Jazz and Electro-acoustic music
Originally posted by beavered_again at Jazz and electroacoustic music
caught an interesting document: http://www.ems-network.org/ems08/papers/gluck.pdf
“Miles Davis protégé Herbie Hancock shows what jazz might have sounded like if it had come up the river from Darmstadt, that European mecca of avant garde, instead of New Orleans.” Time was probably not suggesting direct descent from Boulez and Stockhausen, although Hancock had been long familiar with Stockhausen’s music. Maybe the idea was simply to suggest that this recording offered something new and maybe musically radical, despite its relatively accessible surface.
Herbie Hancock had been fascinated with electronics and machines from an early age, one expression being his choice of a dual major in college of electrical engineering and music. Hancock recalls (Down Beat, November 9, 1972) that he begun to listen to Edgard Varese “when I was in college, I think - ’56 or ’57...” In a 1964 interview with John Mehegan (Jazz, September 1964), he commented: “I first heard electronic music about a year ago and now I am beginning to ‘hear’ or relate to it in some sense. [Miles Davis quintet drummer] Tony Williams and I are going to buy an oscilloscope and tape apparatus and start fooling around with it ... you don’t even need human beings in order to create music. Have you ever heard the beauty of sound passing through trees? That’s the beauty of nature…” He added: “I’ve been listening to The Song of Children [Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ‘Gesang der Jungling’]. I don’t know if the sound is that of human voices or whether it is electronically produced, but it is fascinating. I haven’t as yet been able to absorb it into my emotional makeup. I’ve been affected by it...” Herbie Hancock’s imagination was no doubt sparked by the creative use of electric instruments by black popular musicians Stevie Wonder and Charles Stepney (a student of Henry Cowell’s writings). The introduction of electric instruments in jazz certainly provided another underpinning; witness Hancock’s exposure to the electric piano through Miles Davis. It is clear, though, that his musical influences crossed musical, stylistic and cultural boundaries, bridging Wonder and Stockhausen.
Herbie Hancock Crossings 1972
Original LP
Side A
"Sleeping Giant" (Herbie Hancock) - 24:50
Side B
"Quasar" (Bennie Maupin) - 7:27
"Water Torture" (Maupin)- 14:04
Personnel:
Herbie Hancock - acoustic piano, electric piano, mellotron, percussion
Eddie Henderson - trumpet, flugelhorn, percussion
Billy Hart - drums, percussion
Julian Priester - bass, tenor and alto trombones; percussion
Buster Williams - electric bass, string bass, percussion
Bennie Maupin - soprano saxophone, alto flute, bass clarinet, piccolo, percussion
With:
Patrick Gleeson - Moog synthesizer
Victor Pontoja - congas
Voices - Candy Love, Sandra Stevens, Della Horne, Victoria Domagalski, Scott Breach
When Herbie Hancock began to play the electric piano, first the Wurlitzer in 1968 and later the Fender Rhodes, he built upon the pioneering work of pianist and big band leader, Sun Ra, who first did so in 1954, five years before Ray Charles. Sun Ra’s contribution to electronic instruments in jazz included use of the monophonic keyboard instrument the Clavioline in 1965 and the Mini-Moog, when it came out in 1970. In 1965, Eddie Harris adopted the newly introduced Selmer Varitone, a saxophone coupled with an octave-splitter, extending electronics to reed players. A cluster of electronic expansions to the Rhodes, introduced by the companies Fender and/or Vox, tremolo and then the Echoplex, were of great interest to Hancock, who next adopted two other devices popular among rock and funk guitarists, the wah-wah and fuzz box, and then the ring modulator, first used in jazz in Miles’ band by Chick Corea in 1970. These moves were controversial to some, such as critical Ron Wellburn (1971) who wrote: “...[rock musicians emerged from] a technological lineage extending through John Cage, Stockhausen, Edgard Varese, all the way back to Marconi and the wireless. White rock is a technology, not a real music ... black musicians should re-evaluate the technological intrusions now threatening our music; times may come when that technology will be useless. Our music is our key to survival.”
