Hot Chicks On Roller Skates, Herbie Hancock, & