Word: hancockers
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From Uzbekistan with Love--Bakhor Folk Dance Ensemble, John Hancock Hall...
Speaking of selling out, Herbie Hancock is coming to town this weekend with his "All-Star Funk Unit", also a part of the Globe Festival. We can all have fun sticking up our noses at disco, funk, and other repetitive mood music, but when musicians of Hancock's caliber choose this route it forces some serious questions. Hancock is a terrific jazz musician who rose through the tradition and then (many would say) abandoned it to form the Headhunters, a prototypical jazz-funk fusion group. The Headhunters brought Hancock mass appeal of a kind never before experienced by a jazz...
...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...