The Harmonic and Rhythmic Language of Herbie Hancock's 1970s Fender Rhodes Solos

Abstract

Herbie Hancock's Fender Rhodes electric piano solos of the 1970s, recorded primarily within the jazz‐funk contexts of his Headhunters band and other projects (on albums such as Head Hunters, Flood, Man‐Child, and others), represent a high‐point of improvisation over groove‐based forms. These solos built on the developments of Hancock's piano work from the 1960s to reach new heights of harmonic and rhythmic sophistication. Predominantly in riff‐driven settings based on a single harmonic area or few chord changes, he masterfully balanced elements of tension and release over this, with elaborate harmonic development and rhythmic modulation juxtaposed against his harmonically and metrically stable backings, drawing on both jazz and funk aesthetics. This article explores these solos from an analytical perspective, aiming to identify specific harmonic and rhythmic devices and shed new light on this period of Hancock's output.

Notes

1. This information can be found on the Recording Industry Association of America website, http://www.riaa.com/goldandplatinumdata.php?table=SEARCH (search under “Artist: Herbie Hancock”). Accessed November 24, 2008. The album's platinum status achieved November 21, 1986.

2. Elements of Hancock's 1960s acoustic piano playing have been analysed in Keith Waters, “Blurring the Barline: Metric Displacement in the Piano Solos of Herbie Hancock,” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 8 (1996): 19–37, and David Morgan, “Superimposition in the Improvisations of Herbie Hancock,” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 11 (2001): 69–90.

3. Paul Tingen, “Herbie Hancock: Creating Future2Future and Touring in Surround,” www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul02/articles/herbiehancock.asp. Accessed November 24, 2008. Originally published in Sound On Sound, July 2002.

4. Originally released on Miles Davis, Directions, Columbia 88514, 1981, LP; reissued as Sony 35392, 1998, compact disc.

5. Hancock has revived his 1970s Rhodes style for a small number of live situations. These events include the 1998 “Return of the Headhunters” tour (albeit with Hancock soloing on modern keyboards rather than a Rhodes) and a tour with hip‐hop artist Guru in 2000 (during which Hancock played a Rhodes).

6. The history of this recording is more ambiguous than the other albums from this period. Although released in 1980, no recording dates are given and each track is recorded with a different lineup. There is evidence to suggest that at least half of the album is made up of outtakes from previous sessions. In a 1977 interview with Len Lyons (Len Lyons, The Great Jazz Pianists: Speaking of Their Lives and Music [New York: Da Capo, 1983]), Hancock refers to the harmonic structure of a piece that he is recording. He describes the exact harmonic basis of “Spiralling Prism,” the first track on Mr. Hands. When combined with the personnel lineup of this recording, this statement suggests that the track was originally recorded during the sessions for Sunlight. “Shiftless Shuffle” is the only released track outside of the Head Hunters album that was recorded with the exact same personnel lineup. While this latter recording was the first and only time the composition appeared on one of Hancock's official American album releases, bootleg live performances exist back to 1973, thus suggesting that this track could be an outtake from the original Head Hunters sessions. Also, a 1974 bootleg exists in which Hancock announces to the audience that eight tracks were originally recorded for Head Hunters, of which only four made the release. The lineup of “4am” also suggests that this additional number could have been recorded during the Sunlight sessions.

7. Noted in the album liner notes by Bob Belden and David Rubinson to Herbie Hancock, The Piano, Sony Jazz 87083, 2004, compact disc (originally Columbia 1033, 1979, LP).

8. Stuart Nicholson, Jazz‐Rock: A History (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1998), 193.

9. Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 367.

10. James Lincoln Collier, The Making of Jazz (London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1978), 495.

11. Peter Keepnews, “Jazz Since 1968,” in The Oxford Companion to Jazz, ed. Bill Kirchner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 491.

12. Howard Mandel, “Herbie Hancock: Of Films, Fairlights, Funk … and All That Other Jazz,” Down Beat, July 1986, 17.

13. Mark Gridley, Jazz Styles: History and Analysis, 7th ed. (New Jersey: Prentice‐Hall International, 2000), 321.

14. Steven F. Pond, Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters: Troubling the Waters of Jazz (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2000).

15. Steven F. Pond, Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz's First Platinum Album (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

16. David Liebman, A Chromatic Approach to Jazz Harmony and Melody (Rottenburg, Germany: Advance Music, 1991), 13.

17. Interview with Julia Coryell, in Julia Coryell, Jazz‐Rock Fusion: The People, The Music (New York: Hal Leonard, 1978), 161–162.

18. The altered mode is derived from the dominant seventh chord, with every possible pitch altered that allows it to still maintain its dominant characteristics (i.e., retaining the major third and minor seventh). The alterations are thus: flattened ninth; sharpened ninth; sharpened eleventh; and flattened thirteenth. Because the sharpened eleventh is essentially a diminished fifth, the perfect fifth is most often omitted. The resulting mode can be enharmonically described as the seventh mode of the melodic minor scale, hence the C altered mode is an equivalent to Db melodic minor.

19. Waters, “Blurring the Barline,” 19.

20. Pond, Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters, 103.

21. Interview with Bret Primack, quoted in Mark Gilbert's CD liner notes to Herbie Hancock, Man‐Child, Sony 9563, 2003, compact disc (originally CBS 33812, 1975, LP).