging blaze with Head Hunters. Originally released to tepid reception from jazz purists who thought Hancock was selling out and hitching his wagon to mainstream trends, this album has grown substantially in stature in the intervening decades. It was the first jazz LP to hit the Platinum sales mark and has influenced everyone from Thundercat to J Dilla, at least in part because it was willing to break new ground for jazz and funk music. As Hancock told Wynton Marsalis in 1985, “I was not trying to make a jazz record […] I had gotten to the point where I was so directed toward always playing something different that I was ignoring the validity of playing something that was familiar.”
When the opening bassline on “Chameleon” slinks out of your speakers (listen closely; there are several of them), Head Hunters makes good on that statement of intent. The song is deceptively complex, a 15-minute odyssey built on a two-chord motif. It features some truly incredible playing from Paul Jackson on bass, Harvey Mason on drums, and Hancock himself, who shines in two separate keyboard solos, one of which was done on an ARP Odyssey analog synthesizer. The rest of the record does its best to live up to its opener, serving up a refashioned version of “Watermelon Man” that would make James Brown squeal with envy and the mind-bending afro-fusion composition “Sly.”
Adorned by cover art that addresses race and identity politics in American music, this is one of those albums that, if you’ve never spent time with it, will change how you think about jazz and genre crossovers.
👉 Don’t forget to click the album image to stream the album on your favorite platform 👈