20 Best Herbie Hancock Albums Ranked
Introduction: The Problem With Herbie
Put on 'Maiden Voyage'. Then put on 'Rockit'. Try to hold both in your head as the work of one man, eighteen years apart, and you start to understand why writing about Herbie Hancock is harder than writing about almost anyone else in jazz.
Most great jazz careers move in a line. Coltrane went deeper and deeper into the same search until it consumed him. Miles pushed forward and refused to look back. Hancock did something stranger. He kept leaving, and he kept coming back, and he never seemed to think of these as contradictions. He made the most harmonically sophisticated small-group records of the 1960s and then made a funk album that outsold all of them combined. He built a band so abstract that Warner Brothers barely knew how to market it, dissolved it because he wanted to make people happy, and a decade later put a turntablist on a hit single. He has an Academy Award and a Grammy for Album of the Year and a platinum record, and he also made a solo piano album in Tokyo that most have never heard.
His biography explains some of it. He was a child prodigy, living in Chicago playing Mozart with the Chicago Symphony, aged eleven. He went to Grinnell College and double-majored in music and electrical engineering, which unlocks some of what happened later: the ARP racks, the vocoder, the willingness to hand a record over to a machine. Donald Byrd found him around 1960 and brought him to New York, where Blue Note signed him. And in May 1963 Miles Davis called, and Hancock spent five years in the Second Great Quintet alongside Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, rewriting what a rhythm section was allowed to do.
That's where his influence really sits. Not in any single record but in the idea that a piano player could stop stating the harmony and start suggesting it, could drop out for eight bars, could let a chord hang unresolved and trust everyone to follow. Every pianist who came after him works in a language he helped build. Robert Glasper, Brad Mehldau, Jason Moran, all of them are standing in a room Hancock furnished.
He is eighty-six and still touring. He plays the Hollywood Bowl next month on a bill dedicated to Miles, and Monterey in September billed alongside Ron Carter as "For Miles". This isn't a retrospective on a closed catalogue. The man is still adding to it.
The Rankings
20. 1+1 (Verve, 1997)
Recorded: 1997, Garage Sale Recording Studios, Los Angeles Released: 1997 Personnel: Wayne Shorter (soprano and tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano)
Two men who first played together in Miles Davis's band in 1964, sitting in a room with no rhythm section and nothing to hide behind. That's the whole record.
It could easily have been a victory lap. It isn't. The playing is tentative in the best way, both of them feeling for the shape of a piece rather than executing one. Shorter has never been a saxophonist who fills space, and here he leaves enormous amounts of it, letting a phrase trail off and waiting to see what Hancock does with the silence. Hancock, for his part, plays more sparely than on almost any other record under his name.
'Aung San Suu Kyi' is the piece that stuck, named for the Burmese opposition leader who was under house arrest when they recorded it. It moves slowly and never quite settles. 'Sonrisa' had already appeared on The Piano nearly twenty years earlier, and hearing it here with Shorter's soprano threading through is like watching someone revisit a house they used to live in.
Not a record I'd hand to a newcomer. But if you've spent time with the quintet years, this is the sound of that conversation still going, thirty-three years on, with the volume turned right down.
19. Gershwin's World (Verve, 1998)
Recorded: March to June 1998 Released: 20 October 1998 (Verve) Personnel: Herbie Hancock (piano) with Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Kathleen Battle, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and others. Produced by Robert Sadin
The concept came from producer Robert Sadin, and it's smarter than a Gershwin tribute has any right to be: rather than a set of Gershwin tunes, the record maps the world Gershwin lived in. James P. Johnson, W.C. Handy, Duke Ellington, Ravel. Every piece gets a different setting and a different cast. It refuses to be a single thing, which makes it the most Hancock-shaped project he ever accepted from someone else.
Joni Mitchell sings 'The Man I Love' and 'Summertime' in a voice that had dropped an octave since her folk records, and she is astonishing on both, all cigarettes and knowing. Stevie Wonder takes 'St Louis Blues' and turns it inside out. And then there's the slow movement of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Hancock playing it straight, which sounds like an indulgence until you remember Ravel and Gershwin actually met and admired each other, and the inclusion turns out to be an argument rather than a gesture.
