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Herbie
Hancock Live
review by Adam Horovitz
Cheltenham Jazz Festival,
Town Hall
Monday,
May 2, 2005
Herbie Hancock closed the Cheltenham Jazz
Festival this year with more of a whimper from the audience than a banging
night of great music.
The celebrated pianist, whose acid jazz classic Headhunters is the
biggest selling jazz record of all time, chose to experiment in noble
fashion by forming a quartet with young, unknown musicians and playing
their music rather than his own.
Regrettably this nobility backfired in spectacular fashion - the opening
tune, a half-hour noodle that built and built and, every time it seemed to
be getting anywhere interesting, slipped into soft focus, sub-Pat Metheny
mode, was an excellent indication of the direction of the night. Quite a
number of people left after it.
The second track, "A Virgin Forest",
was little better, leaping between crunchy piano licks and irredeemably
'nice' music - a damning statement since the Fast Show acutely skewered
the worst pretensions of jazz in their classic sketch.
This is not to say that the musicians weren't accomplished - they were all
superb - but the music itself was self-indulgent in the extreme. One could
hear the hissing of the lift in the background nearly all the time.
Two and a half lacklustre hours of this was enough to cause all but the
most thick-skinned of jazz fans to wilt. To add insult to injury, the band
spent the last hour picking up their ideas and the tempo. By that time,
half of the audience were too dispirited to care.
© Adam
Horovitz
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