“I did a lot of stuff in the 70s,” Herbie Hancock remarks midway through the first of two Barbican performances. He’s not wrong. 2023 marks 50 years since his album Head Hunters, a landmark moment for jazz as another of its acoustic vanguard signalled a shift in sound. More remarkable is Hancock’s journey in that decade: completed in just four years, Hancock’s transition from Mwandishi to Thrust – via Crossings, Sextant and Head Hunters – is surely one of jazz history’s strongest runs of albums.
Hancock opens with what he calls “hors d’oeuvres” from the 70s and beyond: glutinous textures and effects-laden improvisation from the Mwandishi days, the later funk-infused fusion, the hip-hop hit Rockit and a low-slung take on Wayne Shorter’s Footprints, all twisted towards today.
Hancock’s technical facility is remarkable as he hurtles through styles, sending down torrential lines before pointing the spotlight elsewhere. Trumpeter Terence Blanchard and guitarist Lionel Loueke are natural, occasionally predictable foils, the former with high wails and fizzing electronic overlays, the latter introspective and modest. Two stellar solos from bassist James Genus reveal muscular and tender sides, and young drummer Jaylen Petinaud brings joy throughout, with explosive solos and a spitting, trap-esque stack cymbal that anchors the band firmly in the sound of the present.
In constantly seeking the new, Hancock rejects the idea of a pared-down musical essence. His curiosity has sent him in many directions over the years; not all have brought success, but what shines is Hancock’s fidelity to his ideas, believing they’ll eventually find a home somewhere. Take his cherished keytar, the gimmicky instrument sounding miraculous trading robotic bird calls with Loueke during a raucous reprise of Chameleon. (A keytar-wearing Hancock brings the band off with a boyband jump, then jogs off stage. He’s 83.)
Then there’s Come Running to Me, from vocoder-heavy album Sunlight. “The critics were a bit meh on this one,” Hancock says. After trundling through the slightly pedestrian tune, Hancock, alone on the vocoder, moves from yearning ballad to fourth-wall-breaking comedy set and arrives at a kind of vocoderized sermon on shared humanity, delivered like a bluesy psalm chant. It’s completely engrossing.
At the Barbican Centre on 29 July.
