‘You’ll Know When You Get There’: Herbie Hancock & Band blow minds at UB Center for the Arts show
At 85, the iconic musician remains at the cutting edge of music and technology
On Sunday evening, living legend Herbie Hancock transformed UB’s Center for the Arts into a sacred space, and took the full house on a journey through his storied, boundary-pushing career.
Fronting a band representing multiple generations of top-tier jazz talent, Herbie proved that, at 85, he remains at the leading edge of music, technology, and showmanship.
From the moment he wandered into the studio on a 1968 Miles Davis recording date to find that ‘The Chief’ expected him to perform on a Fender Rhodes electric piano - legend has it that the still-young keyboardist, who’d been playing with Miles for 5 years by that point, muttered something like, ‘You want me to play on that toy?’ - Herbie has remained at the forefront of the highly charged and potentially perilous nexus where music and technology meet.
Fittingly, then, Sunday’s show offered a thematic through-line, one that pushed the envelope consistently, marrying lofty improvisational abilities with empathic ensemble interplay, while implying that technology is only as good or as bad as the goals of the human beings wielding it. (More on this idea later…)
When Herbie and the band ambled onto the stage, the CFA erupted in applause, but the man offered some immediate insight into what was to come. “This is going to get weird - really weird,” he laughed. “Are you ready? Are you sure you’re ready?”
With that, and following Herbie’s framing of what was to come as a sonic imagining of what sound might’ve been like before human beings were there to observe and interpret it, the band launched into an improvisational overture that might be labelled ‘The Prehistoric Jam.’
Immediately, the strength of Herbie’s band - guitarist Lionel Loueke, trumpeter Terence Blanchard, bassist James Genus, and drummer Jaylen Petinaud - became apparent. These are among the finest musicians currently working, and all were more than comfortable proving as much, with a healthy blend of subtlety, bombast, and grace.
My ears urged my brain to interpret the ensemble sound as similar in substance to Herbie’s Mwandishi period - the incredibly fertile span of time between 1971 and 1974, when the keyboardist led a game-changing band through the heady outer reaches of what we might loosely describe as ‘free jazz’ on the albums Mwandishi, Crossings and Sextant, eventually evolving into the fiery, funky one-two punch of 1974’s Head Hunters and Thrust albums.
During this period, Herbie and his collaborators created revolutionary music that blended Black American and African influences with a fusion of organic acoustic and brazenly beautiful electric and electronic sounds, taking the sonic forays Miles Davis directed on albums like In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson into the future. (I highly recommend an excellent book on this period - Bob Gluck’s authoritative You’ll Know When You Get There, which you can find here.)
The ‘Prehistoric Jam’ went way out there, but it brought us back home in the end. And then the band got down to it, like the absolute masters they are.
Trumpeter Blanchard’s arrangement of Wayne Shorter’s timeless Footprints - dedicated by Herbie to his best friend Wayne, ‘who is gone but lives right here in my heart, always’ - offered a master class in dynamic interplay and featured the finest soloing any of us who were in the house are ever likely to hear.
Blanchard, employing subtle effects on his horn, offered actual proof of why he is, as my friend, the great Buffalo jazz trumpeter Jakob Jay texted me after the show, “on the short list of people who could be considered the greatest living trumpet player.” Blanchard’s soloing scaled mountain peaks, dug deep into dark valleys, and emerged triumphant. This was straight-up fire. It knocked the breath from me. And I wasn’t alone.
Loueke, a remarkable player who seemingly effortlessly blends multiple influences (African, R&B, funk, blues, world beat, jazz) with a distinctive use of pitch-shifting, various modulation effects, and scat-singing accompaniment, is one of a precious few contemporary guitarists who might be described as (literally) unique. His buoyant fluency offered gorgeous counterpoint to Herbie’s tension-filled stabs against the rhythm section throughout, as the ensemble made playing in oppositional time signatures simultaneously sound easy, organic and natural. No small feat.
“Actual Proof” fully celebrated the strength of the band members, as an ensemble and as individual players. Again, Blanchard blew a solo straight toward heaven, and the interplay between bassist Genus and drummer Petinaud was sublime - funky as hell, for sure, but always responding to and challenging Herbie’s rhythmic flourishes and unbelievably eloquent lines. “Butterfly” and “Secret Sauce” offered further fire, moving lithely through moments of jaw-dropping intensity and pure beauty.
And then the show hit its thematic peak.
Seated at his Korg Kronos keyboard, Herbie addressed the crowd through the synth-like vocoder he helped to pioneer in jazz and r&b 50 years ago, delivering a 25 minute improv piece with harmonically dense and rich chords beneath, connecting technology to the concept of humanity being one family with different eye and skin color based on proximity to the equator.
This was challenging, abstract and at times avant garde art, and it must be said that not everyone in attendance seemed to get it. About 10 minutes into the piece, there was some distinct grumbling from some quarters, and a handful of folks began to file out. Most of us seemed to find the whole thing fascinating, though, and we sat rapt as Herbie led us through his emotional and often hilarious musical discourse. I’ll quote my friend, trumpeter Jakob Jay, once again: “I mean, Herbie has always been on the forefront of music and technology. The ‘Rockit’ music video is low-key about the same subject and it came out in the 80’s.”
Facts.
What an incredible experience, to share such an intimate and inviting space with the man who is our greatest living link to the deepest strains of jazz, and his collective of masterful musicians. An absolute honor, in fact.
If this is what 85 years old can look like, well, I’m looking forward to getting there.
Bless Herbie for putting THAT band together. And bless YOU for remembering his wonderful early -'70's "Mwaindishi" period, which enthralled me, especially when he brought the gang to Bemo Crockett's "Revilot Club." on West Utica.
It was an amazing show