Most interesting/favorite 'Herbie Hancock' BN

[JSngry]

I get the feeling that there are those who would probably like to file Herbie in the "Overrated" bin, but other than his early sponsorship of Wynton Marsalis, he has nothing to be outright ashamed of, and has more than most to be quite proud of, particularly/especially , especially as accompanist, but also as soloist, composer, and bandleader.

Overexposed, probably, but overrated, nah, that's bullshit. Not that it's been said yet, but I notice every time Herbie Hancock comes up there's a chorus of reticent sneers hanging around. It's funny.

Not as easy as that, is it.

[mjzee]

I had to vote for Takin' Off, for Dexter and the great tunes.  Herbie showed his gutbucket side, which he sadly discarded soon after.  He has never been one of my favorites; to these ears, he often sounds too soft and tentative.  I much prefer strong, propulsive pianists who push the groove.

But never say never.  I've been seriously contemplating the current Italian BN box, to give his oeuvre a relisten.

 

[JSngry]

9 minutes ago, mjzee said:

 to these ears, he often sounds too soft and tentative.  I much prefer strong, propulsive pianists who push the groove.

If you're wondering where that little bit of moisture came from, all those 70s albums and the Plugged Nickle box just did a collective spit take.

Speaking of Plugged Nickle and such, the only way those guys could do all that insane sub/cross metric shit and have it stay tight (like that) is by having a firmer than firm sense of real time and real groove. That's not opinion, that's basic physics.

Another question - if you have a groove, why do you have to push it? Ride it, yes, dig in to it, sure, but push it? Why? What would you be trying to do to it, knock it down? That's not a very nice thing to do to a groove!

[danasgoodstuff]

I had a long-ish conversation with someone once where I was saying "...'herbie, man'..." as a way of mocking the stort of thing which someone else might say about Hancock in his then current Headhunters period, an he thought I was saying "Herbie Mann" and eventually I just gave up.  And, not just to be difficult, I'd say I like Herbie's range on BN more than any particular album or tune and he's not overrated to me - even though I'm not crazy 'bout everything, the 2nd Quintet alone means I'll never think that way.

[mjzee]

7 hours ago, JSngry said:

If you're wondering where that little bit of moisture came from, all those 70s albums and the Plugged Nickle box just did a collective spit take.

Speaking of Plugged Nickle and such, the only way those guys could do all that insane sub/cross metric shit and have it stay tight (like that) is by having a firmer than firm sense of real time and real groove. That's not opinion, that's basic physics.

Another question - if you have a groove, why do you have to push it? Ride it, yes, dig in to it, sure, but push it? Why? What would you be trying to do to it, knock it down? That's not a very nice thing to do to a groove!

I never liked the second quintet.  Never.  Consistently never*.  Never saw the attraction.  And I've tried: I have the studio box, the two "Bootleg Live" releases, and a one-disc compilation of the Plugged Nickel box.  Unattractive melodies, rushed tempos, Tony's grandstanding cluttering up the beat (give me Billy Higgins any day!), and when it comes time to solo, Herbie's a gooey soft marshmallow who seems to be saying "what am I doing here?"  I've been listening to a lot of the second quintet recently, courtesy of the shuffle functions on my iPod and iTunes.  Just yesterday I heard Madness (from Nefertiti).  A head that's barely a head, Miles noodles, Wayne cobbles together an interesting solo (an achievement, considering the dearth of melodic materials he has to work with), then Herbie comes in with...what?  The beat stops, the tune goes out the window...Teo could've spliced this solo in from an entirely different song.  Or how about Prince Of Darkness (from Sorcerer)?  It's not that the band is tight, it's that the tune is constructed to accommodate when the beat disappears and Tony gets lost in his drums (like for about 10 seconds beginning around 45 seconds into the tune, and again around 1:50 into the tune), then Wayne gives a strong solo, and Herbie's solo is somewhere between playing scales and a bore.  It's not basic physics, it's just personal taste, and this doesn't do it for me.  (Ornette Coleman doesn't do it for me either, and all the spit takes in the world won't change that.)

It's interesting that I start to like Miles again with Filles De Kilimanjaro, where he's moving on from the second quintet.

