Herbie Hancock: Sextant [MUSIC ON VINYL]

Why you'll love it

Music On Vinyl presses the album on 180g vinyl in the Netherlands. Paste called it an uncompromising avant-funk masterpiece, and it captures Hancock among the first jazz players to go deep into synthesizers.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Pressed in the Netherlands

About the album

Herbie Hancock had already played on some of the most famous records of the 1960s with Miles Davis, so nobody expected him to sit still. With his Mwandishi band he headed for outer space, and Sextant, his first album for Columbia, is the farthest out they got.

Everyone took a Swahili name: Hancock was Mwandishi, Bennie Maupin Mwile, Eddie Henderson Mganga, Julian Priester Pepo, Buster Williams Mchezaji and Billy Hart Jabali. Hancock piles up Rhodes, Clavinet, Mellotron, ARP and Moog synths, with Patrick Gleeson on synth and Buck Clarke on percussion. It was the sextet's final album, and their most adventurous. "Rain Dance" bubbles and twitters like an early electronic lab experiment, "Hidden Shadows" rides a heavy, funky bass line, and the side-long "Hornets" swarms for nearly twenty minutes.

Rolling Stone heard in its burbling effects a primitive version of 1990s ambient music, and Hancock's next move, the Headhunters, took Maupin and that funk all the way to the charts. The sleeve also credits FUNDI on Random Resonator, which remains the finest job title we've seen on a record.

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

Tracklist

Listen

On Music On Vinyl (cat# MOVLP522), a reissue of the 1973 album.