Retracing Herbie Hancock’s Ascendant Career Back to its Launch Pad
Hancock’s debut album Takin’ Off, recorded in 1962, showcases a young jazz innovator who was going places.
By Allan Ripp
March 2024
There’s probably never been a jazz artist with the recording span of Herbie Hancock. From his early days in the 1960s as a house pianist for Blue Note Records to the many all-star ensembles he’s fronted and his more recent collaborations with hip-hop and pop stars, Hancock’s discography is as diverse as it is long. Who else could have laid tracks with Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Eric Dolphy, Wes Montgomery, Paul Desmond and Miles Davis, as well as Sting, Tina Turner, John Mayer, Annie Lennox, Chaka Khan, Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell?
Yet despite his vast credits over seven decades — including 14 Grammys — Hancock has issued a relatively small catalog of albums under his own name, while introducing jazz classics like “Maiden Voyage,” “Cantaloupe Island” and “Speak Like a Child.” His output as a recording headliner is especially sparse compared with other piano greats of his generation, namely Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett and McCoy Tyner, who churned out serial albums while Hancock went years without fronting one. His last album was in 2010, The Imagine Project, but that hasn’t stopped his frequent studio work backing other musicians, or concert tours, even during Covid — even after turning 84 this April 12 (he is currently on a U.S. tour, with dates through August 2024: https://www.herbiehancock.com/tour/).
Rewinding Hancock’s extraordinary recording career takes a listener back to May 28, 1962, when he cut his first album as a leader for Blue Note, aptly titled, Takin’ Off. Kennedy was in the White House, Khrushchev was Soviet premier and John Glenn had just orbited the earth when Herbie walked into Rudy Van Gelder’s storied studio in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. He brought a quintet featuring tenor sax legend Dexter Gordon and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, plus bassist Butch Warren and drummer Billy Higgins, all hard Bop veterans.
Hancock was 22, not far past graduating from Grinnell College in Iowa with an electrical engineering degree and music minor. But he’d been causing a stir in jazz circles since being discovered by trumpeter Donald Byrd, who hired Herbie to anchor the rhythm section on two of his own Blue Note records.
Classically trained (he performed with the Chicago Symphony at age 7), Hancock had virtuosic chops but wasn’t showy. His sound was bluesy, his touch percussive. He had a keen harmonic sense and a storyteller’s voice that made his comping and solos attention-grabbing. And he could compose. Auditioning for Blue Note president Alfred Lion, he tried out a couple of his own tunes, including a funky number called “Watermelon Man;” its bouncy beat and wailing lead-in recalled a fruit peddler who called out wares dragging a wagon along the cobblestoned alleys of Chicago’s South Side, where Hancock grew up. Lion was so impressed he told Hancock he could dispense with other familiar standards and fill the session with his own music, an unheard-of offer for a newbie making his first album.
Trumpet-tenor quintets were a jazz staple of the day — hard-driving groups led by Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. For his debut, Hancock stretched the format with modified tempos and voicings that had a distinctly modern feel. Consider “Three Bags Full,” a D-Minor waltz deploying clever harmonic tension and resolve between the two horns before opening up in full swing. Herbie launches his solo repeating a single line three times, each with a different accent, before skipping effortlessly through the changes until building to a brilliant chordal conclusion challenging the song’s meter. Like many of his recorded solos, it’s been transcribed by ardent followers.
Another minor-key revelation is “The Maze,” sporting a hummable melody that zigs and zags, giving Hubbard and Gordon ample room to frolic, with breaks between solos for the rhythm section to improvise freely. A seemingly conventional Bop chart, “The Maze” was both of its time and ahead of it, a judgment that suits the entire outing. It also showcases Hancock’s emerging talents as an arranger, which blossomed in coming years with larger bands and film scores like Blow Up, Death Wish and A Soldier’s Story.
Other gems include a snappy 12-bar blues “Empty Pockets,” the syncopated “Drfitin’’” and “Alone and I”, a moody ballad showing Gordon/Hubbard at their warmest and underscoring how great players often did their finest work with Hancock. But the true breakout hit was “Watermelon Man,” which brought Hancock royalty riches the following year from a top-selling cover by conga bandleader Mongo Santamaria. Hancock’s version is riffier, groovier and impossible to listen to without setting some body part in motion; along with Ramsey Lewis’s “Hang On Sloopy,” it’s the quintessence of 60s soul jazz, and yielded hundreds of recorded covers in years to come (Herbie would update it electronically a decade later for his mega album Head Hunters).
Following the album’s release in July, Hancock went into overdrive, using his “Watermelon Man” earnings to buy a Shelby Cobra for $6,000 (his mentor Donald Byrd had one). He clocked some 10 sideman sessions with Grant Green, Hank Mobley, Jackie McLean and other stalwarts before returning to Englewood Cliffs as a leader the following March for his second LP, My Point of View. The same month he entered a Columbia studio to make his first record with Miles Davis (Seven Steps to Heaven), after which his stock rose exponentially, and the rest is jazz history.
Takin’ Off was reissued in 1996 with three outstanding alternate takes, adding 18.5 minutes of sublimity and proving that Hancock’s rejects surpassed others’ A-list material. The Rough Guide to Jazz, called it “one of the most accomplished and stunning debuts in the history of jazz.”
For anyone in possession of the actual album, Herbie appears on the cover playing a C6/9 chord, just one coordinate in a jazz innovator’s soaring flight path.
Allan Ripp runs a press relations firm in New York.
