Herbie Hancock is one of the most prolific musicians to arrive in the Sixties, and it's surprising that his stature in jazz hasn't carried over, as with such colleagues as Miles Davis and Tony Williams, to bring him mass acceptance with the rock audience. Certainly that audience has heard him enough, even if they didn't realize it he played on several of Miles' mid-Sixties pinnacles, wrote the Number One Mongo Santamaria hit "Watermelon Man" and such outstanding film scores as Blow Up, and even dashed off several commercials currently playing network TV and making him richer than his fine albums ever could.

His days as a relatively invisible man may finally be coming to an end, though, because Blue Note has just released a bargain priced two-record package summarizing his Sixties achievements, and his new set on Warner Brothers finds his latest band getting into a personal militance and searing solo attack that may not be as gorgeously complex as the best of his past work but possesses more sheer seething intensity than anything he's ever done.

One of the interesting things about Blue Note records is that they are perhaps the last record company to carry on the jazz business tradition of holding stables of musicians, so that the men signed to the company get lots of recording work in playing at each others' sessions, one day as leader, the next as sideman. At its worst this practice results in a plethora of uninspired "blowing sessions" of the type that became so oppressive in the Fifties; at its best it gives you a fascinating shelf of albums like the great Blue Note output of the last few years, in which a whole raft of important musicians can be seen in intricate evolution from imitative beginnings to highly personal and influential statements. It did that for Herbie Hancock, and also allowed him to work with a shifting galaxy of heavyweights like Donald Byrd, Dexter Gordon, Thad Jones, the emergent Joe Henderson, Paul Chambers, Ron Carter, Billy Higgins and towering Tony Williams.

The impeccably edited material on The Best of Herbie Hancock ranges from the street-strutting funk of the early "Watermelon Man" through statements successively more challenging and complex, to stop at the very gates of Mwandishi's militance. By 1965 and the Empyrean Isles and Maiden Voyage albums, Herbie had matured to the point of bringing the art of small-combo jazz to a peak equivalent to that attained by Miles, his mentor, in the same period. The music is rich and luxuriant and open-ended, succeeding brilliantly in its attempt to capture, as Herbie said, "the vastness and majesty of the ocean, the splendor of a sea-going vessel on its maiden voyage."

From there he moved into larger ensembles and increasing stylistic diversity, and the last songs on the album, "I Have a Dream" and particularly the ominous "He Who Lives In Fear," reveal a composer and bandleader completely conscious of everything surrounding him in both music and society and transmuting all of those influences into stunningly personal work.

After last year's relatively unambitious side trip on the Fat Albert Rotunda album, Herbie has returned with a real surprise: a session of driving, firebrand improvisations that reflect the full maturation of his art's social awareness (though without getting heavy-handed about it, thank God), as well as some new and perhaps inevitable influences. Miles' recent pioneerings turn up, of course, as they have on just about every jazz record released in the past two years–the yearning, benediction-like opening of "Wandering Spirit Song" is especially reminiscent of "In a Silent Way," and Miles' pervasive new spacetempi crop up, though not nearly so obviously or imitatively as usual. The emphasis on a large percussion section puts them through some changes and imbues them with an angry bite that was entirely missing from the airy labyrinths of a Bitches' Brew. Trombonist Julian Priester's "Wandering Spirit Song" and especially the opening "Ostinato (Suite For Angela)" are much closer in their screams of reed rage and African polyrhythms to albums like Andrew Hill's great Blue Note set Compulsion, which also featured an absolutely carnivorous percussion section, and even harken back to Max Roach and Oscar Brown, Jr.'s 1960 classic of black rage and cultural nationalism. We Insist: Freedom Now Suite. Priester was on that album, too, and his playing is, if anything, more bitterly moving now than it was then.

As beautiful as Hancock's past work is, it's really gratifying to see him moving in this direction, because this is the brand of black music which will probably be most crucial in the Seventies. And while neither of these albums is an extremely experimental nor as "commercial" (as in the current predilection for lame, preachy vocals) as much other current jazz, they're both intensely musical, solid and uplifting from stem to stern. We should be so lucky every day. (RS 90)

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