Herbie Hancock at Melbourne's Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Image: @duncographic
Herbie Hancock performed at Sidney Myer Music Bowl for Melbourne International Jazz Festival on Saturday 19 October.
Under a cloudy night sky at the Bowl, Herbie Hancock introduced his second song, the jazz standard “Footprints.” “This was written by my best friend, Wayne Shorter, who sadly died last year,” said the 84-year-old pianist. Talk about a name-drop. Though, Hancock can be forgiven – he played on Shorter’s original recording of the song and the Miles Davis version, both released in 1967.
A classically-trained pianist and electrical engineering graduate, Hancock joined Davis’ band in 1963. At 23, Hancock had already composed the hard bop classic “Watermelon Man” and played on a few Donald Byrd albums. But his stint in Davis’ band – which produced several landmark records including In a Silent Way, Jack Johnson and On the Corner – would radically alter the sound and conception of jazz music for generations to come.
Davis’ genre-defying albums released at the turn of the 1970s also paved the way for Hancock’s own, similarly disruptive contributions to the nontraditionalist jazz canon, the most notable being 1973’s Head Hunters. Songs from this period of Hancock’s career dominated the setlist.
Credit: @duncographic
“Footprints,” a bluesy waltz that spotlighted Hancock’s syncopated grand piano playing, seemed positively stately compared to the unchecked harmonic and rhythmic adventurousness of “Actual Life” from Hancock’s 1974 LP, Thrust. But despite its free-form nature, Hancock and his four band members were in psychic alignment throughout.
Everyone had a chance to demonstrate their prodigious skills as a soloist, but equally impressive were the musicians’ manifest listening abilities. All five players remained in sync, whether they be injecting a rhythmic accent, allowing the chords and harmonies to chime, or going all-in on a jazz fusion freakout.
Lionel Loueke, Credit: @duncographic
Hancock went it alone on the vocoder-assisted improvisation “We Are All One Family.” However, the dance music spilling into the Bowl from a nearby festival dimmed the luminosity of his musings on loss, family and the Buddhist concept of oneness.
The full band returned to accompany Hancock through a medley of career highlights, an ecstatic sequence that encompassed the P-Funk adjacent psychedelia of “Hang Up Your Hang Ups,” the funk-coded “Spider,” and the hip-hop-inspired, extraterrestrial courting “Rockit.”
Hancock strapped on a keytar for the latter, going toe-to-toe with guitarist Lionel Loueke in a display of playful bravura.
Credit: @duncographic
Earlier in the afternoon, support act Marcus Miller recalled one of Davis’ old maxims, “Don’t wear your old clothes,” a nod to the late trumpeter’s refusal to dwell on past glories. But when Hancock launched into the show’s final song, the Head Hunters centrepiece “Chameleon,” nothing about the song’s familiar, Sly Stone-inscribed strut felt tired or unimaginative.
To the contrary, the show concluded with the 84-year-old Hancock looking as limber as a 20-year-old as he and Loueke jumped up and down in unison. To the ten-thousand-plus people in the crowd, it was incontrovertible evidence of music’s power to bring about self-transcendence.
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