Legacy & a Love for Jazz:Herbie Hancock Still Delivers
DIVING RIGHT INTO THE DEEP END OF HIS MUSICAL LEGACY, ELDER STATESMAN OF JAZZ HERBIE HANCOCK grabbed the audience and threw us into the deep end of the pool with him. The lights had barely gone down when all of a sudden the ensemble was cooking—hot, fast, switching tempos, a high-speed ride through 40 years of jazz through the eyes of Herbie. Set before the rich velvet backdrop of the Arlington on a Wednesday night, the band touched on his classic songs like “Chameleon,” and “Cantaloupe Island,” but also allowed each member to chart their own course, to fantastic results.
At 83, Herbie’s legacy in jazz and contemporary music (he won the 2008 Album of the Year Grammy, rare for a jazz artist) is rock solid. Despite well-deserved honorary degrees, academic positions and awards, (UCLA, Harvard University, Kennedy Center Honors, Washington University in St. Louis, 14 Grammys) he is inspired by the pure joy of music itself and moves accordingly.
He was a source of raw energy on stage, leading the band on the keys, switching from a grand piano to the synthesizer and occasionally to the clavinet, almost as a quick afterthought. At the end, he treated us to breaking out the keytar, almost a nod to “Rockit,” his most pop friendly song, one breakdancers performed to relentlessly in the late 80s.
Having found his own first success as a player in the Miles Davis Quintet, Herbie is adept at putting together the right kind of players, which he certainly did this night at the Arlington. All professionals and passionate, every member of his ensemble deserves praise.
James Genus, on bass, kept the rhythm tight but also knew when to let the band cut loose. Chris Potter played saxophone with a nimble curiosity for the unknown. Devin Daniels, also on saxophone and the youngest in the group, was borderline anarchistic, unmooring the rhythm section as a challenge to himself to lead them back into the pocket, which he did again and again—Trevor Lawrence, on drums, was right there along with him, quick and mercurial as the best jazz drummers have to be. The most haunting, however, was Terence Blanchard, on the trumpet, a last minute addition to the set. Blanchard is an elder statesman himself, a prolific jazz artist who’s scored over 40 movies—and truly understood when less is more, as his solos were lean and cut to the soul of the moment.
Besides a crash course in jazz and Herbie’s discography, the Buddhist in him was present as well. Blending his voice and synthesizer with the vocoder, Hancock spent a good ten minutes in the middle of the show to reflect. The band stepped back as Herbie went a cappella, somewhere between singing and ruminations about, well, everything. Life, serenity, war, family, the conflict of seeking to be whole. Herbie has a way of speaking that is full of dramatic pauses and the audience was game to listen.
Herbie’s use of technology within the fiercely analog world of jazz was also reflected by Genus and Potter, who used looping pedals to play over their own riffs. The difference here is with most use of this technology you can tell what is the loop and what is being played over it. But in both of these cases, the notes became mercurial to the point it was impossible to discern the live from the looped, and it didn’t matter. Both soloists took us on a journey through rich tapestries of harmony and melody.
The show was a little over two hours but not a moment felt wasted or went by too quickly. That is one of the best qualities of jazz music—in and out of time, in the moment but then everywhere else, with Herbie Hancock right there, leading the way.
