musicbriefs
Artist · Musician · Producer · 1940

Herbie Hancock

4
briefs
12:20
average
49 min
in total
On music.briefs4
10:18

Takin’ Off

Herbie Hancock · 1962

Takin’ Off is Herbie Hancock’s 1962 debut solo album for Blue Note Records. It features six original compositions performed by Hancock (piano), Dexter Gordon (tenor saxophone), Butch Warren (bass), and Billy Higgins (drums). Recorded in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs. ‘Watermelon Man’ appears in Tuner (2025) over the opening credits and in The Watermelon Woman (1996), whose title references Melvin Van Peebles’s 1970 film. ‘Driftin’’ appears in Border Buckaroos (1943) and Nothing but the Blues (1995). ‘Alone and I’ appears in Mighty Aphrodite (1995). The album brought Hancock to the attention of Miles Davis, who assembled a new band shortly after hearing it. It predates Hancock’s work with the Miles Davis Quintet, which began in May 1963.

13:00

Head Hunters

Herbie Hancock · 1973

Assembled after three increasingly abstract Mwandishi records, Head Hunters strips Hancock's sound down to bass, drums, reeds and Clavinet, turning a fifteen-minute groove into jazz's best-selling record of its era.

13:00

In a Silent Way

Miles Davis · 1969

Recorded in a single February 1969 session at Columbia's Studio B and shaped afterward by producer Teo Macero's editing, In a Silent Way marked Miles Davis's full turn toward electric instruments. Built from just two long pieces stitched from a handful of takes by an expanded band including three electric pianists and a guitarist new to New York, it plays as a hushed, largely beatless record that unsettled jazz and rock critics alike on release.

13:00

Songs in the Key of Life

Stevie Wonder · 1976

Made after Stevie Wonder seriously considered leaving music to work with disabled children abroad, and released only once he had signed one of the largest recording contracts in history, this double album plus bonus EP moves through faith, parenthood, injustice and romance while Wonder plays the overwhelming majority of the instruments himself.