In 1973, Herbie Hancock, a virtuosic jazz dissident, stomped out an entire history of sound when he walked out a bassline on a modular synthesizer. This was not someone’s upright acoustic bass played with calloused fingers, it was preprogrammed on a circuit board obscured inside a small wooden box, amplified by some hidden electrical process. And it wasn’t one bassline crawling out of the speakers, it was two, dubbed on top of each other, split across the stereo field, blasphemed onto what was ostensibly a jazz recording in post-production.
For purists, it was just another heretical element on another album of heresy from yet another jazz pioneer turned iconoclast. The afterimages of Miles Davis’ blinding turn toward the electric music a few years earlier were still being processed by audiences, players, and critics alike. Hancock, having played keys for six years with Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet, had his own gauntlet to throw. Inspired by the power he saw in James Brown and Sly & the Family Stone, Hancock wanted to quit wafting in the rarified air of acoustic and avant-garde jazz. “I was not trying to make a jazz record,” Hancock said later. He wanted to get low, down to the floor, through the earth. He wanted to make a pure funk record. Instead, he made Head Hunters.
A year before Hancock plunked out that bassline, his woodwind player, Bennie Maupin, sat among the sold-out crowd at Los Angeles Coliseum for Wattstax, a 1972 benefit concert sometimes referred to as “Black Woodstock.” Every marquee artist from the iconic Memphis soul label Stax performed that August afternoon—from the Staple Singers to the Bar-Kays to Isaac Hayes, who closed the concert wearing a gold chainmail cape. The eight-hour show meant to “give back to the community” in the primarily black Watts neighborhood, which had been torn by riots seven years earlier. Tickets were $1, and the security force was entirely black and unarmed. With over 110,000 in attendance, it was then the largest gathering of African Americans in one place since the civil rights March on Washington in 1963.
Maupin, a 32-year-old jazz woodwindist nonpareil from Detroit, had been playing with Hancock for the previous three years on a trilogy of experimental albums known as Hancock's Mwandishi period, from the Swahili name for “composer” that he had adopted at the time. Mwandishi (1971), Crossings (1972) and Sextant (1973) were lofty, sometimes electronic excursions, all influenced deeply by jazz’s big extinction event, Miles Davis’ 1970 album Bitches Brew. The Mwandishi group would sometimes sit in the tour bus and listen to records by German electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen at Hancock’s request. In the studio they were incorporating the vanguard production techniques of Bitches Brew, which were verboten in traditionalist jazz circles: extensive editing, amplified instruments, two drummers, overdubs, synth loops. Having played bass clarinet on Bitches Brew, Maupin served as real connective tissue from the most infamous jazz record to the second most infamous jazz record: Head Hunters. When Hancock disbanded the Mwandishi group in search of a new sound, Maupin was the only member he kept.