04 May Herbie Hancock, “Rockit,” and the World’s Largest Keytar
No performer at this year’s SunFest is more accomplished than Herbie Hancock. He may not have sold more records than Snoop or played arenas as big as Creed, but as far as impact on the musical landscape, across a variety of genres—not to mention impact on the world at large—Hancock wins. (Who else has played with Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, and Duran Duran? And is a UNESCO World Ambassador to boot?) Watching the 72-year-old master on the Tire Kingdom stage under balmy skies last night was was a thrill and an honor.
Hancock’s band included James Genus on five-string bass, Lionel Loueke on guitar, and drummer Vinnie Colaiuta. He cycled through a slew of keyed instruments, including a grand piano, a bank of synthesizers and a Mac attached to a flat-screen monitor the size of a boogie board. The latter half of his set focused on his electrified material, an education for many in the audience on the relevance of his legacy. “I was the second person to record with a Vocoder, which led to Autotune,” he said, introducing the 1978 song “Come Running to Me.” Sure enough, Hancock sang the breezy chorus into his synthesizer mic and his voice emerged like a sexed-up android. Hancock finished on the keys and left Loueke to fingerpick a weird, feedback-infused solo on guitar, chanting African call-and-response into his headpiece mic. The band returned and finished the set with “Cantaloupe Island,” one of Hancock’s iconic jazz tracks, famously sampled by Us3 two decades ago, then left the stage to thunderous applause.
Surprisingly, they returned for an encore, the only SunFest act so far this year to do so. Hancock brought serious firepower: The biggest Axis Synth, aka Keytar, this side of Lady Gaga. The band lunged into “Rockit,” Hancock’s major crossover hit from 1983, one of the first pop songs to feature turntable scratching. Its abrasive, sinister groove and hard-funk nostalgia moved the older crowd into a dancing frenzy. And the sight of Herbie behind that Keytar! Hilarious and super-cool at the same time. He seamlessly segued into “Chameleon,” the highlight of his album with the Headhunters—which happens to be the biggest-selling jazz album of all time—and finished the set to immense applause.
It takes decades of experience to know how to work a crowd with music largely devoid of vocals, and Herbie did so with style, humor and prodigious groove.