It won a stack of awards and should have won more. Fifty-eight years old and still constructing records nobody else would have thought of.
18. Directstep (CBS/Sony, 1979)
Recorded: 17 and 18 October 1978, CBS/Sony Studios, Tokyo Released: 21 January 1979 (CBS/Sony 30AP-1032) Personnel: Bennie Maupin (soprano and tenor saxophone, Lyricon), Webster Lewis (organ, synthesiser, electric piano), Herbie Hancock (electric piano, clavinet, synthesiser, vocals, vocoder), Ray Obiedo (guitar), Paul Jackson (electric bass), Alphonse Mouzon (drums), Bill Summers (percussion)
Three tracks, thirty minutes, and no second chances. Directstep was cut direct to disc, which means the performance went straight onto a master acetate in real time with no editing, no overdubs and no fixing anything afterwards. Roughly sixteen minutes a side, played through, live. If someone fluffs a cue in minute fourteen, you start the side again.
What that produces is a band playing with a particular kind of attention. The version of 'Butterfly' here runs longer and looser than the Thrust original, and you can hear the players listening to each other the way musicians do when there's no safety net. 'I Thought It Was You' gets a reading that improves on the Sunlight studio version, which is not something I say lightly.
It's also the first Hancock record to lean hard on the Sennheiser vocoder, the sound that would define his early 80s. The engineering is astonishing. Collectors talk about this pressing the way people talk about Blue Note mono originals, and for once the hype is deserved.
The one caveat: thirty minutes is thirty minutes. It's a snapshot, not a statement. But what a snapshot.
17. My Point of View (Blue Note, 1963)
Recorded: 19 March 1963, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs Released: September 1963 (Blue Note BLP 4126) Personnel: Donald Byrd (trumpet), Grachan Moncur III (trombone), Hank Mobley (tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Grant Green (guitar), Chuck Israels (bass), Tony Williams (drums)
The septet record, and the largest group Hancock had led at that point. Recorded two months before Miles called him.
Alfred Lion wanted another 'Watermelon Man' and got 'Blind Man, Blind Man', which is the obvious sequel and by some distance the least interesting thing here. The real triumphs are 'King Cobra' and 'A Tribute to Someone'. Most hard bop of the period was written as a launchpad: state the melody, lay out the changes, then everyone solos in turn. These two are the opposite. Hancock is composing the sound of the band itself, stacking Moncur's trombone against Mobley's tenor and letting Grant Green's guitar sit in the middle of the chord.
Tony Williams was seventeen. Listen to him on 'King Cobra' and try to remember that. He plays with a rhythmic confidence that shouldn't be possible at his tender age, pushing against the beat rather than laying it down, and it's obvious why Miles hired him the same year.
It's the least discussed of the seven Blue Notes and the one where you can most clearly hear him deciding what kind of composer he wants to be. That's worth a lot.
16. Mr. Hands (Columbia, 1980)
Recorded: sessions from the late 1970s to 1980, The Automatt, San Francisco Released: 1980 (Columbia JC 36578) Personnel: varies by track. Includes Ron Carter (bass) and Tony Williams (drums) on 'Calypso'; Jaco Pastorius (bass) and Harvey Mason (drums) on '4 A.M.'; Bennie Maupin (tenor saxophone), Paul Jackson (bass), Harvey Mason (drums) and Bill Summers (percussion) on 'Shiftless Shuffle'; Byron Miller (bass), Leon "Ndugu" Chancler (drums) and Bill Summers (percussion) on 'Spiraling Prism'. 'Textures' is Hancock alone.
The record he made in the gap between the disco albums nobody defends and the electro records everybody knows, assembled from sessions scattered across several years. On paper it's a compilation of offcuts. In practice it's the most purely enjoyable album he made in that decade.
'4 A.M.' has Jaco Pastorius on it, and the interplay between Jaco and Harvey Mason is worth the price on its own. 'Calypso' brings in Ron Carter and Tony Williams, which means that on one side of one album you get both the Miles rhythm section and the Weather Report bass player, and Hancock sounds equally at home with each. 'Shiftless Shuffle' is a reworking of the Directstep tune with the Head Hunters personnel, harder and funkier than the Tokyo version.
Then there's 'Textures', which is Hancock alone with a room full of synthesisers, no other musicians, building something ambient and slow-moving years before that was a category. It's the quiet answer to the question of what all that electrical engineering was for.
It's a record with no filler and a genuinely astonishing cast.
15. Inventions & Dimensions (Blue Note, 1964)
Recorded: 30 August 1963, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs Released: 1964 (Blue Note BLP 4147) Personnel: Herbie Hancock (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), Willie Bobo (drums, timbales), Osvaldo "Chihuahua" Martinez (congas, bongos)
Hancock had been in Miles Davis's band for three months when he made this, and the timing explains a good deal. He was learning nightly what happened when a group took its own structures apart in real time, and in August 1963 he booked Van Gelder's studio to try the same thing under his own name, with no horns, two percussionists and, on four of the five pieces, nothing written down at all. Only 'Mimosa' arrived with a set of chord changes. The rest were assembled in the room from fragments, a bass pedal held for four bars and then sixteen bars of improvisation over the top of it, and whatever came out of that is what went onto the record.
What makes it work is who he hired and what he then refused to let them do. Willie Bobo had come up through the Tito Puente and Cal Tjader bands, and Osvaldo "Chihuahua" Martinez had played percussion on Mongo Santamaría's Watermelon Man! sessions. Two Afro-Cuban specialists given almost nothing Afro-Cuban to play. Paul Chambers was the most dependable walking bassist in jazz and was handed a date with no changes to walk through, so he holds pedal tones instead, four bars at a time, while Hancock improvises above him. Every player on the session has been denied the thing he does best, and the music is whatever is left once you take that away.
Which is why it belongs here ahead of records that are considerably easier to enjoy. This is the only album Hancock made where he found out what he would play if nothing had been decided in advance. Everything else in the catalogue, however adventurous it sounds, arrives with its structures already built. Here there is nothing to hold onto, and what comes out of the gap is the harmonic language everybody praises on Empyrean Isles and Maiden Voyage, turning up eighteen months early with no composition to carry it. If you have ever wondered how the man who made a hard bop debut in 1962 was writing 'Maiden Voyage' by 1965, this is the record where the working out is shown.
14. The New Standard (Verve, 1996)
Recorded: 14 to 16 June 1995, Manhattan Center Studios, New York Released: 19 February 1996 (Verve) Personnel: Michael Brecker (tenor saxophone), John Scofield (guitar), Herbie Hancock (piano), Dave Holland (bass), Jack DeJohnette (drums), Don Alias (percussion)
The premise sounds like a marketing meeting: take Nirvana, Prince, Peter Gabriel, the Beatles and Sade, and treat them as standards. In lesser hands it would be unbearable.
It works because the band is serious and because Hancock genuinely rethought the material rather than swinging it. 'All Apologies' is stripped to a modal frame and played with real tenderness. 'Mercy Street' becomes something ominous and slow. 'Norwegian Wood' gets taken apart almost completely, the melody surfacing only in fragments.
The rhythm section is the argument. Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette have played together since the Miles electric bands, and they bring a looseness that keeps the whole thing from becoming an exercise. Scofield's guitar is grittier than the concept probably wanted, which is exactly right.
It's the record that reminded everyone in the mid-90s that Hancock's ear for reharmonisation was undiminished. Thirty years on it holds up better than most albums built on a concept have any right to.
13. The Piano (CBS/Sony, 1979)
Recorded: 25 and 26 October 1978, CBS/Sony Studios, Tokyo Released: 21 June 1979 (CBS/Sony 30AP-1033) Personnel: Herbie Hancock (piano)
One week after Directstep, in the same Tokyo studio, with the same direct-to-disc rig, Hancock came back alone and made his first solo piano album.
