Herbie Hancock Box
Since the 1960s, Herbie Hancock has been one of the major figures in contemporary jazz, even if his restless creative muse sometimes confounded his longtime trad-jazz followers at the same time it was winning him fans from other genres. The first half of this four-disc, 34-track career retrospective leans heavily on Hancock's musical foundations, as distilled through acoustic performances from the late '70s and early '80s (most of which have heretofore only been issued in Japan), many with his former Miles Davis Quintet sidemen-cum-jazz supergroup, V.S.O.P. (includingTony Williams,Wayne Shorter,Ron Carter, andFreddie Hubbard). Those performances (including the unissued Hubbard showcase "Red Clay") lay the groundwork the remainder of the anthology builds on, with Hancock's Fender Rhodes and synths surveying a rich landscape that spans a reinvented "Watermelon Man," the electro-funk workout "Chameleon," jazz-rock fusion, soul, world beat, and, of course, Hancock's most unlikely success, the 1983 hip-hop/industrial megahit "Rockit." Nods are also given to his intermittent film work, via the cool sophistication of hisDeath Wishtitle cut and hisAcademy Award-winning interpretationofMonk's "'Round Midnight." The packaging is nearly as innovative as Hancock's music: a transparent plastic cube with the discs and booklet (featuring insightful notes penned by Hancock himself) suspended within.--Jerry McCulley