I listen to jazz in the background. It plays when I don’t want to listen to music but still want some sound. On early Sunday mornings, it brought vibrancy to the tan decor of my childhood home and to the scene of my dad sipping coffee as he read the newspaper. On days I can’t be bothered to follow along to a song’s lyrics, jazz walks me through Mason Hall. When I enter the library to work for hours on end, jazz is there to comfort me. I enjoy jazz, but I do not pay attention to it. Oxymoronically, I turn to it when I’m at my laziest, even though immense attention would be required to appreciate its complex and shifting patterns.
On Oct. 25, Herbie Hancock and his quintet played the Hill Auditorium. As I sat there watching, the band commanded me to pay close attention to both their musical acumen and lively stage presence. (The man sitting next to me also asked me to note that Hancock was playing a Fazioli piano.)
Herbie Hancock is one of my favorite jazz musicians. It’s hard not to admire him; after all, he practically defined the jazz genre. He worked with Miles Davis, spearheaded the funky jazz of the ’70s and has been part of almost every major musical movement even remotely related to jazz ever since. His most famous album, Head Hunters, was the first jazz album to go platinum, an electric combination of funk, Afrofuturism and jazz.
Going into the show, I expected excellence from Hancock, and he absolutely delivered. What I hadn’t anticipated was his bandmates’ ability to hold their own alongside him. The band ranged in prestige: Terence Blanchard, filling Wayne Shorter’s boots as Hancock’s accompanying trumpeter, is an eight-time Grammy-winning jazz musician and two-time Oscar-winning composer. Electric-bassist James Genus was playing hooky from his regular Saturday-night shift, a weekly performance on a small sketch show called Saturday Night Live. The guitarist and singer Lionel Loueke and drummer Jaylen Petinaud were not as renowned: Loueke is an under-appreciated veteran, and Petinaud is an up-and-coming musician. During the show, Hancock himself even credited Petinaud as proof that jazz isn’t dead. The musician’s backgrounds and reputations became irrelevant, though, as soon as the band stepped onstage. In that moment, they were simply people creating the art they love.
Hancock began the show by introducing the concept of “The Overture,” snippets of songs that would be played in full later. He stated he was going to play a program called “Prehistoric Predator” on his Korg Kronos synthesizer. Then the music began.
Music is a loose word for what Hancock played that night. “Prehistoric Predator” endowed the synthesizer with the sounds of water rushing, leaves shaking and animal noises — more sound effect than song. Genus and Petinuad jumped in, adding to the movements of the underbrush. After a moment of this, Hancock grabbed the mic, and asked, “Where are the raptors?” Loueke and Blanchard jumped into action. Loueke moved his fingers across the strings of his electric guitar, producing the blood-thirsty shrieks of velociraptors. Blanchard handled the larger beats, emitting a deep, guttural blow from his trumpet that became a terrifying roar. The raptors were alive, filling Hill Auditorium, and “The Overture” began.
“The Overture” not only gave the audience their first taste of the kind of music we would hear that night, but also of the band’s dynamism. Blanchard was the first to grab hold of the spotlight. He began a sorrowful solo on the trumpet, seeming to carry with him the weight of the music’s emotion. Hancock was insistent on his friend’s apparent discomfort, pushing him with the piano to hold on to the climax longer and longer. When the trumpet ended, the band took a moment for applause before starting up again.
Loueke grabbed the audience’s attention next, breaking into an intricately crafted assemblage of electric guitar and vocals, using a similar technique to when he created the “raptor sounds” — except with the volume turned down to a whisper. The rhythm of his lyrics perfectly complemented the melody of his guitar. Throughout the show, Loueke juggled a variety of techniques, like simple rhythm guitar, tapping on the guitar neck and classic jazz solos, all while impressively overlaying rich vocals.
Obviously, “The Overture” could not end without the headliner showing off his chops. Hancock’s first musical spotlight of the night was contested by Petinaud. They engaged in a percussive battle, Hancock crafting an intense piano lick and Petinaud responding with an equally intense drum line. Even going back and forth in a musical conflict, they maintained the flow of the song, simultaneously competing and collaborating.
After “The Overture,” Hancock took the mic and introduced his band. He was an incredibly charming showman, keeping the audience entertained with jokes and quips. Yet what completely absorbed the audience’s attention wasn’t how Hancock interacted with them, but rather how the band members interacted with each other. After Hancock and Petinaud’s “battle,” the other band members walked over to them and pantomimed fanning out a fire. They were constantly reacting to each other’s musical feats with smiles or shaking heads, almost in disbelief at each other’s musical acrobatics. In the brief intermissions between songs, they would joke with each other. One inside joke eventually evolved from a comment about the band members relying solely upon AI to make their music, and this joke persisted throughout the show.
The band went on to play one of Blanchard’s arrangements of “Footprints,” a song by Shorter, as well as “Actual Proof” and “Butterfly” from Hancock’s album Thrust. He then played the songs “Hang Up Your Hang Ups,” “Rockit” and “Spider” from his albums Man-Child, Future Shock and Secrets, respectively, as well as a vocoder solo and the song “Chameleon” from Head Hunters to close out the show.
The setlist was funky, which worked well with the band’s playful attitude. Throughout the rest of the show, each of the musicians took turns in the spotlight. They improvised in new and exciting ways, continuing to play off of each other to create blended sonics. While Genus spent the least time in the spotlight, he had a solo during “Secret Sauce.” He looped layers of reverbed bass over itself, soloing on it, looping again and soloing more. When he finally built up enough meaty bass, the rest of the band joined in.
Hancock’s vocoder solo was perhaps the only moment where the band didn’t totally grasp the audience’s attention. Hancock spoke into the vocoder, pitching his voice up and down using the keyboard. He started by continuing the bit about AI, stating into the vocoder that he himself was AI. He then rambled on, talking about the necessity of loving family and ending with the message that everyone is part of one big family. Ironically, when Hancock preached about connection, it was the most disconnected he felt from everyone else. Hancock seemed directionless throughout this solo, and the underlying commentary on the effect of technology on our ability to communicate with one another seemed to be lost on him. Still, Hancock’s quintet played an exciting show at the Hill Auditorium. Each band member possessed incredibly diverse skillsets on their instruments, making it a masterclass in jazz.
What made the band so exciting to watch wasn’t just their musical acumen, but their ability to work as a group, whether in their on-stage banter or when grooving in key. A large part of their consistent musical connection throughout did stem from the individual instrumental skills of the group members. However, a major source of their musical connections was their non-musical interactions: their humor, their riffing and their ability to flow off each other, all of which were instigated by Hancock’s presence, demonstrating the reason Hancock’s musicality has thrived over the past seven decades. Hancock is a true musical legend.
Daily Arts Writer Joe Bogdan can be reached at joebogdn@umich.edu.