The constraint is the story. Direct to disc meant playing three or four pieces consecutively in a single take without exceeding sixteen minutes a side. Producer David Rubinson has said since that the limitation improved the playing, that Hancock treated the impossibility of correction as a reason to concentrate rather than a reason to panic. You can hear it. There's a deliberateness to the phrasing, a willingness to let a note sit and decay, that doesn't appear anywhere else in his solo work.
'My Funny Valentine' and 'On Green Dolphin Street' are the ones people know, both handled with a lot less reverence than you'd expect. But 'Sonrisa' and 'Manhattan Island' are the reason to own this. Slow, harmonically restless, more interested in colour than line.
It became one of his biggest sellers in Japan and went almost entirely unheard everywhere else for twenty-five years. That's an absurd fate for a record this good.
12. Future Shock (Columbia, 1983)
Recorded: 1983, OAO Studios, Brooklyn Released: 1983 (Columbia FC 38814) Personnel: Herbie Hancock (synthesisers, electric piano, vocoder, clavinet), Bill Laswell (electric bass), Michael Beinhorn (electronics, programming), Grand Mixer D.ST (turntables), Daniel Ponce (bata drums), Sly Dunbar (drums), Pete Cosey (guitar)
Placing this at number twelve might annoy some people, so let me be clear about what I think it did and didn't do.
'Rockit' mattered enormously. Grand Mixer D.ST's scratching on a record by a forty-three-year-old jazz pianist put turntablism in front of an audience that had never heard it, the video won five MTV awards at a moment when MTV barely played Black artists, and a generation of hip-hop producers has cited it since. As a cultural event it sits alongside anything in his catalogue.
As an album it's thinner. Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn built these tracks as constructions rather than performances, and while 'Rough' and the title track have real menace, there's a coldness that the best of Hancock's electric music never has. Pete Cosey is on here, the guitarist from Miles's mid-70s bands, and he's underused.
Buy it for what it changed. Just know that Thrust does more with less.
11. Sextant (Columbia, 1973)
Recorded: 1972, Wally Heider Recording and Different Fur Trading Co., San Francisco Released: March 1973 (Columbia KC 32212) Personnel: Eddie Henderson (trumpet, flugelhorn), Julian Priester (trombones), Bennie Maupin (soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, piccolo, afuche, kazoo), Herbie Hancock (Fender Rhodes, Hohner D6 clavinet, Mellotron, Steinway piano), Buster Williams (Fender bass with wah-wah and fuzz), Billy Hart (drums), Dr Patrick Gleeson (ARP synthesiser), Buck Clarke (congas, bongos)
The last of the Mwandishi records and the first for Columbia, which must have made for an interesting first meeting with the label.
Three tracks. 'Rain Dance' opens with a sequencer pattern bleeping away like a piece of malfunctioning lab equipment, and for the first ninety seconds it's genuinely difficult to tell whether you're listening to music. Then the band arrives underneath it. 'Hidden Shadows' is built on a lurching figure in 19/4 that the group somehow makes feel like a groove. 'Hornets' runs nearly twenty minutes and goes to some frightening places.
Patrick Gleeson is the key to why this sounds like nothing else. He wasn't decorating the band with synthesiser, he was playing in it, generating textures in real time alongside the horns. The band members had taken Swahili names by this point and were operating as a genuine collective.
It sold badly enough that Hancock dissolved the group within the year. It's also the most far-out record he ever made, and if you only know Head Hunters, the fact that this came first will reorganise your sense of him entirely.
10. Mwandishi (Warner Bros., 1971)
Recorded: December 1970, Wally Heider Recording, San Francisco Released: 1971 (Warner Bros. WS 1898) Personnel: Eddie Henderson (trumpet, flugelhorn), Julian Priester (trombone), Bennie Maupin (bass clarinet, alto flute), Herbie Hancock (Fender Rhodes), Buster Williams (bass), Billy Hart (drums); with Ronnie Montrose (guitar), Leon "Ndugu" Chancler (drums, percussion) and José "Cepito" Areas (congas, timbales) on 'Ostinato'
Three tracks, one of the great band records, and the moment Hancock stopped being a bandleader and became part of a collective.
