Head Hunters [Remaster]

Performer: Herbie Hancock
Artist: Bennie Maupin
Engineer: Vic Anesini
Producer: David Rubinson; Herbie Hancock
Distributor: Sony Music Distribution (

Notes: Personnel: Herbie Hancock (Fender Rhodes piano, Clavinet, synthesizer); Bennie Maupin (soprano & tenor saxophones, saxello, bass clarinet, alto flute); Paul Jackson (marimbula, bass); Harvey Mason (drums); Bill Summers (congas, shekere, balafon, agogo, cabasa, hindewho, tambourine, log drum, surdo, gankoqui, beer bottle). Recorded at Wally Heider Studios and Different Fur Trading Co., San Francisco, California. Includes liner notes by Scott H. Thompson and Herbie Hancock. This is an Enhanced CD, which contains both regular audio tracks and multimedia computer files. Head Hunters was a pivotal point in Herbie Hancock's career, bringing him into the vanguard of jazz fusion. Hancock had pushed avant-garde boundaries on his own albums and with Miles Davis, but he had never devoted himself to the groove as he did on Head Hunters. Drawing heavily from Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, and James Brown, Hancock developed deeply funky, even gritty, rhythms over which he soloed on electric synthesizers, bringing the instrument to the forefront in jazz. It had all of the sensibilities of jazz, particularly in the way it wound off into long improvisations, but its rhythms were firmly planted in funk, soul, and R&B, giving it a mass appeal that made it the biggest-selling jazz album of all time (a record which was later broken). Jazz purists, of course, decried the experiments at the time, but Head Hunters still sounds fresh and vital decades after its initial release, and its genre-bending proved vastly influential on not only jazz, but funk, soul, and hip-hop. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine Head Hunters has spawned a thousand copies and copyists, but is only strengthened through comparison. One of the most enduring works of the 70s' jazz/funk legacy, and surely one of Herbie Hancock's most enjoyable and infectious recordings, the album was released in the deeply groovy days of 1973, and soon became the best-selling record in jazz history. Loping along on a glorious bed of springy wah-wah and synth bass, the group used all the new technology of the time, and Hancock himself seemed to revel (as he still does) in the latest keyboard sounds available to him. Jazz/funk has never again sounded so exciting and dangerous.

Q (2/00, p.100) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...it's among the best 'fusion' records ever made, its funky alliances of twittering Afro-percussion and high-tensile rock spine building into a kind of electric rainforest music of an almost political intensity..." Down Beat (1/17/74) - 5 Stars - Excellent - "...Herbie translates 'communicate directly' pretty much into 'get down.' The warp-drive electronic space flights of CROSSINGS and SEXTANT have given way to a more basic music, harmonically simple and rhythmically earthy....[HEADHUNTERS] speaks its message--loud and clear..." JazzTimes (9/97, p.65) - "...a preeminent example of sophisticated funkology....this is where it all started."

One of the most open-eared and forward-thinking jazz musicians of his day, Hancock has, more than just about anyone else, consistently tried to broaden the music's horizons by mixing it with the most interesting elements of contemporary pop. Hancock has consistently pushed the envelope, from his earliest days with Miles Davis to his jazz-rock fusion of the early '70s and his early embrace of synthesizers and electronic instruments, his early-'80s experiments with hip-hop and sampling, or more recently, his acoustic piano reinterpretations of songs--the new standards, in his parlance--by everyone from Don Henley to Nirvana.

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