As well as they had a dude whose duties included collecting patches at the Moog III (then it fully took in the Group):
The most substantial change in post-production was quite unintended. Rubinson sent Hancock to the studio of Patrick Gleeson, a sound designer, producer, and synthesizer player, because of Hancock’s expressed interest in learning how to play that instrument. Little could they have known how this encounter would change the nature of the Mwandishi band. Patrick Gleeson had been a literature professor at San Francisco State University who found greater satisfaction and excitement in the musical technologies that were then emerging. He left academia and became part of the creative scene in that city, especially around the circle of the Sam Francisco Tape Music Center. He was influenced by Morton Subtonic’s ‘Silver Apples [of the Moon’ and ‘The Wild Bull’, music of Steve Reich, and Terry Riley, whom Gleeson had befriended. He was also a big jazz fan. Using musique concrete techniques and then the Buchla, Gleeson composed scores for members of Ann Halperin's Dancer's Workshop. “I appeared in concert with John Cage ... [and in 1967 at] The Planetarium, various clubs in North Beach, San Francisco State, etc. With that, I cashed out my middle class life, went in halves on an early Moog III, and began presenting myself as a studio musician...” worked first on session with rock musicians, including members of the Jefferson Airplane.
Gleeson himself felt welcomed after a period of adjustment: “When I joined this deeply Afrocentric band … I felt like I’d gone home. I felt like I’d found my place. This is where I belong.” Ironically, it was Gleeson’s work that added new layers of rhythmic complexity to the band, as he adapted the Arp’s sequencers to craft multiple layers of synthesizer ostinati, such as on ‘Rain Dance’, included on ‘Sextant’, recorded in Fall 1972.
Herbie Hancock Rain Dance 1972
Personnel:
MWANDISHI (Herbie Hancock) - acoustic piano, Fender Rhodes, Hohner D6 clavinet, mellotron, ARP 2600, ARP Pro Soloist, Moog
MWILE (Bennie Maupin) - soprano sax, bass clarinet, piccolo, afuche, Hum-A-Zoo
MGANGA (Dr. Eddie Henderson) - trumpet, flugelhorn
PEPO (Julian Priester) - bass trombone, tenor trombone, alto trombone, cowbell
MCHEZAJI (Buster Williams) - electric bass, acoustic bass
JABALI (Billy Hart) - drums
Dr. Patrick Gleeson - ARP 2600, ARP Pro Soloist
Buck Clarke - percussion
Since then, criticism has not changed:
Harvey Siders (November 23, 1972) call a September 1972 live performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival “... too much of a confusing thing. I don’t know if I was more disappointed with the overall sound of the Herbie Hancock Septet, or with my inability to understand what they’re trying to do ... [the] pieces don’t make a satisfying mosaic; an unrelated collage, perhaps, but not a consistent mosaic.” Pete Welding complained that the record ‘Crossings’ “[displays a] lack of any feeling of flow or inevitability; nor is there much in the way of true rapport among the players…” In general, these critics expressed confusion with the open structures and the unfolding, unpredictable nature of the collective improvisation, criticisms the band had heard as early as 1970. But Welding added something new: “... with freaky, eerie sequences of ‘spacey’ effects laid into a matrix of lush Les Baxter-like exotica ... plenty of empty, overdramatic bluster - the most obnoxious kind of speciously trippy music ... The less said about the synthesizer effects, the better.” It is difficult to align these comments with the depth of nuance and musicality to be found within the actual recording, as a third Down Beat reviewer, Bill McLarney (May 10, 1972) observed: “What matters is that this music, these artists, have the ability to get you next to yourself and maybe some night, even to work a transformation - if you are ready.”
