Herbie Hancock gets heavy with the funk and beyond at Barbican

Here is living, or rather actual proof, of legend status. In an opening piece which is a selection of musical hors d’oeuvres served up from his 60 years making music Herbie Hancock takes a compellingly circuitous route to ‘Chameleon’, his biggest hit and enduring anthem which helped to define what became known as jazz-fusion in the 1970s. The response of the sold-out audience is as amplified as one might well have expected. But what is even more interesting is the fact that during this overture the keyboardist plays a bite-sized chunk, just a single bar, of ‘Butterfly’, and the roar is even more deafening. That beautifully tentative phrase has become so anchored in the minds of not just one but several generations that they don’t even need to hear the whole tune to feel satisfied. Such is the kudos of an artist who has framed the evolution of jazz from the acoustic to the electric era, and pushed it on to many daring tangents that foreshadowed instrumental hip-hop, ambient grooves and techno-funk.     

Very elegantly clad in a black three-quarter length shirt, Hancock, one suspects, could wind up a music box and meet with churchy devotion. But he and a grade-A multi-generational quintet- trumpeter Terence Blanchard and bass guitarist James Genus are the seniors, drummer Jaylen Pentinaud the junior and guitarist-vocalist Lionel Loueke somewhere in the middle – are hardly coasting. The command each player has of their instrument and rainbow of timbres they create through a dashboard of pedals and effects, particularly Loueke, ensure that the performance does not lack the compelling moments where things get a ‘little weird’, as Hancock promised at the outset. The sound of rain, landscapes, the animal kingdom and outer space all run through a set that hits a highpoint of humour when he launches into an extended solo vocoder feature after snaking through the sly, samba-like groove of ‘Come Runnin’ To Me.’

As Hancock declares “This is the fun part of the show” he engages in impromptu musings on the state of the world and the need for universal love, yet the series of spoken statements is astutely harmonized with purring chords so as to make music from the monologue. By contrast is a leisurely yet backbeat-heavy Blanchard arrangement of Wayne Shorter’s ‘Footprints’ that serves as a reminder of Hancock’s profound kinship with the late saxophonist as well as the historical significance of the contribution each visionary composer made to Blue Note’s 60s’s modern jazz heyday.  

‘Actual Proof’, a much demanded favourite from the revered Headhunters era, is like a raucous shot in the arm, taken practically at double time compared to the original. It now has a hard, terse punch of a bassline, ripping cymbal work and cracking wah-wah guitar, making the point that the band, for all its finesse, is capable of highly explosive aggression that is brilliantly set off by Hancock’s choppy syncopated clavinet riffs. And therein lies the real wonder of the performance.

At the age of 83 the Chicagoan still has huge reserves of energy that are shown through the intense rhythmic drive of his comping and solos not to mention the showstopper moment where he straps on the keytar and faces off with Loueke for a pulsing new take on ‘Chameleon’, complete with squelchy chromaticism. It is another mosaic of shifting colours amid a feel-good infectiousness that sits right on the corner of jazz and pop, a place where Hancock has always been, with no slouching on his very serious artistry.