How ‘Head Hunters’ Shook Up Jazz (and Herbie Hancock’s World)

Herbie Hancock still vividly recalls the night, 51 years ago, when the Pointer Sisters skated circles around him.

“We came up and played our weird stuff, and when they came out, they were wearing roller skates,” he said in a video interview in June, recalling a show at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. “The audience went insane.”

That humbling experience in the spring of 1973 sparked a major change in Hancock’s thinking. After establishing himself as one of the leading jazz pianists of the ’60s, he had embraced electric keyboards and homed in on the so-called weird stuff with the Mwandishi band, a sextet that was both fearlessly exploratory and largely oblivious to the tastes of the average listener.

“We need to learn from them,” he remembered thinking of the Pointers. “Maybe there’s something that can emerge from us that would work for a young audience.”

By the early fall, he had disbanded Mwandishi and was busy writing and recording with a new quintet, informed as much by contemporary funk leaders like Sly and the Family Stone as cutting-edge jazz. When the group ventured to clubs around the Bay Area to test out its in-progress material, “People went nuts,” Hancock said, beaming at the memory. “They were all dancing, and they loved it, and it just blew our minds.”

The resulting album, “Head Hunters,” released in October 1973, would be pivotal both for Hancock and for jazz. Peaking at No. 13 on the Billboard 200, it later went platinum, yielded a Top 20 R&B hit in the monstrously grooving “Chameleon” and leveled up Hancock’s concerts into arenas, proving definitively that jazz could make a significant impact on the modern pop mainstream. No instrumental jazz release since has made a bigger bang.