How Head Hunters Changed Everything

Fifty years on, we’re cannonballing into Herbie Hancock’s crossover breakthrough, exploring the sounds that inspired it and the world of music that it’s inspired in turn—from jazz and funk to Afrofuturist pop and synth-driven spiritual quests.

In the months leading up to 1973’s Head Hunters, Herbie Hancock found himself at the altar where he practiced Nichiren Buddhism, wondering where he should take his music next. He’d spent the previous couple of years heading a progressive “research-and-development”—his words—band called Mwandishi, but the freedom was starting to bug him. “I wanted to ground myself,” he wrote in his 2014 memoir, Possibilities. “To look at some other musical territory rather than up into the sky all the time.” As he chanted, an answer materialized in the blank expanse of his open mind: “I want to thank you for lettin’ me be myself again,” lyrics from Sly & The Family Stone’s 1969 classic of (essentially) the same name. Funk became a guiding principle. Not only was it fun, it reflected the pride and defiance of post-Civil Rights-era Black America in ways jazz didn't—just think of James Brown's “Say It Loud” next to something like Duke Ellington's “Black, Brown and Beige,” whose mix of blues and orchestral music had played a similar role 25 years earlier, albeit more quietly. “We played around with the harmonies and rhythms, but the untrained ear could still follow the music,” Hancock wrote. “And we’d sneak enough stuff in there so that the trained ear had a good time, too.” One critic mockingly called Hancock “Mr. Communicate-With-a-Wider-Audience,” but you get the sense that that wider Black audience is exactly who Head Hunters was meant to reach. Jazz-funk? Jazz-by-association? The music wasn’t as confrontational as Miles Davis’ On the Corner (on which Hancock played) or as self-consciously lofty as Weather Report’s I Sing the Body Electric, but you wouldn’t mistake it for Bill Evans, either—like a lot of what we call “fusion,” it was easier to define it by what it wasn’t than by what it was. Now we recognize it as the first platinum-selling jazz album and an inspiration to a line of Black artists from Zapp to Outkast and Kendrick Lamar. But at the time, it was a gamble: As Hancock later put it, he could’ve just as easily lost the audience he already had.

Part of what made Head Hunters appealing was the way it combined futuristic textures and jazz improvisation with the kinds of melodies you might hear in an ad jingle. As sophisticated as Hancock was in terms of pedigree, the bird’s-eye impression of the music was simple. Like the postwar exotica of composers like Martin Denny and Les Baxter, stuff like “Watermelon Man” and “Chameleon” worked first because you couldn’t get the hook out of your head and second because it took you on a journey: in Denny and Baxter’s case, to tribal gatherings on a peaceful shore somewhere unimaginably far away; in Hancock’s, to the ancient beauty that seemed to be vibrating right under the city street. The trick was to defamiliarize you with one hand while bringing you home with the other—the cornerstone of every novelty song and science-fiction classic from Frankenstein on. “I remembered that the watermelon man used to call out in a singsong cry, ‘Watey-mee-low! Red, ripe watey-mee-low!’” Hancock wrote in remembrance of his childhood on the South Side of Chicago. “Then I thought about the women who would sit on their porches, facing the alley. Whenever they’d hear him coming, they’d call out, ‘Hey-eyyy, watermelon man!’ And there it was—the melody for my song.”

Alongside Funkadelic and Jimi Hendrix, Herbie Hancock was one of the first mainstream musicians to merge the imagery of traditional African art with the visionary quality of science fiction. On some level, it was as simple as playing funk on a synthesizer. On another, it was about situating the rhythm and feel of contemporary Black music alongside both traditional (in the case of “Watermelon Man,” the whistle music of the BaBenzélé Pygmies) and futuristic sounds so as to suggest that Black culture had been around forever and would be around for millennia to come—an image of strength and perseverance over all. Stretch your mind a little and you can hear it in everything from the hip-hop/electronic/jazz hybrids of left-field artists like Flying Lotus to the alien minimalism of Timbaland. The sound might be foreign, but the feeling is elemental.

Calling Head Hunters the first platinum-selling jazz album raises the question of whether or not the music on it is even “jazz.” Co-producer David Rubinson remembers executives at Columbia Records complaining that nobody at the company liked it except for the college-outreach guy—not the jazz division and not the R&B division, either. In crossing into the mainstream, Hancock didn’t just build a bridge between jazz and pop, he brought improvisational Black American music to audiences who probably would’ve never bothered with it—or understood it—otherwise. You could say similar things about modern indie-jazz crossovers like Makaya McCraven and Kamasi Washington. But you could also widen the lens to include artists like Kendrick Lamar and ROSALÍA, both of whom have served ambassadorial roles in places pop might not ordinarily go, whether it’s the dense hip-hop/jazz hybrids of an album like To Pimp a Butterfly or the flamenco and bolero shadings of MOTOMAMI. Miles Davis remembers Head Hunters blowing up a year after On the Corner had fallen commercially flat, and watching the lightbulb click on: “It sold like hotcakes in the young Black community…. Everybody at Columbia said, ‘Oh, so that’s what Miles was talking about!’” Maybe. But the idea needed some softening, and Hancock was the one who did it. Sometimes a good translation is everything.

One of the great moments on Head Hunters is when Hancock forgets to adjust the pitch-bending function on his synthesizer during his solo on “Chameleon” and plays a series of discordant notes that somehow fit perfectly. Not only was it an example of his trust in the improvisational nature of jazz, it showed he was willing to go where new technology might take him. He’d been experimenting with synthesizers for a couple of years, but Head Hunters was the first time they’d been so prominent—not to mention one of the first pop albums where it felt like they were being explored on their own merits instead of as extra color or special effect. Giorgio Moroder’s disco and Yellow Magic Orchestra’s techno-pop weren’t far behind. But in terms of Black music, the album’s legacy was in stuff like Roger Troutman’s work with Zapp, or the way producers like DJ Quik and Dr. Dre could mix live and electronic instrumentation to make a sound whose funkiness seemed to defy the machines behind it. When an interviewer asked why Hancock thought so many people objected to electronic keyboards, he said they’d done the same thing with cars back when most people rode horses. “I started playing piano when I was seven,” he went on. “Just think what it’s going to be like when you get people starting to play synthesizer when they are seven.” Look around and you’ll see: It’s the world we’re living in now.