*with two exceptions: Freedom Jazz Dance and Gingerbread Boy (both from Miles Smiles).  But even there, I much prefer the Eddie Harris and Jimmy Heath versions.

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

The worst, I'm sorry to say, is My Point of View.  The album makes complete lack of sense to me musically, the none of the notes in any of the songs link up at all in my head. I have had opportunities for $5 mint stereo copies and i passed on it multiple times.  I dont know what my problem is.  Of course i favor the funky lead off cut, but from there it falls off a cliff for me. 

[JSngry]

35 minutes ago, mjzee said:

. It's not basic physics, it's just personal taste, and this doesn't do it for me. 

No, see, that's where you're wrong. It's both. Nobody says you have to like physics, Newtonian or Quantum, but they exist whether or not you or I like them.

[mjzee]

3 minutes ago, JSngry said:

No, see, that's where you're wrong. It's both. Nobody says you have to like physics, Newtonian or Quantum, but they exist whether or not you or I like them.

Ah.  Well, Stephen Hawking's dead, so I'll leave this to the ether.  

[JSngry]

He didn't take physics with him. Maybe it was his infirmity that prevented that. Because they're still here, drove my car this evening, just to be sure, and yep, still there.

Now, you want a groove, find some urban traffic where the physics are working to the collectively designed effect. Of course, living in Houston, you're not gonna get that, and living in Dallas, neither am I. But there have been times...and any day, you can watch a ballgame where the pitching and the defense hit that groove and you can tell, yes, these physics are u=being unhindered now, Or you can just watch random shit blow through the air and dig those physics too. So when you get a group of grown-ass adults together on the same page musically, there be physics there too, best believe there will be. Are.

[JSngry]

Herbie Physics, take Speak No Evil vs JuJu. those are the two best-beloved Wayne BNs by the generally consesualized. MyCoy on JuJu, Herbie On Speak, McCoy is great because that's a "hard" record and McCoy does that as well as anybody, it's a great Wayne record, just like Speak, which Herbie is a full frontal delight with his comps and solos that are every bit as in the "groove" as were McCoy, but whereas McCoy got on that groove and rode it like a horse, Herbie surfs it, he's delightful the way he's up and down loud and soft making fully orchestral answers to the spaces that arise, the guy's just genius all over that record, and not once does he lose the groove or depend on it to pull him along, no he is sooooo damn deep in the pocket that he can snap it off the cloud he flutters in on, don't let that cloud make you think it's not got peppy max snap in it, that cloud is ALL snap.. I don't know that you'll find as improvisationally kinetic accompanist in this particular zone of jazz as Herbie Hancock.

 

[Joe]

8 hours ago, JSngry said:

Herbie Physics, take Speak No Evil vs JuJu. those are the two best-beloved Wayne BNs by the generally consesualized. MyCoy on JuJu, Herbie On Speak, McCoy is great because that's a "hard" record and McCoy does that as well as anybody, it's a great Wayne record, just like Speak, which Herbie is a full frontal delight with his comps and solos that are every bit as in the "groove" as were McCoy, but whereas McCoy got on that groove and rode it like a horse, Herbie surfs it, he's delightful the way he's up and down loud and soft making fully orchestral answers to the spaces that arise, the guy's just genius all over that record, and not once does he lose the groove or depend on it to pull him along, no he is sooooo damn deep in the pocket that he can snap it off the cloud he flutters in on, don't let that cloud make you think it's not got peppy max snap in it, that cloud is ALL snap.. I don't know that you'll find as improvisationally kinetic accompanist in this particular zone of jazz as Herbie Hancock.

