After all our post-Millennial trauma and creeping sense of global insecurity, and considering all the inane ego-trivia and misogyny of dismal late-period rap, could any American black musician - bar perhaps Nile Rogers and his nostalgia cabaret chic - send through such a feel-good pair of albums as we have here? And, moreover, enjoy hit singles with them?
One somehow doubts it, these records wave to us brightly from a different time. Having forsook temporarily acoustic jazz and the garlands he had achieved there - playing and recording with Miles Davis etc - Hancock is standing on a sun-lit island now in 1978. The cool breezes of his cutting (tech) edge waft about him as he smiles to us blithely, innocently on the cover of Sunlight.
Sunlight contains the sublime I Thought It Was You, Hancock’s first Top 20 UK single (it only made the 85 spot in the US Billboard singles charts.) You Bet Your Love from the follow-up album, 1979's Feets Don’t Fail Me Now, was another UK top 20 smash. On both these albums, Hancock was knee-deep in synths and electric pianos - he studied electrical engineering at college - and he had employed the vocoder to vivify disco vocals with his adventurous sense of musicality.
Sunlight is so feel-good in its bubble of disco-funk that you just get buoyed up by the (only technically plaintive) I Thought It Was You, along with tracks like Come Running to Me, Sunlight itself and No Means Yes. Track five, Good Question, veers away from the mellifluous disco vibe to deliver a barnstorming electric piano work-out. It’s as though Herbie had been joined by Weather Report, such is the power of the track which pummels along with particular punch and energy. In fact, one learns that he was joined by Weather Report 's genius bassist, the late Jaco Pastorious, along with ex-Miles Davis drummer, Tony Williams.
And so to Headhunters, Sunlight’s follow-up which is less spacey and more funkily hard-edged, notably on You Bet Your Love, Ready or Not and Tell Everybody. On the track Trust Me sees Hancock emulating - it would seem - Stevie Wonder in a string-saturated exercise, sultry bass playing off electric piano. Ultimately, the pop psychedelia of Sunlight shades it for your reviewer - put it down to cassette nostalgia, it's purely personal - with less of the infectious grooves that dominate much of Feets Dont Fail Me Now.
In the event, Sunlight - the album - made 39 in the US R & B charts (58 in the pop charts) and reached 27 in the UK album charts. Feets Dont Fail Me Now did better commercially, and made number 16 in the US R & B charts (38 in the pop charts) and number 18 in the British album charts.
A caveat: listeners might easily sacrifice this double CD reissue's proliferation of repeat tracks - 7" inch single versions etc - for another vintage Hancock album squeezed on instead. Keep them coming, in short.
Paddy Kehoe