'Ostinato (Suite for Angela)' is dedicated to Angela Davis, who was in jail awaiting trial when it was recorded. It runs on a fifteen-beat cycle that never resolves, driven by a guest rhythm section that includes José "Cepito" Areas from Santana and Ronnie Montrose, later of the hard rock band that carries his name. The combination shouldn't work but it does.
'You'll Know When You Get There' is the other side of the band: slow, suspended, Bennie Maupin's bass clarinet moving underneath like something lurking in deep water. Nothing about it is in a hurry.
The sextet took Swahili names around this time, Hancock's being Mwandishi, meaning composer or writer. It wasn't a gimmick. This was a band operating on shared principles at a moment when that felt like a worthy political position as much as a musical one. Of the three Warner albums this is the one that announces the project.
9. Crossings (Warner Bros., 1972)
Recorded: 1972, Pacific Recording Studios, San Mateo and Different Fur Trading Co., San Francisco Released: 1972 (Warner Bros. BS 2617) Personnel: Eddie Henderson (trumpet, flugelhorn, percussion), Julian Priester (trombones, percussion), Bennie Maupin (soprano saxophone, alto flute, bass clarinet, piccolo, percussion), Herbie Hancock (electric piano, piano, Mellotron, percussion), Buster Williams (electric and acoustic bass, percussion), Billy Hart (drums, percussion); with Patrick Gleeson (Moog synthesiser), Victor Pontoja (congas) and voices
The middle Mwandishi record, and I've put it above the other two, which I know is the contentious call.
Here's why. 'Sleeping Giant' takes up the whole of side one, twenty-five minutes in five sections, and it's the most completely realised long-form piece the band ever committed to tape. It builds, it collapses, it rebuilds. Buster Williams plays a bass line early on that Miles would have been pleased with. By the time the horns come back in around the twenty-minute mark you've forgotten there was ever a beginning.
It's also where Patrick Gleeson first appears, and his Moog changes what the group is. On Mwandishi you have a superb acoustic-electric sextet. On Crossings there's a layer running underneath all of it that belongs to no player, never repeats and never quite resolves, and the sextet has to play inside it rather than on top of it.
'Water Torture' closes the record with Maupin's bass clarinet against Gleeson's synthesiser and a set of wordless voices, and it is genuinely unsettling. Play it in the dark.
The counter-argument is that Mwandishi is tighter and Sextant is braver. Fine. This one is the most beautiful.
8. Speak Like a Child (Blue Note, 1968)
Recorded: 6 and 9 March 1968, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs Released: 1968 (Blue Note BST 84279) Personnel: Thad Jones (flugelhorn), Peter Phillips (bass trombone), Jerry Dodgion (alto flute), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Mickey Roker (drums)
Here is the thing everybody misses about this record: the horns never solo. Not once.
Thad Jones on flugelhorn, Peter Phillips on bass trombone and Jerry Dodgion on alto flute are there purely as colour, three instruments nobody had thought to combine, sounding the heads and then receding. What you're actually listening to is a piano trio with a wash of light behind it. It's the most elegant idea on any Hancock record and it works completely.
The title track is the one that gets played, and rightly, that ascending figure over Ron Carter's bass is one of the loveliest things in his catalogue. But 'Riot' and 'The Sorcerer' had both been recorded by the Miles quintet, and hearing Hancock's own readings next to Miles's tells you a great deal about what he was contributing to that band. Where the quintet made them jagged, he makes them almost pastoral.
Mickey Roker is an unsung element. He plays with a lightness that lets the whole thing hover.
Recorded while he was still in Miles's band and released just as he was leaving it, this is Hancock the composer arriving fully formed. If you want to understand why people talk about his harmonic ear, start here rather than with the even more famous ones.
7. Takin' Off (Blue Note, 1962)
Recorded: 28 May 1962, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs Released: October 1962 (Blue Note BLP 4109) Personnel: Freddie Hubbard (trumpet, flugelhorn), Dexter Gordon (tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Butch Warren (bass), Billy Higgins (drums)
Twenty-two years old, six original compositions, and a debut that sounds nothing like a debut.