 

Along those same lines: the Hancock / Workman / Chambers dynamic on ADAM'S APPLE

[Simon Weil]

10 hours ago, mjzee said:

I never liked the second quintet.  Never.  Consistently never*.  Never saw the attraction.  And I've tried: I have the studio box, the two "Bootleg Live" releases, and a one-disc compilation of the Plugged Nickel box.  Unattractive melodies, rushed tempos, Tony's grandstanding cluttering up the beat (give me Billy Higgins any day!), and when it comes time to solo, Herbie's a gooey soft marshmallow who seems to be saying "what am I doing here?"  I've been listening to a lot of the second quintet recently, courtesy of the shuffle functions on my iPod and iTunes.  Just yesterday I heard Madness (from Nefertiti).  A head that's barely a head, Miles noodles, Wayne cobbles together an interesting solo (an achievement, considering the dearth of melodic materials he has to work with), then Herbie comes in with...what?  The beat stops, the tune goes out the window...Teo could've spliced this solo in from an entirely different song.  Or how about Prince Of Darkness (from Sorcerer)?  It's not that the band is tight, it's that the tune is constructed to accommodate when the beat disappears and Tony gets lost in his drums (like for about 10 seconds beginning around 45 seconds into the tune, and again around 1:50 into the tune), then Wayne gives a strong solo, and Herbie's solo is somewhere between playing scales and a bore.  It's not basic physics, it's just personal taste, and this doesn't do it for me.  (Ornette Coleman doesn't do it for me either, and all the spit takes in the world won't change that.)

It's interesting that I start to like Miles again with Filles De Kilimanjaro, where he's moving on from the second quintet.

*with two exceptions: Freedom Jazz Dance and Gingerbread Boy (both from Miles Smiles).  But even there, I much prefer the Eddie Harris and Jimmy Heath versions.

When I was coming up (mid-70s), the 2nd Quintet was the gold standard  of what Jazz hipness was about. I didn't understand it, but sensed there was something there. Yup, coming from Rock, I far preferred something I could get my melodic teeth into. But there was no denying it, there was something uncomfortably deep - or perhaps I should say uncomfortable and deep - in this fabulously controlled music on the edge of control.

Because that's what it is, this music, terribly dark - It's music where Miles sounds like he's in a world that's heading to Hell - the stuff he did in the 70s ("On the Corner" onwards) is when he gets there - and the way the music is structured evokes that.

[Teasing the Korean]

5 hours ago, Simon Weil said:

When I was coming up (mid-70s), the 2nd Quintet was the gold standard  of what Jazz hipness was about. I didn't understand it, but sensed there was something there. Yup, coming from Rock, I far preferred something I could get my melodic teeth into. But there was no denying it, there was something uncomfortably deep - or perhaps I should say uncomfortable and deep - in this fabulously controlled music on the edge of control.

Because that's what it is, this music, terribly dark - It's music where Miles sounds like he's in a world that's heading to Hell - the stuff he did in the 70s ("On the Corner" onwards) is when he gets there - and the way the music is structured evokes that.

This was generally my sense and my experience also, although I didn't particularly pick up on the "dark" aspects across the board.  I heard it in some tracks more than others.  

I love how Herbie much later said that, during this time, he didn't know what the hell he was doing, and he wasn't sure the rest of the rhythm section knew either.  He just knew that he wasn't supposed to play the tunes like he did the night before.  

[JSngry]

That band is one of the most extreme, if not the most extreme example, of being one thing live and another thing on record.

I get what he means about not knowing what the hell he was doing, but that doesn't mean anywhere near the same thing in player-speak as it does in civilian-speak. It means that they didn't know what they were going to do until they did it, it doesn't mean that they were flailing about with no idea of where the time or the tune was, I've yet to hear an example of the latter happening live, ever, not even remotely.

That band, in real time, was some of the most exhilarating improvised music of it's time, because they showed that you could take song forms. stretch them past the breaking point, and yet keep the form going underneath, it's pretty high math, and you have to go to the Tristano/Konitz/Marsh Half Note sessions (1959?) to hear anything even remotely that free being done with standard forms.

It's not the sound of the world going to hell, it's the sound of time and harmony getting sliced more and more finely and then, just when it seems like they've been destroyed, oops, there they are again. If Cecil & Ayler & Ornette were busy creating new physics, these guys were going about the business of getting the old physics to realize that it was going to have to either adapt or die. It didn't happen linearly, it happened simultaneously, so the next time somebody needs to convince you to believe in linear time as something other than a construct of scheduling convenience, hey, you should know better than that by now.

