Word: hancock
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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From Uzbekistan with Love--Bakhor Folk Dance Ensemble, John Hancock Hall...
Several continuing events provide an excellent excuse to spend a sunny reading period afternoon wandering around Boston (exams are weeks away...) The lobby of the John Hancock Building and the mezzanine of Boston City Hall share an exhibit called Jazz...A Visual Experience which brings together the work of eleven local artists and photographers. Jazz artists lend themselves to this sort of treatment--the music is inseparable from the men who make it--and both exhibitions are free...
...Hancock responded to his critics by bringing together the V.S.O.P. Quintet, basically a reformation of a ground-breaking Miles Davis group minus Miles, at the 1976 Newport Jazz Festival. The Quintet played the kind of dense, improvisational music that Miles had been experimenting with in the late '60s, and their performance was so well received that the Quintet recorded two live albums and went on a major concert tour in 1977. Their reunion was highly-touted and very well attended, and the musicians were praised for revitalizing exciting and difficult musical forms...
...Then Hancock joined fellow crossover artist Chick Corea for a series of duet piano concerts, which reconfirmed both players as skilled and important improvisationsts. Both the Quintet and the piano tour served to generate among fusion fans an interest in mainstream jazz, and both were commercially successful. But both projects seem to have been dropped, and Herbie Hancock is back on the road with his funk band...
...Hancock answers his detractors by claiming that all musical forms have validity, and I am inclined to agree. It's still hard, though, to reconcile his fusion performances with his brilliant, and sensitive jazz style. On recent albums he plays simplistic music on a barrage of electronic instruments. He sings through a vocal synthesizer. His infrequent piano spots are usually mixed down so far as to be barely audible. His band is topnotch--it includes accomplished jazz players like Bennie Maupin and Alphonse Mouzon--but the high level of players like Bennie Maupin and Alphonse Mouzon--but the high level...