About marketing:
Ironically, just as the Sextet’s music was growing more experimental, Warner Brothers was seeking to mainstream its market appeal. A New York Times advertisement by the Sam Goody record chain places the African themed cover of ‘Crossings’ side by side with “Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits, Vol. II” and folk singer Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Hobo’s Lullaby,” Randy Newman’s ‘Sail Away’, Van Dyke Parks’ ‘Discover America’ and Bob Weir’s (of the Grateful Dead) ‘Ace’. Below that is depicted a new two-LP set by The Beach Boys. On top of the page is trumpeted the rubric “Great Sounds by Great Artists,” but the message conveyed is that ‘Crossings’ was a pop album, in the company of rock and pop musicians. David Rubinson, with encouragement from Herbie Hancock, booked the band in rock venues. The mixing of jazz and rock was the model championed by Rubinson’s business partner, rock impresario Bill Graham, owner of the Fillmore East and Fillmore West, who had paired Cecil Taylor with The Yardbirds, Sun Ra with Ten Years After, Miles Davis with Leon Russell, and Herbie Hancock with Iron Butterfly and with John Mayall. Hancock himself was eager to play to larger and younger audiences. David Rubinson notes: “the whole sensibility of what he was doing changed ... he was getting some negative audience reaction when they’d play a jazz club, some of the new stuff. But when he played some of the rock clubs, that’s what they loved. There was that kind of positive feedback.” For other members of the Mwandishi band, though, these pairings were a source of frustration and a wound to personal pride. Buster Williams concluded: “The attempt to play rock clubs didn’t work … David Rubinson was going to make him a star and of course ended up upsetting everybody.”
And so here we go:
Hancock recalled (in the 1996 liner notes to his 1973 recording ‘Headhunters’): “I began to feel that I had been spending so much time exploring the upper atmosphere of music and the more ethereal kind of far-out, spacey stuff. Now there was this need to take some more of the earth and to feel a little more tethered, a connection to the earth... I started thinking about Sly Stone and how much I loved his music and how funky “Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself” is....”
Herbie Hancock - Chameleon 1973 from the Album Headhunters
Musicians:
Herbie Hancock: Fender Rhodes electric piano, Hohner D6 clavinet, ARP Odyssey synthesizer, ARP Soloist synthesizer
Bennie Maupin: tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, saxello, bass clarinet, alto flute
Paul Jackson: electric bass guitar, marímbula
Bill Summers: congas, shekere, balafon, agogô, cabasa, hindewhu, tambourine, log drum, surdo, gankogui, beer bottle
Harvey Mason: drums
Peace love & enjoy!
dr. π (pi)
♫
.
caught an interesting document: http://www.ems-network.org/ems08/papers/gluck.pdf
“Miles Davis protégé Herbie Hancock shows what jazz might have sounded like if it had come up the river from Darmstadt, that European mecca of avant garde, instead of New Orleans.” Time was probably not suggesting direct descent from Boulez and Stockhausen, although Hancock had been long familiar with Stockhausen’s music. Maybe the idea was simply to suggest that this recording offered something new and maybe musically radical, despite its relatively accessible surface.
Herbie Hancock had been fascinated with electronics and machines from an early age, one expression being his choice of a dual major in college of electrical engineering and music. Hancock recalls (Down Beat, November 9, 1972) that he begun to listen to Edgard Varese “when I was in college, I think - ’56 or ’57...” In a 1964 interview with John Mehegan (Jazz, September 1964), he commented: “I first heard electronic music about a year ago and now I am beginning to ‘hear’ or relate to it in some sense. [Miles Davis quintet drummer] Tony Williams and I are going to buy an oscilloscope and tape apparatus and start fooling around with it ... you don’t even need human beings in order to create music. Have you ever heard the beauty of sound passing through trees? That’s the beauty of nature…” He added: “I’ve been listening to The Song of Children [Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ‘Gesang der Jungling’]. I don’t know if the sound is that of human voices or whether it is electronically produced, but it is fascinating. I haven’t as yet been able to absorb it into my emotional makeup. I’ve been affected by it...” Herbie Hancock’s imagination was no doubt sparked by the creative use of electric instruments by black popular musicians Stevie Wonder and Charles Stepney (a student of Henry Cowell’s writings). The introduction of electric instruments in jazz certainly provided another underpinning; witness Hancock’s exposure to the electric piano through Miles Davis. It is clear, though, that his musical influences crossed musical, stylistic and cultural boundaries, bridging Wonder and Stockhausen.