Which is why all the retro-Second Quintet musics, including Herbie's, are really kind of sucky. they're no longer writing the book, they're reading from the book that already got wrote. Miles asking if they didn't get it right the first time, that is exactly the question to answer, and so far, nobody's had the guts to play that type of music and address that question head-on. They're cowards.

[Larry Kart]

"Which is why all the retro-Second Quintet musics, including Herbie's, are really kind of sucky. they're no longer writing the book, they're reading from the book that already got wrote."

Exactly.

[Quasimado]

4 hours ago, JSngry said:

and you have to go to the Tristano/Konitz/Marsh Half Note sessions (1959?) to hear anything even remotely that free being done with standard forms.

Tristano wasn't able to be there for the 1959 recordings, and it shows. But he was at the Half Note in 1964 when that "Look Up and Live" TV program was made (it's on Youtube) and was later released on his *Jazz Records* label as *Continuity*. There the band can be heard in full flight ... Q

 

[Simon Weil]

4 hours ago, JSngry said:

It's not the sound of the world going to hell, it's the sound of time and harmony getting sliced more and more finely and then, just when it seems like they've been destroyed, oops, there they are again.

Miles says this of Bitches Brew:

"What we did on Bitches Brew you couldn't ever write down for an orchestra to play. That's why I didn't write it all out, not because I didn't know what I wanted. I knew what I wanted would come out of a process and not some prearranged shit. This session was about improvisation, and that's what makes jazz so fabulous. Any time the weather changes it's going to change your whole attitude about something, and a musician will play differently, especially if everything is not put in front of him. A musician's attitude is the music he plays."
Miles/The Autobiography p290

I always read that in the more general sense, of "the way the world is going" for "the weather". Granted this is me extrapolating - and, from that, extrapolating to the way his music changed through out his career, but... 

[CJ Shearn]

Right now Christian McBride's new quartet is playing "Sightseeing" from Weather Report on a J@LC stream, and that's an example of a "retro band" playing something in somewhat of a  dialect informed by the Second Quintet, actually this version is flanked by a lot of free improv, but I wouldn't call what they are doing here as "cowardly".  I  understand the general sentiment in regards to most of that general area of music those types of "retro" groups play, but it's really just a different generation of players trying to see what they can do with that language, I really love those Tony quintet sides, "Black Codes", Wallace Roney's "Verses" and "Wallace Roney Quintet" if anything the latter is like an album after "Sorcerer" and "Nefertiti" the second quintet never made, but that may be a reason I enjoy it too.

Edited April 16, 2018 by CJ Shearn

[Gheorghe]

I love them all, they are superb, and I have them all, but maybe "The Prisoner" is the one that fascinates me most.

[JSngry]

10 hours ago, Quasimado said:

Tristano wasn't able to be there for the 1959 recordings, and it shows. But he was at the Half Note in 1964 when that "Look Up and Live" TV program was made (it's on Youtube) and was later released on his *Jazz Records* label as *Continuity*. There the band can be heard in full flight ... Q

 

Correct, of course, that was Bill Evans in 1959, and yes, "Continuity" is another one for the ages.

[Teasing the Korean]

15 hours ago, JSngry said:

Which is why all the retro-Second Quintet musics, including Herbie's, are really kind of sucky. they're no longer writing the book, they're reading from the book that already got wrote. 

I get the fact that history remembers the innovators in all genres - and rightly so - but if the innovators were the only artists we listened to, our collections would all shrink considerably.  If other artists want to explore Miles 60s quintet territory, I'm not going to fault them for doing what they want to do.  I can similarly decide if I want to buy their records or not.  

[JSngry]

My collection needs shrinking, actually....

[Stefan Wood]

Naah.

 

[Teasing the Korean]

16 minutes ago, JSngry said:

My collection needs shrinking, actually....

I hear you.  I moved recently and had more than 50 boxes of LPs.  It took a couple of weekends to properly install the shelving and file the LPs.  I've pretty much stopped buying music, exempt for really exceptional things, like the Monk Dangerous Liaisons soundtrack that was recently released. 

[JSngry]

We're getting new flooring sometimes in the near future. I have a cloud of dread enveloping me about the logistics that are going to start happening.