There’s a lot of looking backward in the jazz world. And that’s not a bad thing: it could be argued that one of the greatest contributions of jazz education today is its focus on a history that bucks all trends of planned obsolescence and the hellish, eternal now of consumer culture. Jazz brings with it a lesson in memory that counters all those oversimplified histories of Great White Men that reactionaries so often celebrate. So when I see the great Duke Ellington celebrated by Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Memphis’ own Central High School Jazz Band named the best young purveyors of that tradition in the world, I get choked up. Take that, AI!
But it’s important to recall the other face of jazz, the face that looks forward into the future, or inward into the soul, by breaking with all tradition, embracing the innovative, the extemporaneous, and the improvised. And at the Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC) last Saturday, that was the face of Herbie Hancock and his quintet.
You can’t say he didn’t warn us. “We’re gonna do some really strange things,” he quipped after he’d greeted crowd in the sold-out Highland Capital Performance Hall. “You like strange and weird music?” he asked, as the audience replied with shouts and cheers of encouragement. “I always ask the audience that, and they always go ‘Yeah!’ Are you sure? Because I’m gonna start with this synthesizer. This is a Korg Kronos, right?”
With that, perhaps by way of reassurance, he launched into some mellow chords using a sound akin to a Fender Rhodes electric piano. But then he stopped and said, “I’m gonna start with something weirder than that.”
The swooping starship sounds that followed then led to an atmospheric, improvised workout that initially sounded more like a classic Tomita electronic music track, further evolving as the band fell in one by one. It was utterly captivating and absolutely unpredictable.
The band, featuring Terence Blanchard (trumpet), James Genus (bass), Lionel Loueke (guitar and vocals), and Jaylen Petinaud (drums), matched Hancock’s “weirdness” with inventiveness and aplomb, as the extended jam morphed into brief snippets of his better-known tunes before moving on to other tempos and textures. Some echoed Hancock’s exquisite early improv work like Inventions & Dimensions when he played the acoustic piano, pivoting on his bench between that and the Korg.
It was a journey that dipped back into history, then leapt into unknown sonic landscapes — at times more like a roller coaster ride. Nearly a half hour later, it ended to wild applause, and Hancock told us dryly, “Thank you, that was the overture.”
And indeed it had been, preparing us for the remaining hour and a half to come, without breaks. Blanchard, a deservedly renowned composer in his own right, never faltered with his warm, wailing tone, keeping an organic, emotional grounding in the sonic swirl to match Hancock’s piano and Petinaud’s blend of classic kit work and atmospheric cymbals. Meanwhile, Genus and Loueke never shirked from the possibilities of effects pedals, especially Loueke’s processed guitar interjections that brought their own synthesizer flavors to the group. And he also introduced the percussive guitar lines of his native Benin into the mix, subtly adding an African dimension to Hancock’s music.
The shining example of this was Loueke’s funktastic arrangement of a medley that included “Hang Up Your Hang Ups,” “Rockit,” and “Spider,” all some of the finest jazz-funk from Hancock’s catalog. From there, Hancock ramped up the funk factor even further when he strapped on a keytar (a keyboard held like a guitar) and launched into the synth bass line of “Chameleon,” the ultra-groovy opening track from his masterpiece, Head Hunters.
That was the incendiary finale that had the crowd rising to an uproarious standing ovation for the 85-year-old powerhouse player and his group. And yet, what really stuck with me as I filed out with the rest of the audience was a quieter moment in the show, a sort of break for the band while Hanock sat at the Korg and improvised an open meditation on our unity as a species. It was the night’s most definitive voyage into the future, given that even his synth-funk is a half century old.
He spoke and sang through a vocoder, so his voice rang out with the tones of the keyboard’s synth tones. It was more like a Laurie Anderson bit than any jazz I’ve ever heard. And in this soliloquy of sorts, he exhorted us to be more polite … to robots.
“We don’t thank them enough for what they do for us,” he said. “Think about it… they are our new children, aren’t they? They really are. Don’t you think it might be important to teach them, teach them ethics?” From there he went on to meditate on humanity itself, asking the musical question, “How many families are there on the earth?”
With that, he moved to his real, human voice on the other mic and said “You know what my answer is?” And he silently held up a single finger to signify the number, as some in the audience half-gasped the word, “One.”