The Kentucky Center Whitney Hall by Keith Halladay
Of the three towering pianists of his generation, Herbie Hancock is the one I enjoy the least. Chick Corea just makes me happy, and Keith Jarrett says something to my soul. But Herbie has always just made me say, “huh…cool.” I think it’s because I don’t play piano, and the subtleties of his voicings, which every jazz pianist since has spent long stretches of time analyzing, are kind of lost on me. So my bad, not his.
I went to Louisville to see him, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. He had Terence Blanchard with him, which was the name I most recognized when I bought the ticket. Also knew of James Genus, on bass, but nothing of guitarist Lionel Louweke or drummer Jaylen Petinaud. Nor did I look for any set lists online. For some reason I kind of expected a straight-ahead, post-bop show, drawing on Herbie’s ’60s stuff with Miles or solo, and the post-’90s return to that style.
That’s not what happened. The other four guys took the stage, and then this little, hunched old man tottered out. He picked up a mic, explained in a very slow, halting voice, that they were going to begin with an overture, classical style, that would introduce the sort of tunes they were going to play throughout the night. And then all manner of fusion broke out.
They started with this creepy ambient jam meant to emulate the age of the dinosaurs, with Blanchard blowing massively chorused and delayed trumpet screeches, and that morphed into a frantic 7/8 chops workout, which turned into something slower, but no less out there, and then a hint of Watermelon Man, and then a funk outro. I messaged the dudes on my band chat: “Holy shit. He’s going full Mwandishi.”
The only tunes they played that fell outside the period of 1971 to 1979 were Louweke’s scat-guitar rendition of “Dolphin Dance,” which was great, Terence Blanchard’s 4/4 R&B arrangement of Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints,” and Herbie’s MTV-dominating “Rockit,” from 1983, plus a couple of newish ones he’d written with Louweke. Other than that, it was straight afro-futurist mothership Herbie. He alternated between an acoustic grand and a Korg Kronos, which took the place of the banks of analog synths he used to lug around. It was kind of a greatest hits of the Mwandishi sextet, the Headhunters, and the Secrets-era band. “Butterfly,” “Actual Proof,” and some stuff I didn’t recognize.
The man is 85. Stooped. But the hands work just fine. And he didn’t leave the stage for two and a-half hours. Somewhere near the midpoint Genus and Blanchard walked off, while Louweke and Petinaud remained at their instruments, and Herbie started sermonizing about the dangers of AI, the unstable political moment, and the horrors of war. I realized this was the set break. Herbie wanted to impart some wisdom. This being Kentucky, there were a number of audience members who recognized what Herbie was doing and in the Pentecostal fashion started verbally responding: “Uh huh…you know that’s right…amen…” One woman was very moved by the spirit and started shouting her approval. Herbie smiled and said, “I can hear you.”
That lasted 20 minutes, and then he put the mic down and sat at the Korg. Time for a medley of “Rockit,” “Spider,” and something else. Halfway through he got up and made for the Keytar; I cringed as he shuffled to it and strapped it on. The thing was nearly as long as Herbie is tall now. Had to weigh a ton. But he got it on, and then he got it on, and he kept it on for the closer, “Chameleon,” and my God the man started doing jumping jacks in tandem with Louweke in time with the beat. And they weren’t half-assed: Herbie was jumping off the ground. High. High enough. Then there was a slide step routine, followed by more jumping.
From the video channel of Jason Redd
And that’s when I realized what this set was. Herbie was showing off. It must have hurt him terribly when Wayne died a couple of years ago; Herbie had spent several minutes talking about Wayne by way of introducing “Footprints,” earlier, and he’d made a number of references to his advanced age throughout the night. But what he was doing was flipping the bird to all of it. More than two hours into this, and Herbie’s showing off. I had this vision of his manager saying to him, during a planning meeting, “so, nice acoustic set? Play some standards, some crowd pleasers?”
And Herbie must have smirked and said, “man, get me my Keytar and get out of my face.”
I did have a moment of panic when Herbie, jumping around during the “Chameleon” drum solo, started drifting backward as he bounced, and began to come perilously close to Genus’s hefty pedal board. “Surely he sees that,” I said to myself, “surely James will see that Herbie’s about to land on his octaver, fall, and break his hip. I don’t want to see that, man. Stop him. Stop him.”
But Herbie stopped himself, about a foot away from a career-ender, and everybody went home happy, and full of the spirit.
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