Herbie Hancock & Bobby Hutcherson Quartet - Sketched in the theme

Though the instrumental voices and material are quite different, Herbie Hancock more or less picked up here where he left off on the same stage with the 2001 Davis/Coltrane tribute band. Like his contemporary and former Miles Davis partner Wayne Shorter, Hancock confirmed that he has adopted a collectively expressive approach, much like the modus operandi of the 1960s Miles Davis Quintet, whose intuitive sensibilities still hover around this music. In a two-hour unbroken set in the company of vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, bassist Scott Colley and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, classic tunes were slyly hidden, hinted at or played only after they had been improvised upon.
Dynamic levels were kept down for long periods, then exploded without warning. Straight, between-the-eyes funk was touched on (hardly avoidable for a player with Hancock's chart-busting track record), but with the backbeat dispersed into flurries of polyrhythms, and the original hooks hidden under streams of arpeggios.
It was as if Hancock knows that he can do what he likes with anything he plays, however far stretched from a groove or a song. The roar that went up when he came on stage proved it.
At first it sounded as if Carrington - who kept up a waterfall of percussion all night and knew unerringly where she was, however elastic the pulse - would overwhelm the effusive whisper of Hutcherson's contributions. The drummer's controlled-explosion approach seemed more attuned to Hancock's streaming runs and percussive chords, but when the dynamics settled, the listening powers of these players opened up.
Hutcherson began whipping a mallet down the keys of the vibes to echo Hancock's most liquid figures, and a spacious exploration of music, reforged from Dolphin Dance, moved between insinuating meditation and snarling, emphatic vamps. Late in this extended piece, Carrington began playing like the most virtuosic of rock drummers, but with the accents audaciously scattered. Finally, Hutcherson sketched in the theme.
Hutcherson's own mid-tempo November was a relaxed piece of straight-ahead swing and classic bebop, and Shorter's Footprints weaved in and out. A racing groove at the close could have gone on all night. And, for the encore, the band played cruising bop, instead of cosily reverting to the Hancock hit-medley they could have done. The show was entirely their call, and they made the most of it.

Setlist
Dolphin Dance
Virtual Hornets
Actual Proof
Footprints
Little B's Poem

Note: Most of the tracks are linked in a long medley, I have cut the tracks into 7 parts

Line Up
Herbie Hancock - piano
Bobby Hutcherson - vibraphones
Scott Colley - bass
Terri Lyne Carrington - drums

SOURCE	FM	SOUND QUALITY	A+	FORMAT	FLAC	BITRATE	LV 6	TRACKS #	7
LOCATION / VENUE		London		Barbican		DATE		07/03/03

Herbie Hancock And The "New Standard All Stars" - Live in Europe

1995's The New Standard found him and an all-star band including John Scofield, Jack DeJohnette and Michael Brecker interpreting pop songs by contempory Artists. On first glance this record would not seem to have much promise from a jazz standpoint. Herbie Hancock performs a set of tunes which include numbers from the likes of Peter Gabriel, Stevie Wonder, Sade, Paul Simon, Prince, the Beatles ("Norwegian Wood") and Kurt Cobain. However by adding vamps, reharmonizing the chord structures, sometimes quickly discarding the melodies and utilizing an all-star band, Hancock was able to transform the potentially unrewarding music into creative jazz. Hancock, who sticks to acoustic piano, shows that he is still in prime form, taking quite a few fiery solos. With Michael Brecker on tenor and surprisingly effective soprano, guitarist John Scofield, bassist Dave Holland, drummer Jack DeJohnette and percussionist Don Alias (along with an occasional horn or string section that was dubbed in later), the results are often quite hard-swinging and certainly never predictable. Although it is doubtful that any of these songs will ever become a jazz standard, Herbie Hancock has successfully created a memorable set of "new" music.

New York Minute
Mercy Street
Thieves In The Temple
You've Got It Bad Girl
Love is Stronger Than Pride

Herbie Hancock (P.) Michael Brecker (S.) John Scofield (G.) Dave Holland (Ac.B.) Don Alias (Perc.) Jack Dejohnette (Dr.)

SOURCE	FM	SOUND QUALITY	A+	FORMAT	Mp3	BITRATE	256	TRACKS #	5
LOCATION / VENUE		Montreux		Stravinski Hall		DATE		July 14 1997
NOTES:

Herbie Hancock - Live at the Barbican 2004

Both veterans of the Miles Davis Quintet from the mid-1960s, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter have spent the subsequent decades pursuing divergent paths that still manage to cross at regular intervals. For this reunion, they have recruited bassist Dave Holland and Shorter's regular percussionist, Brian Blade, to form a jazz supergroup of sorts - one that doesn't suffer from the battling egos the term usually implies.
The foursome play jazz that thinks on its feet and dances on tiptoe. They never take the obvious route to a musical conclusion, but nor are they lured into obscurity for its own sake. Blade is too subtle a drummer to hammer relentlessly on the beat, but synchronises with the firm, elastic pulse of Holland's double-bass to ensure that the rhythm section can swing ferociously or diffuse into a weightless shimmer at the flip of a coin.
It was only after the first three numbers - during which Hancock pondered chords both allusive and quizzical at the piano, while Shorter alternated between light, fluttery tones and lean, sculpted lines on saxophone - that Hancock got up to speak. "I haven't got anything to say really, I just couldn't sit there any longer," he muttered. But he did offer a few clues about how the quartet work from skeleton arrangements: "We're constantly reclassifying the bones - it's forensic music."
At times the sounds suggested a small boat in distress as Hancock thundered out low-register rumblings amid waterspouts of percussion; then the sun would suddenly come out as Holland stretched the tempo into a confident, loping blues. And when Hancock clanged out honky-tonk chords or dabbled in Debussy, Shorter countered with birdsong or pulsating hard bop.

Sonrisa
Pathways
Footprints
Canteloupe Island

Herbie Hancock – p
Wayne Shorter – s
Dave Holland – db
Brian Blade – d

SOURCE	FM	SOUND QUALITY	A	FORMAT	Mp3	BITRATE	224	TRACKS #	4
LOCATION / VENUE		London		Barbican Center		DATE		05–07–04
NOTES:		This concert is a rare opportunity to witness such massed talent on one stage!!!

Miles Davis - Tales Of New York

By late 1958, Davis employed one of the best and most profitable working bands pursuing the hard bop style, his personnel stabilized to alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Wynton Kelly, long-serving bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb. His band played a mixture of pop standards and bebop originals by the likes of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron; as with all bebop-based jazz, Davis's groups improvised on the chord changes of a given song.
However, Davis was one of many jazz musicians growing dissatisfied with bebop, seeing its increasingly complex chord changes as hindering creativity. In 1953, pianist George Russell published his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, which offered an alternative to the practice of improvisation based on chords. Abandoning the traditional major and minor key relationships of Western music, Russell invented a new formulation using scales or a series of scales for improvisations; this approach came to be known as modal in jazz.
Influenced by Russell's ideas, Davis implemented his first modal composition with the title track of his 1958 album Milestones; satisfied with the results, Davis now prepared an entire album based on modality. Pianist Bill Evans, also an enthusiast of Russell, but recently departed from the Davis band to pursue his own career. Davis successfully drafted Evans into his new recording project, the sessions that would become Kind of Blue.

SETLIST		FEATURING:
Bye, Bye, Blackbird Four It Never Entered My Mind Walkin Milestones So What		Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Arthur Taylor, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Philly Joe Jones, Wynton Kelly, Jimmy Cobb, George Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams