Hancock stretches musical boundaries
Amidst swimming pools and killer grooves, playing on toys, and utilizing tools, it’s nice when an artist still makes time for a moment of sombre, sober contemplation.
Herbie Hancock delved into all that over two hours at the Winspear Centre Thursday, choosing to stretch the boundaries of what many might expect from a jazz fest headliner. The keyboard wizard and his quartet likely left a few patrons in the sold-out hall wondering when they had last heard such a small group create music with such an epic sweep.
Jazz, funk, hip-hop and pop, even a twist of blues and a snatch of West African groove. Spacey orchestral effects, horns and strings. It was all there, at least in some virtual shape or form thanks to the band’s expert command of electronic devices. Complete with an alien love song.
While you used to find Hancock’s music in the jazz section at record stores, it’s worth remembering that at 73, he has enjoyed a long career touching on a bunch of different musical genres.
This time around, he chose to address past accomplishments and highlight the younger talents he’s using to fill out the band: guitarist Lionel Louecke, bassist James Genus, and a powerhouse twentysomething college student on drums, Jonathan Pinson. And if their leader seemed obviously proud of the forces he had commandeered, then they seemed pretty happy to be there too, challenging each other with a driving intensity for much of the show.
Depending on exactly how you counted them, there were only eight or nine tunes in the whole show.
Along with the opening piece Actual Proof, the most recognizable numbers from the Hancock songbook came from his 1970s period leading the funky Headhunters group.
But it was hard to sort out where some pieces ended and others began, especially as the bandleader switched back and forth between acoustic piano and electronic keyboards, maybe using a synth wash as a backdrop to some other solo statement, showing how utterly comfortable he is at combining them.
Early on there was that thing about swimming pools too. Hancock noted that a lot of people in his part of Hollywood have swimming pools that they seldom use, himself included, wondering, “How insane is that?”
I can’t recall how he got on to that subject but it provided a nutty segue into band introductions, and his warning that Louecke was packing a surprise stealth factor.
We got to see that soon enough when the guitarist from Benin, West Africa pulled out an extended solo rhythm feature, using pedals and loops to mimic the sounds of other instruments like acoustic guitar and bass on his electric axe.
The coolest part came when he added a chant in his mother tongue at one point, with vocal percussion at the close. Pinson and Genus had their spotlight moments only briefly in comparison.
Hancock wanted to cover all the bases too.
You could hear him thinking out loud in the big spaces between the notes in a long solo piano feature that came at mid-concert. After maybe ten minutes he chose to augment things with some orchestral colour and brought in a facsimile string section on the synth to underscore his pianistic statements.
I’m not usually a fan of canned strings or horns, but I have to say it worked, because he’s one of the few solid jazz guys who also knows something about working with orchestras. That’s when it clicked that Hancock actually wants to be the leader of a big band.
At several other points he came out from behind the keyboard completely with something he calls a keytar strapped over one shoulder, hamming it up a little to try some musical jousting with Genus and Louecke. Hey, everyone’s got a right to joust, I guess, though the solos he took on the longnecked, four-octave keyboard adapted to a guitar-format had more to do with making impressive noises than finding indepth melodic development.
Watermelon Man and Cantaloupe Island showed up in the party mix and for the encore a few brief minutes of Hancock’s hit Rockit dissolved into another killer funk groove — Chameleon.
Sadly for the quieter jazz fans, acoustic numbers were in the minority, but there was no lack of energy or high spirits from this magnetic combo and their audience picked up on that with delight.