Herbie Hancock (born April 12, 1940) – Hang Up Your Hang Ups (1975)

Funk Brother Melvin “Wah Wah Watson" Ragin, bassist Paul Jackson, and Hancock co-wrote the jazz-funk masterpiece opening cut from his final LP with the Headhunters.

Watch full video on YouTube.

Herbie Hancock is a musical genius whose brilliance has shaped jazz for six decades.

After rising to fame in the sixties as a member of Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet (alongside bassist Ron Carter, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and Tony Williams on drums), Hancock became fascinated with synthesizers and the possibilities of electronic music.

In the early 70s he formed the Mwandishi sextet to explore these new sounds. The band was named after a Swahili word meaning ‘writer’ that Hancock used as an alias at the time.

For more on his Mwandishi era, see our post from February on the cosmic jazz-funk jam “Anua” by Mwandishi member Eddie Henderson, off his debut solo LP, which was one of the albums featuring the sextet.

In 1973, Hancock formed a new band, The Headhunters, with only Mwandishi multireedist Bennie Maupin remaining. The other original Headhunters were bassist Paul Jackson, drummer Harvey Mason, and percussionist Bill Summers. Their debut album together was the breakthrough Head Hunters LP (1973), which became a huge commercial success. It sold over a million copies and helped jazz-funk cross over to white audiences.

In the liner notes to the 1997 CD re-issue, Hancock explained why he assembled a new band when he did:

“I began to feel that I had been spending so much time exploring the upper atmosphere of music and the more ethereal kind of far-out spacey stuff. Now there was this need to take some more of the earth and to feel a little more tethered; a connection to the earth. ... I was beginning to feel that we (the sextet) were playing this heavy kind of music, and I was tired of everything being heavy. I wanted to play something lighter.”

Drummer Mike Clark replaced Mason after Head Hunters, and appeared on their next few releases, including Thrust (1974), the live double LP Flood (1975), and Survival of the Fittest (1975), the Headhunters’ solo debut as a group without Hancock.

The final album Hancock made with the Headhunters was Man-Child (1975), his fifteenth studio LP.

Besides the members of the Headhunters, Man-Child featured a stellar lineup of additional players, including Wayne Shorter on soprano sax, Ernie Watts on sax and flute, Garnett Brown on trombone, Funk Brother guitarist Melvin “Wah Wah Watson” Ragin, and Louis “Thunder-Thumbs” Johnson on bass. James Gadson and Harvey Mason both played drums along with Mike Clark, and Stevie Wonder guested on harmonica.

It has been called Hancock’s most straight up funk LP, with highlights like “The Traitor,” which he co-wrote with Ragin, Shorter, and Johnson; “Steppin' In It,” featuring Headhunters bassist Paul Jackson on bass synthesizer; and the very funky closing cut “Heartbeat.” Bennie Maupin played the Lyricon for the first time on Man-Child, a wind synthesizer that would become an important part of the band’s sound over the next few years.

On an album full of them, Man-Child’s arguably funkiest moment was its opening cut, the jazz-funk masterpiece “Hang Up Your Hang Ups.” The track was co-written by Hancock, Ragin, and Jackson.

Like the rest of Man-Child, “Hang Up Your Hang Ups” was co-produced by Hancock and unsung producer David Rubinson. Besides co-producing most of Hancock’s records in the 70s and early 80s, Rubinson produced classic albums for Moby Grape (and mixed Grape guitarist Skip Spence’s 1969 cult masterpiece Oar), Santana, the Pointer Sisters, Labelle, Patti Labelle’s solo records, and Right On Be Free (1970), the debut album by The Voices Of East Harlem.

More info:

“Cuttin' Heads: Headhunters drummer Mike Clark chops it up with Mackrosoft's Aja West,” interview by Aja West, Wax Poetics, Issue 28, 2008.

“Herbie Hancock – Manchild | Album Of The Day,” Soul Brother Records, June 29, 2021.

“Man-Child,” HerbieHancock.com.

#funk #jazz #Headhunters #HerbieHancock