Herbie Hancock Crossings 1972
Click to viewOriginal LP
Side A
"Sleeping Giant" (Herbie Hancock) - 24:50
Side B
"Quasar" (Bennie Maupin) - 7:27
"Water Torture" (Maupin)- 14:04
Personnel:
Herbie Hancock - acoustic piano, electric piano, mellotron, percussion
Eddie Henderson - trumpet, flugelhorn, percussion
Billy Hart - drums, percussion
Julian Priester - bass, tenor and alto trombones; percussion
Buster Williams - electric bass, string bass, percussion
Bennie Maupin - soprano saxophone, alto flute, bass clarinet, piccolo, percussion
With:
Patrick Gleeson - Moog synthesizer
Victor Pontoja - congas
Voices - Candy Love, Sandra Stevens, Della Horne, Victoria Domagalski, Scott Breach
When Herbie Hancock began to play the electric piano, first the Wurlitzer in 1968 and later the Fender Rhodes, he built upon the pioneering work of pianist and big band leader, Sun Ra, who first did so in 1954, five years before Ray Charles. Sun Ra’s contribution to electronic instruments in jazz included use of the monophonic keyboard instrument the Clavioline in 1965 and the Mini-Moog, when it came out in 1970. In 1965, Eddie Harris adopted the newly introduced Selmer Varitone, a saxophone coupled with an octave-splitter, extending electronics to reed players. A cluster of electronic expansions to the Rhodes, introduced by the companies Fender and/or Vox, tremolo and then the Echoplex, were of great interest to Hancock, who next adopted two other devices popular among rock and funk guitarists, the wah-wah and fuzz box, and then the ring modulator, first used in jazz in Miles’ band by Chick Corea in 1970. These moves were controversial to some, such as critical Ron Wellburn (1971) who wrote: “...[rock musicians emerged from] a technological lineage extending through John Cage, Stockhausen, Edgard Varese, all the way back to Marconi and the wireless. White rock is a technology, not a real music ... black musicians should re-evaluate the technological intrusions now threatening our music; times may come when that technology will be useless. Our music is our key to survival.”
As well as they had a dude whose duties included collecting patches at the Moog III (then it fully took in the Group):
The most substantial change in post-production was quite unintended. Rubinson sent Hancock to the studio of Patrick Gleeson, a sound designer, producer, and synthesizer player, because of Hancock’s expressed interest in learning how to play that instrument. Little could they have known how this encounter would change the nature of the Mwandishi band. Patrick Gleeson had been a literature professor at San Francisco State University who found greater satisfaction and excitement in the musical technologies that were then emerging. He left academia and became part of the creative scene in that city, especially around the circle of the Sam Francisco Tape Music Center. He was influenced by Morton Subtonic’s ‘Silver Apples [of the Moon’ and ‘The Wild Bull’, music of Steve Reich, and Terry Riley, whom Gleeson had befriended. He was also a big jazz fan. Using musique concrete techniques and then the Buchla, Gleeson composed scores for members of Ann Halperin's Dancer's Workshop. “I appeared in concert with John Cage ... [and in 1967 at] The Planetarium, various clubs in North Beach, San Francisco State, etc. With that, I cashed out my middle class life, went in halves on an early Moog III, and began presenting myself as a studio musician...” worked first on session with rock musicians, including members of the Jefferson Airplane.
Gleeson himself felt welcomed after a period of adjustment: “When I joined this deeply Afrocentric band … I felt like I’d gone home. I felt like I’d found my place. This is where I belong.” Ironically, it was Gleeson’s work that added new layers of rhythmic complexity to the band, as he adapted the Arp’s sequencers to craft multiple layers of synthesizer ostinati, such as on ‘Rain Dance’, included on ‘Sextant’, recorded in Fall 1972.
