Listen to this track by jazz-funk pioneer, future electro innovator, and all-around influential musical barrier-breaker-downer Herbie Hancock. It’s “Chameleon”, a key track on his seminal 1973 album Head Hunters.
That record would spin the heads of many who’d first heard it, perhaps not being able to immediately figure out whether or not it was a jazz record. Many of these people would be the critics. Well, it certainly is a jazz record. But, it also carries with it influences that stood apart from the traditions of the jazz world at the time too; Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, and the funk genre in general, which is in turn very much influenced by jazz. Talk about spinning heads!
The barriers between the musical forms expressed here had always been fairly permeable. But, as jazz expanded its borders by the end of the ’60s, the definition of jazz as a musical form became harder to ascertain. It had shifted, and morphed, having taken on new influences, as it had done since it was first recorded.
In the middle of all of that, this record was a big seller, standing as a sign of the musical times where the evolution of jazz was concerned. And it would provide an avenue that would open things up for Hancock, and for other musicians down the road. Read more
Listening to this, it’s hard to believe that this music came out the same year as Sonny & Cher. This is not to knock “I Got You Babe”, but the point is that this music sounds as though it’s from another world entirely, streets ahead of what was happening in the pop charts. Later, rock music and jazz would dovetail into fusion, brought about largely by Hancock and Coleman’s former bandleader Miles Davis. Hancock himself would align his sound with funk, and collaborate with non-jazz artists like Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell, to name a few. He would even branch out into hip hop and electro in the early 80s. Yet, in this brief period between cool jazz, ‘
The Delete Bin 