Record #405: Herbie Hancock – Sextant (1973)

As much as I love Miles Davis’ electric period (especially In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew) it’s taken me until the last couple weeks to realize that everyone else in the room with Miles on those records was also making some really out-there music around the same timeframe…
Maybe the most out-there of Miles’ collaborators during this time was the already-legendary Herbie Hancock. Herbie was a pillar in the jazz scene years before Miles invited him into his band. He had proven himself as a master composer (”Maiden Voyage” is a standard for any high school jazz group) and a virtuoso on the piano. But when instrument makers started to expand upon the basic format of the piano itself, Herbie was keen to jump on board. He was an early adopter of the Fender Rhodes, the synthesizer, and tape delay.
While you can hear his love for electric pianos on his work with Miles, his fascination with the boundless possibilities of synthesizers came to a head during his Mwandishi period. While all three of these records (Mwandishi and Crossings being the other two) saw Herbie and Co. pioneering digital landscapes with sheer animalistic delight, that ethos reached its pinnacle on Sextant.
The album opens with “Rain Dance,” a nine minute track that is almost as synth driven as a Kraftwerk tune. Drums are almost absent as the group lets a synthesizer take over on rhythm duties. It’s followed by “Hidden Shadows,” which I swear is a rearrangement of a tune from Miles Davis’ Live-Evil, but I can’t identify it. But it jaunts along with a wicked sounding voodoo funk that Herbie tries to defeat with the only acoustic piano on the record (spoiler alert: he does not defeat the voodoo).
Side B is a single twenty track (not unusual during this period) called “Hornets.” It’s a funky, spaced-out jam that sounds exactly like the cover looks. The band plays in an absolutely tribalistic abandon that sounds exactly how the cover looks. Herbie warps the settings on his tape delay. Bennie Maupin plays a friggin’ kazoo. Buster Williams runs his bass groove through every possible permutation. Billy Hart does all he can on the drums to keep the band from flying off into space. But for all of his effort, he fails: the song still ends up as the theme song for a rave on Mars.
While Herbie would go on to out-funk all the funk guys on Head Hunters, his Mwandishi period produced my undisputed favorite albums in his catalogue. And this record, even more untethered to traditional conventions of jazz, is as good as he gets.

Record #4: Al Jarreau – Breakin' Away (1981)

Here’s another record from that free stack taken from my in-laws’ house, but this one is quite a bit better than the last (Air Supply…ughhh…). Admittedly, this genre (R&B/jazz crossover) is a little out of my familiarity, but most of these songs just remind me of 80s sitcoms*, or post-break up montages from 80s rom-coms (My Old Friend, especially, could be played to shots of forlorn lovers staring out windows before fading out into a rain-soaked reconciliatory plea).  Filled with jazz tinged love songs, this album has probably been put on by many a daddy after the kids had been laid to sleep.
The one thing that makes Jarreau stand out among the vaguely “funk” landscape of 80s R&B is his tendency towards scat solos, which makes for a much more entertaining listen on the more upbeat tracks. And while the first half is rather ballad heavy (but with much more success than my last entry), the B-side is filled with less mainstream offerings, all of which do a great job of showcasing Jarreau’s vocal acrobatics (see: Blue Rondo a la Turk) His mastery of his voice as an instrument is the largest contributor to the album’s success, but it also strongly benefits from the composition of the songs, which is littered with jazz-style chord changes. These two factors keep the slow songs from being boring, and the fast songs from being inane.
Allmusic’s review states that the record was “the standard bearer of the L.A. pop and R&B sound” of its time, which is what makes this record sound so dated in 2012–the album’s most prominent flaw. But what can you do?
All in all, it’s a fun record and significant cultural and historical piece, but it’s not something I’ll throw on to unwind.
*I found out after writing this bit that he wrote the theme song to the 80s dramedy Moonlighting.