My son, Matthew, got me a $50 gift certificate for music at Cutler’s Record Shop in New Haven. I took him to this store last year and he really liked it, which made me very happy :), as I used to hang out there frequently in my college years from 1972-74, as a matter of fact its a frequent music haunt in my travels still 😉
My wife, Rosemary told me the money was burning a hole in my pocket and she was right of course ;).
This is the first of the three recordings I purchased. I’ll write about the other two recordings tomorrow and Monday…
Herbie Hancock – Head Hunters, the Jazz Masterpiece originally released on October 13, 1973. I recall that I played Chameleon and Watermelon Man often when I was an FM disk jockey at the University of New Haven, on WNHU-FM. I minored in music at UNH and learned a great deal from my world music college professors who all came from Wesleyan University. We analyzed Head Hunters in my jazz class extensively, which was one the freedoms of taking free form music classes that I dug in the early 70s.
We’d learn things like the quote below which further increased my interest in ethnomusicology, “On the intro and outro of the tune, percussionist Bill Summers blows into a beer bottle imitating hindewhu, a style of singing/whistle-playing found in Pygmy music of Central Africa. Hancock and Summers were struck by the sound, which they heard on the ethnomusicology LP, The Music of the Ba-Benzélé Pygmies (1966), by Simha Arom and Genviève Taurelle.[11]
Herbie Hancock’s historic “re-imagining” of the classic Headhunters band took place on the Bonnaroo stage in 2005.
The 20-bit remastered edition on CD plays better than I even remembered from music class and radio days. I’m listening to it now as I write this blog post 🙂
The Herbie Hancock Group
Herbie Hancock – Keyboards, Synthesizers
Bennie Maupin – Sax (Soprano, Tenor)
Paul Jackson – Electric Bass
Harvey Mason – Yamaha Drums
Bill Summers – Percussion
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