'Watermelon Man' is his, whatever some biographies will tell you, and the story he's told about it is worth repeating: it came from the cry of the watermelon seller working the alleys of Chicago's South Side, and the rhythm of the cart wheels on the cobblestones. Mongo Santamaría heard Hancock play it, recorded his own version, and took it into the top ten of the American pop charts in 1963. A jazz pianist's first album produced a genuine hit single. That doesn't happen often.
But the record isn't a one-tune affair. 'Driftin'' is a beautifully constructed medium blues. 'The Maze' is harmonically slippery in ways that point directly at what he'd be doing three years later. And having Dexter Gordon on your first date, playing with that enormous behind-the-beat authority, gives the whole thing a gravity a young leader has no business having.
Freddie Hubbard is on fire throughout. Billy Higgins swings it without ever pushing.
There is no weak track, the writing is already extraordinary, and it's the record that made everything else possible.
6. The Prisoner (Blue Note, 1969)
Recorded: 18, 21 and 23 April 1969, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs Released: 1969 (Blue Note BST 84321) Personnel: Johnny Coles (flugelhorn), Garnett Brown (trombone), Tony Studd or Jack Jeffers (bass trombone), Hubert Laws (flute), Jerome Richardson (bass clarinet, flute), Romeo Penque (bass clarinet), Joe Henderson (tenor saxophone, alto flute), Herbie Hancock (piano, electric piano), Buster Williams (bass), Albert "Tootie" Heath (drums)
His last Blue Note album and his most ambitious writing for the label, a nonet record made in the year after Martin Luther King was murdered and explicitly about that.
'I Have a Dream' is the centrepiece and it refuses every obvious move. No fanfare, no uplift. It opens quietly and stays there, the low brass and woodwinds moving in slow blocks underneath Joe Henderson. The title track and 'He Who Lives in Fear' work the same territory. This is a record about confinement and it sounds like it.
The arrangements are Hancock's own and the Gil Evans influence is unmistakable: bass trombone, bass clarinet, flute and flugelhorn voiced as a single instrument rather than a section. He'd been thinking this way since Speak Like a Child and here he has the players to do it properly.
It's also the first of his own records where the electric piano appears, which in hindsight reads as a door opening. Critics loved it at the time and then almost everyone forgot about it for thirty years. The 2020 Tone Poet reissue gave it another go, and one it really deserves.
5. Fat Albert Rotunda (Warner Bros., 1969)
Recorded: May and June 1969, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs Released: 1969 (Warner Bros. WS 1834) Personnel: Johnny Coles (trumpet, flugelhorn), Garnett Brown (trombone), Joe Henderson (tenor saxophone, alto flute), Herbie Hancock (piano, electric piano), Buster Williams (acoustic and electric bass), Albert "Tootie" Heath (drums)
His first funk record, made from music he'd written for Bill Cosby's animated television specials, and cut at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs. Sit with that for a second. The room that produced the Blue Note hard bop catalogue, being used to record 'Wiggle-Waggle'.
The band is largely the Prisoner nonet stripped back, which means Joe Henderson is playing on a funk album, and he sounds delighted about it. 'Wiggle-Waggle' opens with a horn riff that could have come off a Stax single. 'Fat Mama' is filthy. 'Tell Me a Bedtime Story' is the one that got away from him and became a standard in its own right, covered by everyone from George Benson to Kimiko Kasai, and it is gorgeous. A slow, floating melody that has almost nothing to do with the rest of the record.
'Jessica', named for his daughter, is the other ballad, and between them they make the case that Hancock's melodic writing was as strong as his harmonic thinking.
4. Thrust (Columbia, 1974)
Recorded: August 1974, Wally Heider Recording, San Francisco Released: 1974 (Columbia PC 32965) Personnel: Bennie Maupin (soprano and tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, alto flute), Herbie Hancock (electric piano, clavinet, synthesisers), Paul Jackson (electric bass), Mike Clark (drums), Bill Summers (percussion)
The follow-up to Head Hunters, with Mike Clark replacing Harvey Mason on drums, and that single change is the whole album.
