Music I used to like #13: I could drink a case of Herbie Hancock and still be on my dancing feet

Herbie Hancock: 'Palm Grease' from Thrust (1974)

MUCH AS THERE ARE thought to be several ways to skin a cat (I wouldn’t actually know about that: I never got round to doing mine), there is more than one way of going deaf — and more than a few kinds of deafness. Deafness, as I have come to understand it from my own experience, is not wholly defined by the degree to which hearing is absent — as is typically revealed by a conventional hearing test — but by the proportion of dysfunctional hearing relative to those aspects of hearing that remain viable. You can hear quite a lot and still be very deaf indeed, as I am.

You might describe my deafness as a negative admixture, compounded of no hearing at all (my right-side hearing went west, lock, stock and barrel, in 2007) and, on the other side, considerable but not total hearing loss, of which the residual auditory function is subject to an unstable range of distortions. This kind of deafness will admit sound, up to a point; in fact up to the chambers of the inner ear and its micro-steppe of subtle grasses, where any kind of aggressive arrival will meet only with devastation, soon or gradual. For it is within the buried, snail-like cochlea that the most remarkable of all electro-biological phenomena are to be found: minuscule hair cells called cilia which convert acoustic sound waves into code that is read electronically by the brain, either as beautiful music, say, or as the not-so-appealing sound of a cat being peeled — and all points in between too, obviously. I quite obviously have lost large numbers of cilia, perhaps damaged by fluctuating levels of the endolymphatic fluid that fills the vestibular system and “might” have given rise to an incidence of the non-Ménières endolymphatic hydrops of the inner ear revealed as a possibility by a recent MRI (no, me neither, but you’re welcome to look it up if you like).

So whereas my right ear is a flapping great white elephant stuck on the starboard side of my head, the other one on the port side is a bare, ruined choir. The sound goes in, to be met safely enough with the good old tympanum and the apparatus of the conductive passages, which duly usher the soundwave on its way, perhaps with a Checkpoint Charlie-style wave-through, sending the soundwave on blind to its destiny: gross distortion. What I get in my head now when I hear music, instead of music, is a broken noise parody of music, which is persistently ruthless in its destruction of tone, tonality, timbre, melody, rhythm, harmony. It never stops. It goes on and on, twisting and breaking, shattering and sheering away, as if the design of its existence were dedicated only to bringing me to pain and music to cruelty. I cannot bear it.

Except that sometimes I can.

HERBIE HANCOCK HAS always struck me as a nice man, but a nice man one should not underestimate. He is naturally endowed with a lanky, slightly boffinesque air, which he has carried through his life I suspect partly as an amiable, all-purpose front that puts others at ease — but also as a way of disguising something of himself. Those wire-rimmed glasses are the very stuff of the steadfast IT bloke whose entire life has been switch-off-and-on-able, his dignity inviolable, his temper held. Hancock’s time spent with Miles Davis will have alerted him to the perils as well as the virtues of assumed coolth.

His time spent with me, over an hour or so in 1986, in a posh hotel room and on its balcony overlooking Knightsbridge, may not have had the same impact on him.

I can’t now remember what the peg was for the interview. It was done for The Wire magazine and is now a part of the fog in my mind — but I do remember enjoying Hancock’s company as well as the bottle of Bordeaux he’d acquired at customs on his way over from France the night before, which he shared with me in the toothmugs provided in his ensuite bathroom (actually, there had only been one toothmug in his single-occupancy room and so, with great gallantry, he’d ordered up another one on room service — and that, in my view, is stylishness that goes beyond cool). He then insisted that we sit on the floor and do the job there because it felt more easeful to him than perching on the hotel’s grimly over-styled period furniture.

The point of all this mellow reminiscence is not to persuade you that I am firm friends with Herbie Hancock (I am assuredly not) but to demonstrate how you should never lose touch with any music that really gets you off. Because I blush and warm to remember the one bit of the interview when everything went bendy and I wished that the hotel’s deep carpet might swallow me into its pile.

Dear reader, I tried to tell Herbie Hancock what, regarding the middle-passage of his 1970s recording career at Columbia (CBS), when he recorded three albums of electronic funk-jazz so dazzling in both conception and execution that no one has ever got close to matching them in terms of both musicianly chutzpah and carefully organised abstract design. And funk. Certainly not Miles Davis, who preceded them with the uncomfortable if super-influential Bitches Brew and On the Corner, before heading towards the planet’s core in search of its inner woosnum, the Agharta and Pangaea brought to slamming tectonic life by the overdriven guitars of Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, plus the host of imitators and derivatives that always followed in the wake of Davis’s high-seas yacht like flocks of yawking seagulls.

Hancock’s Head Hunters, Thrust and Man-Child contain more enjoyable, tougher-minded electro-instrumental music than anything else smart and technically advanced taking up space on funk’s forecourt between 1973 and 1975; certainly the first two do. Man-Child is a softer, more commercially ambitious, less jazz and less demanding effort that points to Hancock’s future ear for a hit pop/R&B single in the coming electronic age. It is still a very good record, whether or not you’re disquieted by the somewhat “orchestral” production gloss and the addition of star turns such as Stevie Wonder and his chromatic harmonica.

