Herbie Hancock Mwandishi: The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings CD

 Easy to Lose Yourself In for Long Stretches
I find the one thread that links all of Herbie Hancock's diverse music, from the early Blue Note albums to the great Miles bands to this Warner Bros. era to VSOP to jazz-funk to snyth-disco, is the feeling that you can lose yourself completely in it. There's a broad sweep, an expansive texture; it's partly the way he voices chords on the piano, open and impressionistic, but there's more to it than that. On this collection, which includes all three of the albums he recorded for Warner Brothers in the early 70s (on two CDs), Herbie gets that expansive sound by playing with different arrangements of instruments and song forms. The music from the first album (Fat Albert Rotunda) is funky, danceable, just nice tight grooves and simple improv (from the earliest days of jazz-funk, mind you; nothing derivative here!). The next two albums, Mwandishi and Crossings, retain the groove in the bottom end (bass, drums, piano accompinament) but the songs spread out. Horns, reeds and piano play with snatches of melody for long, wistful stretches. In the hands of some bandleaders, this meandering might have less merit; but with Hancock in charge, that yearning, mystical quality is always there. While not all of these tracks are memorable for me, the texture of this entire collection is smooth and mesmerizing, start to finish. The price is right, and the packaging is good (great photos, interesting new essay by Blumenthal just for this repackaging). If you like Herbie's 60s stuff, if you also enjoy funky jazz or spacy jam sessions like In a Silent Way, you'll enjoy this. If you mostly think of Hancock as the Headhunters leader, you might be disappointed.
Submitted by Keith (San Jose, CA)
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