
Herbie Hancock has been recording albums for more than three decades, exploring a variety of different directions in jazz while maintaining an interest in the interface between jazz and popular music styles. For me, his first great album was
Inventions and Dimensions (1963). With its stripped-down arrangements of bass, piano and percussion, the responsibility is solely Herbie’s to keep the music dynamic and interesting, and he manages to do so by drawing on both 20th century classical music and jazz. In “Succotash,” for instance, he moves easily from percussive rhythmic figures in the manner of Bartok to virtuosic melodic riffs to impressionistic chord progressions in the manner of Debussy.
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