Head Hunters
| Head Hunters | ||||
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| Studio album by Herbie Hancock | ||||
| Released | October 26, 1973 | |||
| Recorded | September 1973 | |||
| Studio |
Wally Heider Studios Different Fur Trading Co. San Francisco, California |
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| Genre | Jazz-funk, jazz fusion | |||
| Length | 41:52 | |||
| Label | Columbia | |||
| Producer | Herbie Hancock David Rubinson |
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| Herbie Hancock chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |  |
| Down Beat | |
| Q |  |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide |  |
| The Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide | |
| Zagat Survey | |
Head Hunters is the twelfth studio album by the American pianist and composer Herbie Hancock, released October 13, 1973, on Columbia Records. Recording sessions for the album took place during evening at Wally Heider Studios and Different Fur Trading Co. in San Francisco, California. Head Hunters is a key release in Hancock's career and a defining moment in the genre of jazz. In 2003, the album was ranked number 498 in the book version of Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 2007, the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry, which collects "culturally, historically or aesthetically important" sound recordings from the 20th century.
Head Hunters followed a series of experimental albums by Hancock's sextet: Mwandishi (1970), Crossings (1971), and Sextant (1973), released at a time when Hancock was looking for a new direction in which to take his music:
"I began to feel that I had been spending so much time exploring the upper atmosphere of music and the more ethereal kind of far-out spacey stuff. Now there was this need to take some more of the earth and to feel a little more tethered; a connection to the earth....I was beginning to feel that we (the sextet) were playing this heavy kind of music, and I was tired of everything being heavy. I wanted to play something lighter." (Hancock's sleeve notes: 1997 CD reissue)
For the new album, Hancock assembled a new band, the Headhunters, of whom only Bennie Maupin had been a sextet member. Hancock handled all synthesizer parts himself (having previously shared these duties with Patrick Gleeson) and he decided against the use of guitar altogether, favouring instead the clavinet, one of the defining sounds on the album. The new band featured a tight rhythm and blues-oriented rhythm section composed of Paul Jackson (bass) and Harvey Mason (drums), and the album has a relaxed, funky groove that gave the album an appeal to a far wider audience. Perhaps the defining moment of the jazz-fusion movement (or perhaps even the spearhead of the Jazz-funk style of the fusion genre), the album made jazz listeners out of rhythm and blues fans, and vice versa. The album mixes funk rhythms, like the busy high hats in 16th notes on the opening track "Chameleon", with the jazz AABA form and extended soloing.
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