'Actual Proof' is why. Clark plays it without ever settling into a repeating pattern, a continuously evolving line that moves around the bar and somehow never loses the pulse. Drummers have been transcribing it for fifty years. Paul Jackson's bass has to hold the ground while all that happens above it, and he does, and the two of them together produce something no other rhythm section of the era could touch.
'Butterfly', co-written with Bennie Maupin, is the other reason to own this. Slow, suspended, harmonically ambiguous, and the melody line drifts across the changes without ever landing where you expect. He returned to it repeatedly for the rest of his career and never bettered this version.
'Palm Grease' and 'Spank-A-Lee' are the workouts. Both excellent, neither essential.
Head Hunters is the more important record. Thrust is the better band.
3. Empyrean Isles (Blue Note, 1964)
Recorded: 17 June 1964, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs Released: November 1964 (Blue Note BLP 4175) Personnel: Freddie Hubbard (cornet), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Tony Williams (drums)
Note the instrument. Hubbard plays cornet here, not trumpet, Rounder, less penetrating, sitting inside the quartet rather than on top of it. It's the reason this record has the particular warmth it does.
'Cantaloupe Island' is the famous track, that four-note vamp and the modal shift that anyone who has ever sat at a piano has tried to play. Us3 sampled it in 1993 for 'Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)' and put a thirty-year-old Blue Note record into the charts, which is the second time in this list that a Hancock tune has escaped jazz entirely.
But 'The Egg' is the reason the album ranks this high. Fourteen minutes built on a fragment, the group moving in and out of tempo, Tony Williams playing something closer to sound than time. It's the most adventurous thing on any of the Blue Notes and it points straight at the Mwandishi band seven years later.
'One Finger Snap' opens the record at a sprint and 'Oliloqui Valley' does the pretty work. A four-piece with no saxophone, which forces Hancock to carry far more of the harmonic weight than he does on Maiden Voyage.
Almost perfect. Just pipped.
2. Maiden Voyage (Blue Note, 1965)
Recorded: 17 March 1965, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs Released: 1965 (Blue Note BLP 4195) Personnel: Freddie Hubbard (trumpet), George Coleman (tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Tony Williams (drums)
A concept album about the sea, made by a quintet that is three-fifths of the Miles Davis band, with George Coleman rather than Wayne Shorter in the tenor chair. That last detail matters more than people allow. Coleman is a warmer, more lyrical player than Shorter, and the record is gentler for it.
The title track is built on suspended fourth chords that never resolve, four of them cycling, the harmony forever about to arrive and never arriving. That's the sound of the sea and it's also a genuinely radical piece of writing for 1965: a tune with almost no harmonic movement that still feels like it's going somewhere. Every jazz student learns it. Most of them don't notice what's strange about it until years later.
'Dolphin Dance' is the one musicians talk about, thirty-two bars that modulate so smoothly you can't hear the joins. 'The Eye of the Hurricane' is the burner. 'Little One' also turns up on Miles's E.S.P., recorded a few months earlier, and the comparison is instructive.
It is, by common consent, one of the most beautiful record he ever made. If Head Hunters didn't exist it would be first without argument.
1. Head Hunters (Columbia, 1973)
Recorded: 1973, Wally Heider Recording, San Francisco Released: October 1973 (Columbia KC 32731) Personnel: Bennie Maupin (soprano and tenor saxophone, saxello, bass clarinet, alto flute), Herbie Hancock (Fender Rhodes, Hohner clavinet, ARP synthesisers), Paul Jackson (electric bass, marimbula), Harvey Mason (drums), Bill Summers (congas, shekere, balafon, agogo, cabasa, hindewhu, tambourine, log drums, surdo, gankogui, beer bottle)
Look at the last item in Bill Summers's instrument list. A beer bottle.
