A Man Must Have His Things To Keep Him Sane

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Bob Gluck is a sane man. He’s in the pro­cess­ing of writ­ing a book about a wor­thy and unex­plored sub­ject, what he calls Her­bie Hancock’s Mwan­dishi Band. Han­cock made a series of record­ings, from his last Blue Note record, The Pris­oner , through a stint at Warner Broth­ers (that included writ­ing the music for the “Fat Albert” car­toons), through a long stretch at Colum­bia that even­tu­ally devolved into the pack­aged com­mer­cial music of Future Shock. The start of the Colum­bia years was fab­u­lous, though, not only pro­duc­ing the mas­ter­piece of funk cul­ture that is Head­hunters , but Sex­tant (not my favorite, but highly regarded), and the sub­tly superb Thrust and Man-Child . The music is tech­ni­cally sophis­ti­cated, struc­turally abstract and totally funky, some­thing along the lines of the high­est achieve­ment in pop­u­lar art. You can fol­low Bob’s thoughts at his blog before the book actu­ally comes out, and here’s a hope that he will put some of his tran­scrip­tions in print, for those of use to, uh, lazy to do our own. Good luck, Bob! (h/t Patrick Jaren­wat­tananon).

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5 thoughts on “A Man Must Have His Things To Keep Him Sane”

  1. Thanks for this tip, George — those are some of my absolute favorite record­ings (with Thrust at the top of that list), pil­lars of 70s cul­ture. I look for­ward to the book.

  2. Thanks for giv­ing my blog a shout-out, George. Work­ing on this book has been a fab­u­lous expe­ri­ence — the music is so good and the peo­ple so inter­est­ing to talk to. The focus is really the three albums Mwan­dishi, Cross­ings, and Sex­tant, and their live gigs on the road. But it also traces how Her­bie emerged musi­cally from age 20, with Don­ald Byrd and Eric Dol­phy, and then Miles, to become the musi­cian who was able to play the intense, eclec­tic and exploratory music of his Mwan­dishi Sex­tet (really Octet). I hope peo­ple enjoy the blog — and the book once it comes out, hope­fully in the com­ing year. Again, thanks.

    • Thank you, Bob, and look­ing for­ward to the book. It’s a great sub­ject, and no one has done any­thing on it, so your work will be wel­come, I’m sure. I know the clip is not what I wanted, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy to find sam­ple of the Rotunda music, with any cartoons.

  4. I’ve not yet come upon a video clip of the pilot with Herbie’s music; not sure why. One can find video clips of Herbie’s Sex­tet from 1971, albeit not play­ing any of the Fat Albert reper­toire; but this par­tic­u­lar one is one of two that seem dif­fi­cult to locate. The other is of the Soul! show that was first aired on WNET Pub­lic TV, Newark, NJ.

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