Top 100 Albums of the 1970s - #68 - Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters (1973)

Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters is one of the best selling jazz records of al time, and with good reason. It's catchy, it's fun, it's exciting, and it broke important new ground in updating jazz to fit in with the changing times. Along with Miles Davis, Hancock can be regarded as one of the great innovators, not content to fall back on previous structures and textures that had long since been worn into the ground.

Talking about his inspiration for Head Hunters, Hancock said that he felt like the music his band had been making was getting too lofty and ethereal. He wanted something more down and dirty, more earthbound. With this instinct in hand, it's not surprising that he found his way towards funk, the dirtiest, earthiest music around.

In the early 70s, a lot of Prog groups were inspired by jazz, and were experimenting with working it into a rock context. Their efforts led to a whole genre of jazz/rock fusion, but none of those records approaches what Herbie did in transforming jazz into a truly electric medium. Armed with electric pianos, clavinets, and most importantly, the distinctively searing Arp synthesizer, Hancock and his sextet sank their teeth into funk grooves in a way that was anything but academic, while maintaining the spontaneity and virtuosity of high-octane jazz. Over the course of just four tracks, he crafted an album that remains thrilling more than four decades later.

Side one is dominated by Chameleon, a fifteen minute piece built around a syncopated bass ostinato, with plenty of room for soloing. The way the instruments gradually build up, one on top of the other, is a blueprint for many a funk or electronica tune, and it allows the listener to gradually get used to simple things before moving into the wilder reaches of virtuoso musicianship. 

The second track, Watermelon Man, is a rerecording of a tune first done on Hancock's debut album, but this time arranged in a way that imitates African Pygmy music, with a rhythm section build around blowing air across the top of a beer bottle.

Side two kicks off with Sly, an uptempo workout for the band complete with brain-melting solos. In fact, the final track, Vein Melter, seems like it would have been a better title for this one. Instead, the last nine minutes of the record are taken up by a psychedelic cooldown, perhaps suggesting that the title is alluding to narcotics.

I'm not the biggest fan of jazz in general, but I have to confess that Head Hunters is great. It combines catchy tunes, infectious rhythms, astounding musicianship, and an electric funkiness that I just love. It certainly stands the test of time better than a lot of fusion records from this period.