Herbie Hancock: Maiden Voyage (Blue Note Essentials series) [BLUE NOTE / EMI]

Why you'll love it

This Blue Note Essentials series edition is cut from high-resolution masters onto 140g vinyl. Maiden Voyage won a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1999, and the title track and "Dolphin Dance" became jazz standards.

This edition

• Blue Note Essentials series
• 140g vinyl
• Stereo
• Pressed in Germany

About the album

Plenty of jazz albums are named after the sea; this one actually sounds like it. Herbie Hancock built Maiden Voyage as a concept record about the ocean, and on March 17, 1965 he took it to Rudy Van Gelder's studio with a quintet that had serious form: Ron Carter, Tony Williams and George Coleman were all recent bandmates from the Miles Davis quintet, with Freddie Hubbard on trumpet.

The title track drifts on a suspended, open-ended vamp, "The Eye Of The Hurricane" whips up a storm of fast modal blowing, and "Little One" is a slow, aching ballad that Miles recorded the same year. "Survival Of The Fittest" goes furthest out, with Williams pushing hard, and Hancock has said Count Basie's "Shiny Stockings" was the spark for the graceful "Dolphin Dance." Space matters as much as notes here; the band lets the music breathe like water.

The Penguin Guide to Jazz put it in its Core Collection and called it "a colossal achievement from a man still just 24 years old." Most of us at 24 were still working out which way up the record went.

Also at Kops: more Herbie Hancock on vinyl · browse Modern Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Blue Note (cat# 5759307), a reissue of the 1965 album.