Herbie Hancock: Mwandishi Years

(This is an edited transcript of Episode 23 of the Sounds Out of Time podcast. Here’s a playlist of tracks featured in this episode.)

After a few heavy duty episodes in a row, it’s time to switch things up a bit. Instead of a Deep Listening session, this one’s a Summer Listening session, which means there’s a groove or two involved.

I thought for this episode I’d dig into the Mwandishi years of Herbie Hancock’s career. This was a bit of a transition time for Herbie. He’d established himself in the early ’60s both as a member of Miles Davis’s band and as a solo artist. His first album Takin’ Off included the tune “Watermelon Man,” which became his first big commercial success. Toward the end of the ’60s, though, a couple things happened. He left Miles Davis’s band, and his solo career went into a period of exploration. The years from 1969 through 1972 were the Mwandishi years. I’ll come back to the story of Mwandishi shortly, but first there’s a parallel story.

During his early solo career, Herbie had one foot in commercial music. He did the soundtrack for a 1966 film called “Blow-Up” by director Michelangelo Antonioni, and a few years later, he got a call to do the score for the cartoon series “Fat Albert.” It was definitely the funkiest cartoon music of all time, and it was collected on an album called Fat Albert Rotunda. Here’s the tune…