Herbie Hancock

Herbie Hancock’s name is synonymous with the best in accessible & melodious jazz and jazzfunk and this collection appears to be his own selection of the tracks that define his music.
I could be churlish and ask where the Miles Davis material is or the work he did with VSOP in the seventies but these dozen tracks say all that needs to be said about the mans approach to music and his influence on Jazz – simply put, it it wasn’t for HH most of the seventies and eighties fusion artists would still be looking at the keyboards and trying to think of something to say.

Every track here is a classic in its own right and looking at the musicians he plays with – Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter, Joe Farrell, Eric Gale, Bernard Purdie and his guest artists – Stevie Wonder, Corrinne Bailey Rae, Joni Mitchell, you get a sense of the acclaim he is held in and the impact he has had through the years.

These songs go back as far as 1965 and the latest of them is from 2008 (a live number featuring Joni Mitchell) and they include ‘Watermelon Man’ from the ‘Headhunters’ album and ‘Wiggle Waggle’ from his time on Blue Note but frankly there isn’t a single track that isn’t a classic.

The musicianship all through the album is uniformly excellent but the reflections of the changing faces of Jazz show just how crucial the quality of the musicians he has associated with has been – only the best can cope with the number of developments he has been involved in over the years; he has been a leader all his life and attracted the best and delivered time after time.

He is still relevant today this album shows why.