Herbie Hancock

Herbert Jeffrey Hancock (born April 12, 1940) is a jazz pianist and composer from Chicago, Illinois, USA. Hancock is one of jazz music's most important and influential pianists and composers. He embraced elements of rock, funk, and soul while adopting freer stylistic elements from jazz.

Fat Albert & Mwandishi

Hancock left Blue Note in 1969, signing up with Warner Brothers. In 1969, Hancock composed the soundtrack for the Bill Cosby TV show called Fat Albert. Titled Fat Albert Rotunda, the album was mainly a R&B-influenced album with strong jazz overtones. One of the jazzier songs on the record, "Tell Me A Bedtime Story", was later re-worked as a more electronically sounding song for a Quincy Jones album.

Related Topics:
Blue Note - 1969 - Warner Brothers - Bill Cosby - Fat Albert - Fat Albert Rotunda - R&B - Quincy Jones

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Hancock was fascinated with accumulating musical gadgets and toys. Together with the profound influence of Davis's Bitches' Brew, this fascination would culminate in a series of albums in which electronic instruments are coupled with acoustic instruments.

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Hancock's first ventures into electronic music started with a sextet comprised of Hancock, drummer Billy Hart and bassist Buster Williams, and a trio of adventurous horn players: Eddie Henderson (trumpet), Julian Priester (trombone), and multireedist Bennie Maupin. Dr. Patrick Gleeson was eventually added to the mix to play and program the synthesizers.

Related Topics:
Electronic music - Sextet - Billy Hart - Buster Williams - Eddie Henderson - Trumpet - Julian Priester - Trombone - Multireedist - Bennie Maupin - Dr. Patrick Gleeson

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The sextet made three experimental albums under Hancock's name : Mwandishi (1970), Crossings (1971) (both on Warner Brothers) and Sextant (1973) (released on Columbia Records); two more, Realization and Inside Out were recorded under Henderson's name with essentially the same personnel. The music often had very free improvisations and showed influence from the electronic music of some contemporary classical composers.

Related Topics:
Electronic music - Contemporary classical

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These three records became later known as the "Mwandishi" albums, so-called after a Swahili name Hancock sometimes used during this era (Mwandishi is Swahili for writer). The first two, including Fat Albert Rotunda were made available on the 2-CD set Mwandishi: the Complete Warner Bros. Recordings, released in 1994, but are these days sold as individual CD editions. Of the three electronically sounded albums, Sextant is probably the most experimental (especially the song "Rain Dance", which is one of Hancock's early Columbia classics.) since the Moog and Arp synthesizers are used in revolutionary ways that still sound fresh today; some extremely advanced improvisation is found on the tracks "Hornets" and "Hidden Shadows" (which is in the meter 19/4). "Hornets" was later revised on the 2001 album Future2Future as "Virtual Hornets".

Related Topics:
Swahili - Fat Albert Rotunda - 1994 - Meter - 2001 - Future2Future

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Among the instruments Hancock utilized were Fender Rhodes piano, ARP Odyssey, ARP Pro-Soloist Synthesizer and the Minimoog. He was one of the first mainstream musicians to use an Apple computer in creating music in the early 1980s.

Related Topics:
Fender Rhodes - ARP Odyssey - ARP Pro-Soloist Synthesizer - Minimoog - Apple - 1980s

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All three Warner Brothers albums Fat Albert Rotunda, Mwandishi and Crossings were remastered in 2001 but were not released in the U.S.A. as of June 2005.

Related Topics:
Fat Albert Rotunda - Mwandishi - Crossings - 2001 - June - 2005

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