#jazz

By 1973, Herbie Hancock had already lived a few musical lifetimes. He’d been the young piano genius drafted into Miles Davis’ second great quintet, pushing post-bop into uncharted modal and free territories. He’d led his own adventurous groups, including the Mwandishi sextet, diving deep into spacey, avant-garde fusion that stretched jazz into cosmic abstraction. Yet as dazzling as those projects were, they weren’t reaching beyond the inner circle of jazz heads.