Mwandishi: The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings

Mwandishi: The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings

ASIN: B000002MTQ

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com essential recording
These two CDs include three LPs from 1969 to 1972, one of Herbie Hancock's most creative periods. The earliest album, Fat Albert Rotunda, features a fine sextet highlighted by tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, like Hancock a master at maintaining strong rhythmic grooves while stretching outward. The later music, with a regularly working band, becomes increasingly expansive and exploratory. Like Miles Davis on Bitches Brew, Hancock was increasingly interested in layering rhythms and textures, emphasizing percussion, electric keyboards, and potent soloists, and broadening his palette of sounds to eventually include synthesizers. There are significant contributions from the inspiring drummer Billy Hart and some potent, if neglected, soloists in multireed player Bennie Maupin (also on Bitches Brew) and trombonist Julian Priester (a Sun Ra associate), who also provided the extended compositions "Water Torture" and "Wandering Spirit Song," respectively. This is a sometimes overlooked period in Hancock's music, bracketed by the quality of his earlier acoustic music, both with Davis and as a leader on Blue Note, and his later commercial success, but it's some of his most innovative work. --Stuart Broomer

Tracks:

Wiggle-Waggle
Fat Mama
Tell Me A Bedtime Story
Oh! Oh! Here He Comes
Jessica
Fat Albert Rotunda
Lil' Brother
Ostinato (Suite For Angela)
You'll Know When You Get There

Tracks:

Wandering Spirit Song
Sleeping Giant: Part One/Part Two/Part Three/Part Four/Part Five
Quasar
Water Torture

Amazon.com essential recording

These two CDs include three LPs from 1969 to 1972, one of Herbie Hancock's most creative periods. The earliest album, Fat Albert Rotunda, features a fine sextet highlighted by tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, like Hancock a master at maintaining strong rhythmic grooves while stretching outward. The later music, with a regularly working band, becomes increasingly expansive and exploratory. Like Miles Davis on Bitches Brew, Hancock was increasingly interested in layering rhythms and textures, emphasizing percussion, electric keyboards, and potent soloists, and broadening his palette of sounds to eventually include synthesizers. There are significant contributions from the inspiring drummer Billy Hart and some potent, if neglected, soloists in multireed player Bennie Maupin (also on Bitches Brew) and trombonist Julian Priester (a Sun Ra associate), who also provided the extended compositions "Water Torture" and "Wandering Spirit Song," respectively. This is a sometimes overlooked period in Hancock's music, bracketed by the quality of his earlier acoustic music, both with Davis and as a leader on Blue Note, and his later commercial success, but it's some of his most innovative work. --Stuart Broomer

Customer Reviews:

Headhunter fans should just keep moving along!.......2007-06-13

If you are a fan of Miles' music around the Bitches Brew era then this CD is for you. You get the complete Fat Albert Rotunda, Mwandishi, and Crossings. Frankly, I purchased this for Mwandishi and Crossings. After I heard Sextant, I just had to have more of Herbie's Mwandishi band material. The Fat Albert Material is good but it's very different from the other two releases found in this 2 disc set. Again - if you are a fan of Miles in the late 60's early 70's then this is a must have. You will not be disappointed!

Fascinating with spectacular moments.......2006-03-04

These two CDs document Herbie Hancock's music from 1969-1971 for the Warner Brothers label, released originally as three albums. It is a testament to how much jazz was changing at the time that the first album and the last are so drastically different, though the middle album helps to bridge the gap. The first album, "Fat Albert Rotunda," was music that Hancock wrote for "Fat Albert," the Bill Cosby cartoon. For the most part, the music is very funky, but more in the Lee Morgan boogaloo sense than in the Headhunters of the 70s sense. At this point, so much energy had been used trying to find the next hit boogaloo to succeed "The Sidewinder" that the subgenre had been exhausted. Thus, many of the tunes on this album sound very very similar (and one cut actually steals the Horace Silver groove from "The Jody Grind" three years earlier). That having been said, for what it is, the level of musicianship is very high, as Hancock was truly the inventor of this type of tune. The highlights of "Fat Albert Rotunda" are actually the non-funk tunes, few as they are. "Tell me a Bedtime Story" is absolutely beautiful, though it does sound dated mainly because of the groove (the drum pattern used sounds eerily like disco music even though this was almost a decade before the disco craze). "Jessica" is another really pretty ballad, though the orchestrations are a little thick at some times (the melody is beautiful enough to stand alone in my opinion).

The truly wonderful music on this CD comes from the second and third albums represented here, "Mwandishi" and "Crossings." The former features exploratory (though still listenable) extended pieces with an emphasis on odd rhythmic patterns and grooves (though not in the funk sense). "Ostinato" and "You'll Know When You Get There" are excellent, fascinating pieces, while "Wandering Spirit Song" wanders a bit too far to keep my attention.

If you have an adventurous ear, far and away the best music on here comes from "Crossings." With the inclusion of Patrick Gleeson on synthesizers (the first time they were used in jazz, Gleeson's idea), this is electronic music, and can be labeled "fusion" but it's early fusion, before it was commercialized and streamlined. The result is an amazing array of sounds and colors (though the music doesn't rely solely on technology; the writing here is especially strong) with sporadic but glorious moments of funk. Early fusion was often about building great amounts of tension and then releasing them in glorious fashion (though that could be said about a lot of jazz) and there is one moment about twenty minutes into "Sleeping Giant" where Bennie Maupin has been soloing, raising the intensity level gradually, leading the band into a frenzy on one chord to the bursting point, then pow, they hit the bridge and fall back into perfect time. Musicians live for moments like that.

Get this CD because it is fascinating to trace the development of fusion leading up to its breakout with "Headhunters" and "Heavy Weather." There is something for everyone; casual listeners will enjoy the grooving funk of "Fat Albert Rotunda" while serious jazz-heads will be enthralled by almost every moment of Hancock's electronic experiments.

Funky And A Bit Crazy.......2005-07-27

this double cd compiles the complete recordings from three of herbie hancock's sextet releases - fat albert rotunda, mwandishi and crossings. recorded between 1969 and 1972 the band(s) created a musical hybrid of jazz-fusion and rock. like miles davis' recordings released in the same time period, the mwandishi recordings were introspective, explorative, and focused on sounds that were more representative of rock than they were of jazz. the music from fat albert rotunda is the most structured of the three albums and tracks like "wiggle waggle" and "fat mama" are out-in-out hard jazz funk. although these tracks are a bit more focused than the others on the cds, they lack the structure that was more easily accessible with hancock's later band, the headhunters. the tracks included from mwandishi and crossings are spatial and free. the melodies are rarely coherent, and the solos have a tendency to be a bit loose. even still, there is an undeniable weird funkiness to many of these tracks. it's impossible not to be somewhat engrossed by the music on these cds, but it's tough to groove with the music all of the time (it's definitely not always an easy listen).

Herbie and a great band.......2003-12-16

This album is awesome. I should say albums: this two disc set comprises Fat Albert Rotunda, Mwandishi and Crossings. On the Fat Albert stuff Herbie and a great band play with such great joy and feeling--mixing James Brown funk and jazz. You can dance to it. The Mwandishi stuff is more esoteric, but great too--especially Ostinato. Buy it, you'll like it!

Essential Herbie from top to bottom.......2003-11-01

I was really surprised this wasn't on Amazon's list of essentials from Herbie Hancock, because to my ears this is the definition of Herbie's contribution to jazz and clearly surpasses most of the work he did before this point as a group leader. The two discs present two very different visions of what can be done in an electric format, with the first showing how a nearly "standards" approach can be approached in an R & B context (clear melodic and harmonic structures), while the second takes a free approach and explores timbre, space, and texture. I really can't say enough about how much this disc has meant to me since I bought it soon after its initial release. It remains one of my absolute favorite top 5 "stranded on a desert island" discs because no matter how much I've heard it, or how many of the solos I've tried to cop or transcribe, I can honestly say I always hear something new that musicians of today could pick up on to make whole new genres upon genres.

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