Herbie Hancock Rain Dance 1972
Personnel:
MWANDISHI (Herbie Hancock) - acoustic piano, Fender Rhodes, Hohner D6 clavinet, mellotron, ARP 2600, ARP Pro Soloist, Moog
MWILE (Bennie Maupin) - soprano sax, bass clarinet, piccolo, afuche, Hum-A-Zoo
MGANGA (Dr. Eddie Henderson) - trumpet, flugelhorn
PEPO (Julian Priester) - bass trombone, tenor trombone, alto trombone, cowbell
MCHEZAJI (Buster Williams) - electric bass, acoustic bass
JABALI (Billy Hart) - drums
Dr. Patrick Gleeson - ARP 2600, ARP Pro Soloist
Buck Clarke - percussion
Since then, criticism has not changed:
Harvey Siders (November 23, 1972) call a September 1972 live performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival “... too much of a confusing thing. I don’t know if I was more disappointed with the overall sound of the Herbie Hancock Septet, or with my inability to understand what they’re trying to do ... [the] pieces don’t make a satisfying mosaic; an unrelated collage, perhaps, but not a consistent mosaic.” Pete Welding complained that the record ‘Crossings’ “[displays a] lack of any feeling of flow or inevitability; nor is there much in the way of true rapport among the players…” In general, these critics expressed confusion with the open structures and the unfolding, unpredictable nature of the collective improvisation, criticisms the band had heard as early as 1970. But Welding added something new: “... with freaky, eerie sequences of ‘spacey’ effects laid into a matrix of lush Les Baxter-like exotica ... plenty of empty, overdramatic bluster - the most obnoxious kind of speciously trippy music ... The less said about the synthesizer effects, the better.” It is difficult to align these comments with the depth of nuance and musicality to be found within the actual recording, as a third Down Beat reviewer, Bill McLarney (May 10, 1972) observed: “What matters is that this music, these artists, have the ability to get you next to yourself and maybe some night, even to work a transformation - if you are ready.”
About marketing:
Ironically, just as the Sextet’s music was growing more experimental, Warner Brothers was seeking to mainstream its market appeal. A New York Times advertisement by the Sam Goody record chain places the African themed cover of ‘Crossings’ side by side with “Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits, Vol. II” and folk singer Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Hobo’s Lullaby,” Randy Newman’s ‘Sail Away’, Van Dyke Parks’ ‘Discover America’ and Bob Weir’s (of the Grateful Dead) ‘Ace’. Below that is depicted a new two-LP set by The Beach Boys. On top of the page is trumpeted the rubric “Great Sounds by Great Artists,” but the message conveyed is that ‘Crossings’ was a pop album, in the company of rock and pop musicians. David Rubinson, with encouragement from Herbie Hancock, booked the band in rock venues. The mixing of jazz and rock was the model championed by Rubinson’s business partner, rock impresario Bill Graham, owner of the Fillmore East and Fillmore West, who had paired Cecil Taylor with The Yardbirds, Sun Ra with Ten Years After, Miles Davis with Leon Russell, and Herbie Hancock with Iron Butterfly and with John Mayall. Hancock himself was eager to play to larger and younger audiences. David Rubinson notes: “the whole sensibility of what he was doing changed ... he was getting some negative audience reaction when they’d play a jazz club, some of the new stuff. But when he played some of the rock clubs, that’s what they loved. There was that kind of positive feedback.” For other members of the Mwandishi band, though, these pairings were a source of frustration and a wound to personal pride. Buster Williams concluded: “The attempt to play rock clubs didn’t work … David Rubinson was going to make him a star and of course ended up upsetting everybody.”
And so here we go:
Hancock recalled (in the 1996 liner notes to his 1973 recording ‘Headhunters’): “I began to feel that I had been spending so much time exploring the upper atmosphere of music and the more ethereal kind of far-out, spacey stuff. Now there was this need to take some more of the earth and to feel a little more tethered, a connection to the earth... I started thinking about Sly Stone and how much I loved his music and how funky “Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself” is....”
Herbie Hancock - Chameleon 1973 from the Album Headhunters
Musicians:
Herbie Hancock: Fender Rhodes electric piano, Hohner D6 clavinet, ARP Odyssey synthesizer, ARP Soloist synthesizer
Bennie Maupin: tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, saxello, bass clarinet, alto flute
Paul Jackson: electric bass guitar, marímbula
Bill Summers: congas, shekere, balafon, agogô, cabasa, hindewhu, tambourine, log drum, surdo, gankogui, beer bottle
Harvey Mason: drums
Peace love & enjoy!
dr. π (pi)
♫
.