That's how 'Watermelon Man' opens: Summers blowing across the neck of a bottle while humming, imitating the hindewhu whistle playing of the Ba-Benzélé people of Central Africa, which he'd heard on an ethnographic field recording. Two minutes of that before the band arrives. On the biggest-selling jazz album ever made to that point, released by a major label, the first sound you hear is a man and a beer bottle recreating Central African pygmy music.
That is Head Hunters in one gesture. Everybody remembers it as the funk record, the sell-out record, the one where Hancock dissolved the Mwandishi band because he'd concluded through his Buddhist practice that his job was to make people happy. All true. But it is a far stranger album than its reputation, and the strangeness is what has kept it alive.
'Chameleon' runs fifteen minutes and takes its time. The bass line everyone knows is Hancock's ARP Odyssey, not a bass guitar, and after about six minutes the piece dissolves into a long floating passage that has more in common with Sextant than with anything on the radio. 'Sly', named for Sly Stone, is the fastest and hardest thing here, Harvey Mason playing with a snap that Mike Clark would replace with something looser a year later. 'Vein Melter' closes it slow and blue, and it's the track nobody talks about and the one I'd defend hardest.
It became the first jazz album to go platinum and it changed the commercial reality of the music permanently, for better and worse. Every jazz-funk record, every acid jazz record, an enormous amount of hip-hop, all of it runs back through this.
But that isn't why it's first. Head Hunters is the only record where the two Herbie Hancocks stop being separate people. The composer who wrote 'Maiden Voyage' and the bandleader who made Sextant are both on it, working at the same time, and neither one has been simplified to make room for the other. That is a much harder thing to bring off than selling a million copies, and he never quite managed it again. Fifty-two years on it still sounds like the work of musicians who had no idea whether any of it would come off and went ahead regardless, which is the only reason a record this famous can still catch you out.
Special Mentions
Kimiko Kasai with Herbie Hancock, Butterfly (CBS/Sony 25AP 1350, 1979). Recorded in Tokyo in October 1979 with the touring band: Bennie Maupin, Paul Jackson, Webster Lewis, Ray Obiedo, Alphonse Mouzon, Bill Summers. Kasai singing vocal versions of Hancock tunes, several with lyrics by his sister Jean Hancock. Japan-only, and originals have become genuinely expensive. Be With Records reissued it in 2018 and did a good job.
The Herbie Hancock Trio (CBS/Sony 25AP-650) / Third Plane (Milestone M-9105). These are the same session. On 13 July 1977 at The Automatt in San Francisco, Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams recorded enough material for two albums, and contractual obligations meant the takes were split: the Hancock-led half went to CBS/Sony in Japan, the Carter-led half to Milestone under Ron's name. Buy both and you have one afternoon.
V.S.O.P. (Columbia PG 34688, 1977). Recorded at the Newport Jazz Festival at New York City Center on 29 June 1976, and it's more interesting than its reputation as "the quintet reunion". Across the double album you get three separate Hancock bands in one night: the Miles quintet with Freddie Hubbard in the trumpet chair, the Mwandishi sextet reassembled, and the electric band. His whole career staged as a single concert.
Flood (CBS/Sony 28AP-2183/84, 1975). Live in Tokyo at Shibuya Kokaido on 28 June 1975 and Nakano Sun Plaza on 1 July, with Blackbird McKnight added on guitar. The Head Hunters band stretching out at length in front of an audience. Japan-only, and the most collectible of all the Japanese titles.
A Tribute to Miles (1994). Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Tony Williams and Wallace Roney playing the quintet repertoire the year after Miles died. Roney had the impossible job and handled it with more grace than anyone expected.
There's a version of Herbie Hancock's story where the zigzagging is the flaw. The pianist who could have been the greatest of his generation, distracted by machines and hit singles and film scores, never settling long enough to build the single monumental thing.
I've never believed it. The through-line is right there if you listen for it: a musician with an unusually good ear and an unusually low tolerance for repeating himself, following curiosity wherever it went and taking the consequences. The engineering student and the Mozart prodigy were never in conflict. They were the same impulse.
He is eighty-six and still on the road. Somewhere in the middle of this year's set he'll strap on a keytar, and some part of the audience will wince, and he will not care in the slightest. He never has.
