Herbie Hancock - "Fat Albert Rotunda" (1969)

Herbie Hancock invented funk in all forms.  He pioneered electric funk, acoustic funk, techno-pop, and the use of synthesizers in jazz and rock.  His music is sampled so frequently alongside James Brown and George Clinton that the three have became the foundation of hip-hop, but in my mind Fat Albert Rotunda was the starting point of it all, the starting point of all funk.  Soul, Jazz and R&B had given way at this time to a whole new form musical for Herbie Hancock, and it must have hit hard because this is the first jazz album to ever go platinum.  It blew the doors wide open for the first time jazz listeners and the old aficionados as Herbie Hancock stood at a crossroads between his straight ahead jazz on Blue Note and the electro-awesome Mwandishi period to follow.

Having finished his contract with said Blue Note, Herbie was asked by Warner Brothers to record soundtrack music for Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids TV show as the start of a new multi-album contract.  The rich subject matter, the freedom and support of a new record company, and Herbie’s wise choice of soul/jazz crossover musicians put it all in just the right place.  Yes, Herbie had gotten his first industry chops with soul-master Donald Byrd and Coleman Hawkins.  Before that he gained an electrical engineering and music degree from Grinnell.  After that he played with Miles Davis’ second great quintet, Kenny Dorham and Freddie Hubbard, but it takes more than a great musician to make a great album.  The timing has to be right, the recording environment, and the mood.  Herbie had just discovered the Fender Rhodes, been given a solo contract by Warner Brothers and the freedom to lead his own band.  Fat Albert Rotunda has a sound that many have come to imitate, but for Herbie Hancock it was a one-of-a-kind, as he soon afterwards sought new instruments, new musical layering and styles, and challenges both compositional and technological.    

But even more importantly than the back story, Fat Albert Rotunda’s got soul.  Everybody starts movin’ when “Wiggle Waggle” drops in, a first choice to get the party going, ‘cause if anybody knows how to do it right it’s Herbie.  Check out those beats, lil’ brother.  Listen to that wiggle waggle!

The Chromatics "Night Drive" (2007)

Sometimes an album just falls out of the air and into your lap.  Sometimes this happens for the listener and maybe sometimes it happens for the artist too, but an album like this can stand alone as one enjoyable length of music, regardless of the rest of a band’s catalogue.  Sometimes a group of people just gets it right, and that would be the album Night Drive by The Chromatics.

I have been drawn to female vocalists in The Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance, the techno edge of their work with Future Sound of London.  Portishead has always had a dark disdainful sound, and I like the German brooding of Chicks on Speed, but Night Drive is an album of Italo-Disco, an old style re-invented by a group of Portland musicians on Italians Do It Better.  If I could make up the story, it seems like the first stab by a new collection of musicians at a new sound, eager to get away from a punk background but still aware of a specific target; a sparsely instrumented, intentionally repetitive collection of euro synth-pop songs that at first comes up like background music, until you find yourself spacing out on it, or singing the hooks a couple of days later. 

Night Drive starts with street noise and a phone conversation as a girl leaves a club and starts her car, then her drive takes you through scenic landscapes and sound structures that are only appreciated fully when the album is enjoyed from beginning to end.  Like an orchestral composition, there are movements and rhythms that vary like the idea suggested by the title.  Then the album comes to an end like the end of the night, or early morning, the two times I find myself playing this music the most.

Personally, there are some musicians whom I know as personalities and myths before I know their music.  Then there are musicians whom I know only through their music.  That would be The Chromatics, but when  Ruth Radelet sings “Oh, little stranger“, I want to be there with her, and I want to see the sun disappear.