My review of Herbie Hancock's The Complete Columbia Albums Collection 1972-1988, today at AllAboutJazz.com
As Legacy Records slowly works its way through complete album collection boxes for artists ranging from Stanley Clarke and The Brecker Brothers to the massive Miles Davis and Johnny Cash boxes, one of the notable absences has been keyboardist Herbie Hancock. While he was not a Columbia artist for as long as either Cash or Davis, he was around long enough to release a total of 31 albums over the course of seventeen years—though a full 25 percent of them were never issued Stateside.
Legacy redeems itself with the long overdue The Complete Columbia Albums Collection 1972-1988 by including everything Hancock recorded for Columbia and Sony Japan, including eight recordings seeing their first light of day in North America. But more than satisfying fans outside of Japan by making these titles available for the first time, they paint the single broadest picture of Hancock's multifarious interests; Hancock may have first emerged most decidedly in the jazz world on Blue Note in the 1960s with albums like Takin' Off (1962), Maiden Voyage (1965) and The Prisoner (1969)—along, of course, with his tenure in Miles Davis' second great quintet of the same decade—but it was during his years recording for Columbia that he first demonstrated what has ultimately become an even more visible truth with recent projects like his Joni Mitchell tribute set, River: The Joni Letters (Verve, 2007) and more pop-oriented Possibilities (Hear Music, 2005) and The Imagine Project (Herbie Hancock Music, 2010): Herbie Hancock has really never been solely a jazz musician; he's been a musician, period.
These 31 albums spread over 34 CDs (plus a particularly informative 200-page softbound book that also comes in this compact, square box measuring a little over 5"x5"x5") cover a lot of stylistic ground, including the more abstract electronic musings of Sextant (1973), with his Mwandishi group; the funk-infused fusion of Head Hunters (1973) and Thrust (1974); film scores for Death Wish (1975) and Round Midnight (1986); hard-swinging post-bop with his V.S.O.P. Quintet on The Quintet (1977) and Live Under the Sky (1979); disco-oriented vocal and Vocoder music with Sunlight (1977) and Feets Don't Fail Me Now (1979); an Afro-centric collaboration with koto master Foday Musa Suso, Village Life (1985); his direct-to-disc solo piano excursion, [i]The Piano (1979) and live, four-handed piano duo date, An Evening With Herbie Hancock & Chick Corea (1978); and the keyboardist's groundbreaking techno trilogy with bassist/producer Bill Laswell: Future Shock (1983), which yielded the #1 hit on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play list, "Rockit," along with Sound-System (1984) and Perfect Machine (1988).
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