Rating:
Genre:
Jazz
Release Date: 09/17/2007
Run Time: 41:34
Head Hunters was a pivotal point in
Herbie Hancock's career, bringing him into the vanguard of
jazz fusion.
Hancock had pushed
avant-garde boundaries on his own albums and with
Miles Davis, but he had never devoted himself to the groove as he did on
Head Hunters. Drawing heavily from
Sly Stone,
Curtis Mayfield, and
James Brown,
Hancock developed deeply funky, even gritty, rhythms over which he soloed on electric synthesizers, bringing the instrument to the forefront in
jazz. It had all of the sensibilities of
jazz, particularly in the way it wound off into long improvisations, but its rhythms were firmly planted in
funk,
soul, and
R&B, giving it a mass appeal that made it the biggest-selling
jazz album of all time (a record which was later broken).
Jazz purists, of course, decried the experiments at the time, but
Head Hunters still sounds fresh and vital decades after its initial release, and its genre-bending proved vastly influential on not only
jazz, but
funk,
soul, and
hip-hop.
~Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
;)
Listen
