Fazioli piano<\/a>.)<\/p>\nHerbie Hancock is one of my favorite jazz musicians. It\u2019s hard not to admire him; after all, he practically defined the jazz genre. He worked with Miles Davis, spearheaded the funky jazz of the \u201970s and has been part of almost every major musical movement even remotely related to jazz ever since. His most famous album,\u00a0Head Hunters<\/em>, was the first jazz album to go platinum, an electric combination of funk, Afrofuturism and jazz.\u00a0<\/p>\nGoing into the show, I expected excellence from Hancock, and he absolutely delivered. What I hadn\u2019t anticipated was his bandmates\u2019 ability to hold their own alongside him. The band ranged in prestige: Terence Blanchard, filling Wayne Shorter\u2019s boots as Hancock\u2019s accompanying trumpeter, is an eight-time Grammy-winning jazz musician and two-time Oscar-winning composer. Electric-bassist James Genus was playing hooky from his regular Saturday-night shift, a weekly performance on a small sketch show called Saturday Night Live. The guitarist and singer Lionel Loueke and drummer Jaylen Petinaud were not as renowned: Loueke is an under-appreciated veteran, and Petinaud is an up-and-coming musician.\u00a0During the show, Hancock himself even credited Petinaud as proof that jazz isn\u2019t dead. The musician\u2019s backgrounds and reputations became irrelevant, though, as soon as the band stepped onstage. In that moment, they were simply people creating the art they love.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nHancock began the show by introducing the concept of \u201cThe Overture,\u201d snippets of songs that would be played in full later. He stated he was going to play a program called \u201cPrehistoric Predator\u201d on his Korg Kronos synthesizer. Then the music began.<\/p>\n
Music is a loose word for what Hancock played that night. \u201cPrehistoric Predator\u201d endowed the synthesizer with the sounds of water rushing, leaves shaking and animal noises \u2014 more sound effect than song. Genus and Petinuad jumped in, adding to the movements of the underbrush. After a moment of this, Hancock grabbed the mic, and asked, \u201cWhere are the raptors?\u201d Loueke and Blanchard jumped into action.\u00a0Loueke moved his fingers across the strings of his electric guitar, producing the blood-thirsty shrieks of velociraptors. Blanchard handled the larger beats, emitting a deep, guttural blow from his trumpet that became a terrifying roar. The raptors were alive, filling Hill Auditorium, and \u201cThe Overture\u201d began.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Overture\u201d not only gave the audience their first taste of the kind of music we would hear that night, but also of the band\u2019s dynamism. Blanchard was the first to grab hold of the spotlight. He began a sorrowful solo on the trumpet, seeming to carry with him the weight of the music\u2019s emotion. Hancock was insistent on his friend\u2019s apparent discomfort, pushing him with the piano to hold on to the climax longer and longer. When the trumpet ended, the band took a moment for applause before starting up again.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Loueke grabbed the audience\u2019s attention next, breaking into an intricately crafted assemblage of electric guitar and vocals, using a similar technique to when he created the \u201craptor sounds\u201d \u2014 except with the volume turned down to a whisper. The rhythm of his lyrics perfectly complemented the melody of his guitar. Throughout the show, Loueke juggled a variety of techniques, like simple rhythm guitar, tapping on the guitar neck and classic jazz solos, all while impressively overlaying rich vocals.<\/p>\n
Obviously, \u201cThe Overture\u201d could not end without the headliner showing off his chops. Hancock\u2019s first musical spotlight of the night was contested by Petinaud. They engaged in a percussive battle, Hancock crafting an intense piano lick and Petinaud responding with an equally intense drum line. Even going back and forth in a musical conflict, they maintained the flow of the song, simultaneously competing and collaborating.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nAfter \u201cThe Overture,\u201d Hancock took the mic and introduced his band. He was an incredibly charming showman, keeping the audience entertained with jokes and quips. Yet what completely absorbed the audience\u2019s attention wasn\u2019t how Hancock interacted with them, but rather how the band members interacted with each other. After Hancock and Petinaud\u2019s \u201cbattle,\u201d the other band members walked over to them and pantomimed fanning out a fire. They were constantly reacting to each other\u2019s musical feats with smiles or shaking heads, almost in disbelief at each other\u2019s musical acrobatics. In the brief intermissions between songs, they would joke with each other. One inside joke eventually evolved from a comment about the band members relying solely upon AI to make their music, and this joke persisted throughout the show.<\/p>\n
The band went on to play one of Blanchard\u2019s arrangements of \u201cFootprints,\u201d a song by Shorter, as well as \u201cActual Proof\u201d and \u201cButterfly\u201d from Hancock\u2019s album Thrust.<\/em> He then played the songs \u201cHang Up Your Hang Ups,\u201d \u201cRockit\u201d and \u201cSpider\u201d from his albums Man-Child<\/em>, Future Shock<\/em> and Secrets<\/em>, respectively, as well as a vocoder solo and the song \u201cChameleon\u201d from Head Hunters<\/em> to close out the show.\u00a0<\/p>\nThe setlist was funky, which worked well with the band\u2019s playful attitude. Throughout the rest of the show, each of the musicians took turns in the spotlight. They improvised in new and exciting ways, continuing to play off of each other to create blended sonics. While Genus spent the least time in the spotlight, he had a solo during \u201cSecret Sauce.\u201d He looped layers of reverbed bass over itself, soloing on it, looping again and soloing more. When he finally built up enough meaty bass, the rest of the band joined in.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hancock\u2019s vocoder solo was perhaps the only moment where the band didn\u2019t totally grasp the audience\u2019s attention. Hancock spoke into the vocoder, pitching his voice up and down using the keyboard. He started by continuing the bit about AI, stating into the vocoder that he himself was AI. He then rambled on, talking about the necessity of loving family and ending with the message that everyone is part of one big family. Ironically, when Hancock preached about connection, it was the most disconnected he felt from everyone else. Hancock seemed directionless throughout this solo, and the underlying commentary on the effect of technology on our ability to communicate with one another seemed to be lost on him. Still, Hancock\u2019s quintet played an exciting show at the Hill Auditorium. Each band member possessed incredibly diverse skillsets on their instruments, making it a masterclass in jazz. <\/p>\n
What made the band so exciting to watch wasn\u2019t just their musical acumen, but their ability to work as a group, whether in their on-stage banter or when grooving in key. A large part of their consistent musical connection throughout did stem from the individual instrumental skills of the group members. However, a major source of their musical connections was their non-musical interactions: their humor, their riffing and their ability to flow off each other, all of which were instigated by Hancock\u2019s presence, demonstrating the reason Hancock\u2019s musicality has thrived over the past seven decades. Hancock is a true musical legend.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nDaily Arts Writer Joe Bogdan can be reached at <\/em>joebogdn@umich.edu<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n
Related articles<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I listen to jazz in the background. It plays when I don\u2019t want to listen to music but still want some sound. On early Sunday mornings, it brought vibrancy to the tan decor of my childhood home and to the scene of my dad sipping coffee as he read the newspaper. On days I can\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3991,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[2344,3914,2250,3913,863,3916,3915],"class_list":{"0":"post-3990","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-auditorium","9":"tag-hancock","10":"tag-heart","11":"tag-herbie","12":"tag-hill","13":"tag-steal","14":"tag-worked"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3990"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3992,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3990\/revisions\/3992"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}