This is a new Music On Vinyl pressing of Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters
Head Hunters was a pivotal point in Herbie Hancock's career, bringing him into the vanguard of jazz fusion. Hancock had pushed avant-garde boundaries on his own albums and with Miles Davis, but he had never devoted himself "to the groove" as he did on Head Hunters.
Drawing heavily from Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, and James Brown, Hancock developed deeply funky, even gritty, rhythms over which he soloed on electric synthesizers, bringing the instrument to the forefront in jazz. It had all of the sensibilities of jazz, in the way it wound off into long improvisations, but it's rhythms were firmly planted in funk, soul, and R&B, giving it a mass appeal that made it the biggest-selling jazz album of all time (a record later broken).
Jazz purists, of course, decried the experiments at the time, but Head Hunters still sounds fresh and vital decades after its initial release. It's genre-bending proved vastly influential on not only jazz, but funk, soul, and hip-hop.
Label: Music on Vinyl
Includes Herbie Hancock, Bennie Maupin Bill Summers Harvey Mason, Sr. Oren Waters Paul Jackson
TRACK LISTING
1 Chameleon
2 Watermelon Man
3 Sly
4 Vein Melter