But the first of the three, which materialised in late 1973, was Head Hunters and it retains its status as one of the biggest selling “jazz” albums of all time — a kaleido-funky flow of auditory pixelations that seems to engender in both Time and Space a sort of Brownian motion of tonality, tethered only by the thick hawser of Hancock’s one-finger bassline on the justly famous “Chameleon” and the tight syncopations of drummer Harvey Mason and bassist Paul Jackson. Head Hunters may well have insinuated its way, crab-like, archly swinging, into your consciousness before now, but if it hasn’t, then seize the day, for all that pixelated Time is now running out, like grains of ghosts in a holographic hourglass.

Then came Thrust, a record that has cleaved close to both my heart and my endocrine system since the middle of the 1980s, and is surely worthy to be the outright best-selling “jazz” record of all time, purely on the grounds that I think it’s even better than Head Hunters. In particular because of the opening cut, the filthy “Palm Grease”, which is so granular, so atomised in its blizzard of harmonic spot-squits, all actually played rather than programmed by the pianist on his battery of ARP hardware, that it has always suggested to me that music still has yet to fully explore every nook, cranny and journeying asteroid in its formal multiverse. Come on now. Why have we heard so little of la musique pointilliste?

Herbie Hancock makes an excellent jazz Seurat: the primum mobile of a music that concerns itself principally with its own hyper-precise placing in time and space, within a harmonic structure so dotty that we begin to think less about chordal harmony and more about colour modalities and the formation of clouds (“Uh, thangewverymuch, London! This next piece we have for you tonight is in Sirrus-minor, the greyest and fluffiest of all keys”); music that has become less and less linear in its drive to move its poles away from the banalities of chord “progression” and become more and more concerned with articulations of the endless moment, the unceasing now, the rubber-thewed not-yet. The poetics of utter stillness. But funkily of course.

“Palm Grease” has the secret to eternal life, I thought once, when excessively hammered one evening, feeling my own molecular structure being subsumed into Hancock’s wireless mainframe, a fuzzy cloud of electronic dots but also a funky beast in all but his physical motions. Lying there flat on my back. How do you do that? I mean, really, though?

That afternoon in 1986, comfortably cross-legged on his hotel-room carpet and working his way — but slowly — into a brimming toothmug of overpriced not-bad Bordeaux, Herbie Hancock sat and listened patiently while the passionate young journalist with fire in his eyes and the hint of a slur in his words (having knocked back his own toothmug of fairly fine wine in two or three nervous glugs), explained to him, Herbie Hancock, why “Palm Grease” was definitely the high point of a terrific solo career, following on so soon after the sustained Alpine pinnacles, no, the peaks, no, the elevated mountain region and high pastureland of the half-decade he spent with Miles Davis.

“I see. So tell me, Nick,” says Herbie Hancock, who has accepted the role-reversal with customary grace and only the tiniest imaginable adjustment of his IT bloke’s spectacles. “Tell me what you attribute this, as you say, remarkable peak of achievement to, exactly. How did I pull it off, this, uh, coup artistique? What were my moves? How did this vision become, uh … manifest?”

Nick pauses for a moment and considers the question put to him so eloquently by Herbie Hancock.

“Well, it’s got to be the drummers, hasn’ it, Herbie,” says the young Londoner, the pride of his nation, ducking his chin in, in an effort to intercept a burp. “It’s got to be the drummers, hasn’ it, swapping out Harvey Mason for Mike Clark-ark…?”

The burp had arrived.

Herbie just smiled.

“Well,” he said gently. “We can’t discount the possibility, can we?”

THERE IS NO DOUBT in my mind that something of this nature passed between Herbie Hancock and me in Knightsbridge that warm summer’s afternoon in 1986 — but sadly it is lost to the world now, along with the tape I transcribed the interview from with mounting horror the next day. But that isn’t the reason I’m writing this piece now and in this way, much as I love Herbie Hancock and so very many of his works from down the decades and into the new century — a century that isn’t that new anymore — while Herbie grooves on lankily like life itself, or so I am given to believe.

No, the reason I have written all this in a state of mounting and desperately suppressed excitement is because I have just listened to all ten minutes of “Palm Grease” through for the third time and on each occasion all those dots and squeaks and beeps and the extraordinary drumming and the weirdly cloudy way in which harmony is expressed, not in a linear way… well, it sounded like music to me, holding its own in my brain and its tuning and dotty tonality not breaking apart and all those crazy gaps left by the drummer, Mike Clark-ark … why, by the third repeat of the whole thing I was, I was dancing … dancing.

This is what happens when you lose your musical hearing for three and a half years and you are sure, no certain, that there’s no chance you are ever going to get music back. And you’ve been told that by the hospital too. And then one day you stuff in some new earbuds and listen to a peculiar piece of music you rather like but haven’t heard for a while, just to see how weird it is now — and it goes straight in, maps itself directly onto what your brain is offering so forlornly in the way of viable signal input receptors, and you discover over a very intense and possibly even slightly deranged thirty minutes that the music that brought you to this pass is almost certainly the greatest piece of music Herbie Hancock ever … well… he ever he did. I mean, really though.

Vive l’Age de la Musique Pointilliste!

Vive “Palm Grease”!

Here’s to you, Monsieur H!

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press in 2027.