From Herbie to Herwig and Back Again

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The New York Sun

It’s little wonder that one of Herbie Hancock’s most famous tunes is called “Chameleon”: Any newcomer who listens to one of his more abstract piano solos with Eric Dolphy, then to one of his complex compositions of the mid-’60s, which incorporate elements of modal jazz and free jazz, and then to “Headhunters” or another of his funky fusion works of the 1970s (including “Chameleon”) will swear that he is listening to the work of two or three different and equally ingenious musicians.

Mr. Hancock has a pop side, highly accessible and user-friendly, and an avant-garde side, which produces richly complex music that rewards deep and repeated listening; perhaps the reason that his latest album, the Grammy-winning “The Joni Letters,” is such a smash hit is because he has never incorporated both spheres of his musical personality into the same project more skillfully.

To quote the title of Mr. Hancock’s third album (from 1963), there are ever more “Inventions and Dimensions” to the work of this increasingly iconic pianist, composer, and bandleader. Currently, two of Mr. Hancock’s admirers are reworking his signature compositions in much the same way Mr. Hancock has done in recent years for the music of George Gershwin and Joni Mitchell. This week, the trombonist Conrad Herwig is presenting “The Latin Side of Herbie Hancock” at the Blue Note, and earlier this year, the pianist John Beasley released his album “Letter to Herbie.”

Mr. Herwig’s engagement at the Blue Note is the latest in his series of Latinate reimaginings of the works of central jazz figures, which have included two figures very close to Mr. Hancock: Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter. In every instance, he has combined famous and lesser-known works by his subject — in Mr. Hancock’s case, from “Maiden Voyage” to “Oliloqui Valley” — and reworked them with a vigorous Havana-style salsa, utilizing a tight Cubop band that’s equal parts Art Blakey and Ray Barretto. Mr. Herwig features a three-horn frontline (himself plus Craig Handy on reeds and Mike Rodriguez on trumpet) and a Latin-inflected rhythm section (Bill O’Connell on piano, Ruben Rodriguez on Fender bass, Robbie Ameen on drums, and Pedro Martinez on percussion), plus two special guests, the trumpet headliner Randy Brecker and veteran Puerto Rican pianist Eddie Palmieri.

The effect is to make Mr. Hancock’s abstract melodies more distinct and his fusion-y tunes more fundamentally boppish. When you listen to Miles Davis’s original 1967 recording of Mr. Hancock’s abstract “The Sorcerer,” for instance, you’re never really cognizant of the melody — the main thing is the individual solos and the sorcery, as it were, of the extended trade of phrases between Davis and Mr. Shorter. Mr. Herwig’s arrangement of “Sorcerer,” which he performed at the Blue Note, includes the chase chorus, restaged as a brass battle between himself and Mr. Brecker, but there’s also a lot more of what you might call the melody. The more fusion-oriented “Oliloqui Valley,” meanwhile, becomes a compelling exercise in jazz repertory, climaxing in a tutti passage whereby Mr. Herwig transcribed the original 1964 Hancock piano solo (from “Empyrean Isles”) and arranged it for three horns — trumpet, trombone, and tenor — playing in tight harmony without the benefit of piano.

Like an expert travel agent, Mr. Herwig, with the aid of Mr. Palmieri, redirected the famous “Maiden Voyage” from a vaguely Caribbean destination into a sea cruise to San Juan. But Mr. Herwig is also smart enough not to look a gift horse in the mouth: Where a Hancock classic already has a Latin component, he’s not about to let it go to waste. The tune that originally established Mr. Hancock’s bona fides as a composer was 1962’s “Watermelon Man,” an early example of Latin funk that was a hit for Mongo Santamaria. At the Blue Note, “Watermelon Man” also climaxed in a trade of riffs and licks, doled out on the principle of diminishing returns: The four horns (including both trumpeters) traded eight-bar phrases, then fours, then twos, until they were challenging each other to see who could stuff the most notes into a couple of beats.

The opening set on Tuesday closed with what could be called the second half of the Herbie Hancock fruit medley, from “Watermelon Man” to “Cantaloupe Island.” This much-sampled tune, one of the definitive 6/8 Afro-Latin jazz vamps, provided a high-energy climax, with the horns charging like bulls down the streets of Pamplona. Or maybe, since Mr. Handy quoted “The Mexican Hat Dance,” it was the streets of Guadalajara.

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Likewise, there’s some genre-hopping at play on John Beasley’s “Letter to Herbie.” “4 AM,” which Mr. Hancock originally played on a 1980 fusionista album (“Mr. Hands”), is here done as a straight-ahead acoustic trio number with bassist Christian McBride and drummer Jeff Watts. But revisionism isn’t exactly the point; the guiding idea is to revisit a variety of tunes from all over the pianist’s career in formats that include the trio as well as the trumpeter Roy Hargrove, who performed with Mr. Hancock on the famous “Directions in Music” album.

Mr. Beasley, who, like Mr. Hancock, also toured with Miles Davis and is well known in both pop and “commercial” music (whatever that means) as well as jazz, is at his most creative when combining several lines in original and arresting ways. On “Letter to Herbie,” rather than playing “Maiden Voyage” straight, he juxtaposes it with the somewhat similar “Tell Me a Bedtime Story” from 1969, placing both tunes in a copacetic key and titling the result “Bedtime Voyage.” He also takes one of Mr. Hancock’s boppier classics, “One Finger Snap,” and stretches it out to the point where two more fingers are necessary — hence the “Three Finger Snap.”

But the money track, for me, is “The Naked Camera,” which was a somewhat dark and somber 3/4 on Mr. Hancock’s “Blow Up” soundtrack in 1966, but here becomes a much more cheerful Afro-Caribbean excursion, with light electronics and pop flavoring evoking Carlos Santana and Bob Marley.

Messrs. Herwig and Beasley serve to increase our anticipation for Mr. Hancock’s albums and voyages to come, maiden or otherwise.

wfriedwald@nysun.com


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