Can you go home again after 50 years, and will you recognize the old neighborhood when you do? Herbie Hancock, now 84, set out to do just that in his annual Hollywood Bowl gig on Wednesday night, Aug. 14, reuniting almost all of the players he recruited for his game-changing, best-selling jazz-funk album Head Hunters.
It wasn’t a complete reunion because one of the original band members, bassist Paul Jackson, died in 2021. Nor was it the first such attempt in 50 years; the original five Headhunters — Hancock, Jackson, wind player Bennie Maupin, percussionist Bill Summers, and drummer Harvey Mason — previously gathered for one track, “Shiftless Shuffle,” on Hancock’s 1980 album Mr. Hands. But with Marcus Miller brilliantly knocking out intricate bass lines in Jackson’s absence on Wednesday, you won’t hear me complain.
Recorded and released in 1973, Head Hunters was Hancock’s attempt to reach for a sound and feeling more rooted in the “earth” after floating in weightless galaxies with his terrific, electric avant-garde sextet and septet. The album was that rare thing: a forward-looking artistic and commercial success — and it sold like gangbusters. Predictable howls of “sellout” from the jazz police, on account of the music’s stomping funk rhythms, greeted the album when it was released, but the purists had overlooked the urbane harmonic sophistication of the interludes and electronic textures.
Head Hunters was the best-selling jazz album up to that time, eventually overtaken belatedly by Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas, and its rhythms and textures provided a treasure chest of samples for hip-hoppers and others well into this century.
At the Bowl, the resurrected Headhunters — now older, wiser, and a little more settled — reprised all four selections from that first album, as well as three of the four from the follow-up, Thrust. (On that album, Mike Clark replaced Mason in the band because Mason preferred not to tour.) All the tempos are slower now, and the band took its time getting into the moods and grooves of each number. But once they did, they nailed them with a mastery that wiped away the decades.
Leading off the first half was Hancock’s Latin jazz standard “Watermelon Man,” completely transformed for Head Hunters into a sauntering mix of African sounds and American funk, with Summers here kicking it off by blowing bass-flute-like notes on a beer bottle. Hancock was back on a vintage Fender Rhodes electric piano, starting out gingerly but soon getting into the groove. Maupin played sparingly on soprano sax as Mason laid down his thumping beat.
“Sly” — as in Sly and the Family Stone, whose music was a decisive influence on Head Hunters — found the band starting to mix it up good and hard, with Hancock quoting the riff from his own “Hornets” at one point. Mason’s dirgelike repeated pattern on the meditative “Vein Melter” was identical to that on the album, an authentic blast from the past. Yet in “Palm Grease” and the ever-gorgeous “Butterfly” (both from Thrust), he showed how different a drummer he was for the Headhunters from Mike Clark, putting down a more straightforward funk beat minus Clark’s complexities.
Because it would have been difficult for the band to play everything from the records in real time, Devin Daniels played a second saxophone, and Julian Pollack helped out on backup keyboards, using a modern Nord Stage 4 to imitate the distinct staccatos of the Hohner Clavinet and the cheesy string sound of 1970s-vintage ARP synthesizers. It was like revisiting the old neighborhood, now populated with a mix of old and new buildings but recognizable just the same.
After intermission, the Headhunters were joined by members of Hancock’s current band — James Genus (bass), Lionel Loueke (electric guitar), Jaylen Petinaud (drums), and for some luxury casting, trumpeter and now-renowned opera composer Terence Blanchard.
They started with “Actual Proof” (from Thrust), played slowly at first and then with more complex youthful energy. On its own, with Summers still on percussion, the new band cruised through the Overture that Hancock has played in a lot of recent concerts, loaded with fragments of his past (“Textures,” “Butterfly” again, “Rockit,” and more). Blanchard was in commanding form, utilizing an octave-doubling device to give his horn majestic projection and contributing his Ahmad Jamal-flavored arrangement of “Footprints” as a memento of the tune’s recently departed composer, Wayne Shorter.
Hancock and company played his Head Hunters hit “Chameleon” no less than three times — the first time to round out the first part of the night, the second time as part of the Overture, and the third with all the musicians joining in a rousing, stomping grand finale as Hancock strapped on a portable synthesizer to knock out the defining bass line. Five decades on, the piece could still cross stylistic barriers and get a nearly sold-out 17,500-seat amphitheater rocking.
