Herbie Hancock, unlike Miles, has never been afraid to revisit his back catalogue and this Sunday’s concert in Manchester was a trip down memory lane. However, as we know, revisiting is usually rather more than revamping.
This evening’s concert started with ‘Actual Proof’ from Hancock’s second Headhunters’ album, Thrust, And for a while in there it seemed as though Hancock had found a rhythm section to rival the Michael Clark/Paul Jackson combination that drove the Headhunters into superstardom. Terence Blanchard’s current drummer, Kendrick Scott and bass player James Genus move this group as though from the heart itself. And, as Hancock himself said, Scott is very much a listening drummer, moving through the dynamics with ease and virtuosity.
The concert moved onto a combination of a reworking of the classic ‘Speak Like a Child’ and Wayne Shorter’s ‘The Visitor’. Hancock has always been able to write in such away that the theme and its framework seem to ease themselves away from their mooring and float, taking the group and the soloists with them. The soloists here were Blanchard’s trumpet and the harmonica of Swiss-born Gregoire Maret, and this instrumentation combined with Hancock’s Korg floated the tunes from silky lyricism towards a free atmospherics. Blanchard is a trumpeter very much in the Miles mould, alternating short stabbing phrases with soaring runs into the higher registers to give a sense of real authority and strength. Maret is a virtuosic harmonica player who is perhaps still finding the way to swing in this company. In Benin-born guitarist Lionel Louete, Hancock has found guitar player who blends the influences of the West African guitarists with the contemporary sound of a John Schofield.
And it is the tension with swing that often underlines Hancock’s bands. There were times when this band seemed to re-echo Miles’ Jack Johnson sessions, with a charged darkness that seemed to open a gap beneath itself. It wasn’t really until the leader himself sat to play ‘April in Paris’ as an acoustic solo that the ‘melody, logic and soul’, that Julian Joseph sees in Hancock’s playing, really shone through. After that things took off; and we were treated to an opulent version of the original ‘Watermelon Man’, and finally, a twenty minute encore of ‘Chameleon’. It was then that we were truly in the presence of the man who had achieved his ambition – to out-groove Sly and the Family Stone.
Ian Pople