Herbie Hancock's Masterpiece, Now Cut At 45rpm!
200g 45rpm Vinyl Mastered at Sterling Sound by Ryan K. Smith! Plated & Pressed at Quality Record Pressings!
The Second Highest-Selling Jazz Album Of All Time!
This item not eligible for any further discount offers!
There are few artists in the music industry who have had more influence on
acoustic and electronic jazz and R&B than Herbie Hancock.
In 1963, Miles Davis invited Hancock to join the Miles Davis Quintet. During his
five years with Davis, Herbie recorded many classics with the jazz legend
including ESP, Nefertiti and Sorcerer, and later on he made appearances on
Davis' groundbreaking In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew.
Hancock's own solo career blossomed on Blue Note, with classic albums including
Maiden Voyage, Empyrean Isles and Speak Like a Child. After leaving Davis' fold,
Herbie put together a new band called The Headhunters and, in 1973, recorded
Head Hunters.
Head Hunters became not only Hancock's best-selling album, but also the second
highest selling jazz album of all time (at last RIAA count). It was in 1973 that
he gathered a new band to combine electric music with funk, perhaps best
exemplified in the pop music of Sly Stone.
Hancock took over all synthesizer duties, along with Fender Rhodes and clavinet
and was backed by bass and drums. The opening bars of "Watermelon Man" with Bill
Summers blowing into a beer bottle, along with the band's funky grooves and new
electric sounds, captured the crossover fans who had otherwise avoided buying
jazz records.
Head Hunters was a pivotal point in 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 four decades after its initial release, and its
genre-bending proved vastly influential on not only jazz, but funk, soul and
hip-hop.
Features:
• 200g Vinyl
• Double LP
• Mastered at Sterling Sound by Ryan K. Smith
• Plated & Pressed at Quality Record Pressings
• Stoughton Printing old-style deluxe film lamination tip-on jacket
• Meticulous test pressing evaluation and quality control
• Highest-quality jackets and rice paper inner sleeves
Musicians:
Herbie Hancock, electric piano, clavinet, synthesizer
Bennie Maupin, soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone, saxello, bass clarinet, alto
flute
Paul Jackson, electric bass, marimbula
Bill Summers, congas, shekere, balafon, agogo, cabasa, hindewhu, tambourine, log
drum, surdo, gankogui
Harvey Mason, drums
Selections:
Side One:
1. Chameleon
Side Two:
1. Watermelon Man
Side Three:
1. Sly
Side Four:
1. Vein Melter
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