HERBIE HANCOCK

Sextant duTTOn vOCalIOn Back to the future with revelatory quad mix.

Now aged 79 and still working, Hancock’s career can be neatly divided into bite-sized chunks; the Blue Note years; Miles Davis’ second great quintet; Head Hunters funk period; the vocoderbased pop hits; the raucous hip-hop mashup with Bill Laswell; the keytar-struttin’ Herbie, and so on. Having topped enough readers’ polls to supply a New York ticker-tape parade, not to mention the armfuls of Grammy awards he’s received, success and Hancock appear to have gone hand-inhand. Yet it wasn’t always like that. The three albums of the Mwandishi period – Mwandishi (1971), Crossings (1972) and Sextant (1973) – in which he pursued free-ranging abstract music that incorporated extensive experimental electronics, are still underplayed.

The first two in the trilogy marked the end of Hancock’s tenure with Warner Brothers, who chose to jump before he was pushed. Signing to Columbia, Sextant doubled down on his Afro-centric inner space explorations, adding synth-wrangler Patrick Gleeson full-time to the lineup. The eight-piece band did gigs with a quadrophonic PA and we can get a sense of how that might have sounded thanks to Columbia’s quadrophonic mix issued in 1973 to tempt in the audiophile market. It’s this mix that’s been brought to SACD for the first time by the ever-reliable Dutton Vocalion label – and it is spectacular.

The surround-sound picture is a vast canvas that’s truly immersive, affording dramatic shifts in perspective.

Hancock’s drifting Mellotron and echoplexed Fender Rhodes piano dart from corner to corner like swarming fireflies, while Eddie Henderson’s trumpet arcs across the moody terrain and proto-world music stylings with a shimmering, meteoric afterglow. However, it’s Gleeson’s ARP synths, with their hair-raising sonic fireworks exploding to the extreme edges, that astonish and delight. Though Head Hunters would bring commercial success, Hancock has never sounded as out-there or as spikily adventurous as he does here.