A jazz pianist walks into a San Francisco studio without a guitar player, with a bassist and a percussionist who will soon blow into a beer bottle. The man is Herbie Hancock, who had made a string of ambitious, dense, electric records under the name Mwandishi. On October 26, 1973, Columbia Records released what he recorded that September: Head Hunters, his twelfth studio album and the record that would turn him from a respected jazz innovator into a crossover star.
A lean four-man lineup
The risk was visible in the lineup. Hancock kept only one musician from the Mwandishi sextet, the reed player Bennie Maupin. Around him he built a lean four-man core: Paul Jackson on bass, Bill Summers on percussion, Harvey Mason on drums. They called themselves Headhunters, and they played with a directness that Hancock's previous music had avoided. The album has just four tracks, and none of them sounds like a typical jazz tune.
The biggest shock was what Hancock left out. There is no guitar on Head Hunters. Instead, the lead instrument is a Hohner Clavinet, a keyboard that could slice through a groove like a rhythm guitar but with a sharper, more percussive bite. Hancock also played every synthesizer part himself, dropping Patrick Gleeson, with whom he had shared that role on earlier records. The bass line that opens 'Chameleon' is Hancock on an ARP Odyssey, a synth riff so instantly catchy that it became the album's signature sound.
The bass line that opens 'Chameleon' is Hancock on an ARP Odyssey, a synth riff so instantly catchy that it became the album's signature sound.
Rebuilding Watermelon Man
Track two was an old friend with a new face. 'Watermelon Man' first appeared on Hancock's debut album Takin' Off back in 1962. For Head Hunters, Hancock and Harvey Mason rebuilt the tune from the ground up. Bill Summers blew into a beer bottle to imitate the hindewho flute of the Mbuti pygmies from Zaire, and African percussion filled the track. The tune now sounded like a street festival from another continent.
Not everyone was ready for a jazz musician to play this way. The charts settled the argument. Head Hunters climbed to No. 13 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. It stayed in the top 30 and top 5 of those respective charts until the end of the following year. Until George Benson's Breezin' arrived in 1976, Hancock's album was the biggest-selling jazz record ever made. The album runs 41 minutes, yet its impact stretched far beyond that runtime. In 2008 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
The four tracks each had a job to do. 'Chameleon' opened with that famous synth bass line and stretched it into a slow-building groove. 'Sly' was a tribute to Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone, a nod to the funk and psychedelic soul that Hancock was absorbing. The closing 'Vein Melter' dropped the tempo and let Hancock's Rhodes electric piano and Maupin's bass clarinet drift through a moody, late-night atmosphere. The album cover, designed by Victor Moscoso, showed Hancock in a mask inspired by the kple-kple mask of the Baule people of Ivory Coast, with Mason, Jackson, Maupin, and Summers arranged around him clockwise.
What did it change? Head Hunters became a bridge between jazz and the funk, soul, and hip-hop that followed. The Headhunters band, with Mike Clark replacing Mason on drums, went on to record Thrust and Man-Child with Hancock. A jazz record built on clavinet, synth bass, and a beer-bottle flute had no right to sell like a pop album. But on October 26, 1973, that is exactly what it started to do. The Headhunters also worked with Hancock as a guest soloist on Survival of the Fittest, which he produced and which included the hit 'God Make Me Funky'.