Herbie Hancock Septet - Jazz Workshop, Boston, MA 3/22/73
The lore about the changeover from the Mwandishi band to the Head Hunters group comes with the idea that Hancock wanted to get commercial or maybe that the label wanted him to be commercial, but I really wouldn’t swear to any of that, it reeks of all those “selling out” stories that are often so false. The thing that strikes me about this Septet date (it’s actually an Octet with the conga player) is how close to the music of Miles Davis it is and one wonders if the change might have been to distance Hancock’s sound from his original mentor’s. Anyway this is all speculation of course, but there were several times during the several listens to this show that I kept wondering if this was a Miles show. Part of it is that Eddie Henderson is on fire here, chopping so hard I thought maybe Hubbard had stepped in for the date. Hancock is probably at his most dissonant Rhodes-wise, which is particularly obvious on the gigantic Hornets that starts off. I can go for Sextant-period Hancock any day and this one sounds great, just like a number of other shows from the first half of the 70s. Right up my alley.
Daevid Allen - Obscura 3: Self-Initiation
One in a long series of various Daevid Allen archives. You could liken this one to a meditation or visualization cassette found in a new age store, of course, woven in Allen’s own mythos. It’s actually not all that far from Cyrille Verdeaux’s tapes, with lots of electronics that spiral around in repetitive patterns, shifting and morphing under Allen’s spiritual cant. It’s also, unsurprisingly, a bit like Steve Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Musick except in comparison this seems a bit low fi/budget.
Magma / Weidorje - Chorus TV 9/23/78; 1982 / 1979 (DVD)
A rather short DVD featuring a handful of small performances from Magma and one of its premiere offshoots. The 1978 performance features Hhai and one other song from their later repetoire whose name I can’t think of off hand. This shows a very energetic Magma contrasted by the shift to 1982 and “Otis,” possibly one of the most embarassing things I’ve ever seen. Their incorporation of R&B into the mix would work with some projects, but Vander hollering next to the piano player just made me uncomfortable. Weidorje also had a kind of funky stage presence, with Bernard Paganotti the unlikely frontman. I used to have this Chorus TV clip on tape and remember it being tame compared to the Rombas material, my opinion does remain just about the same.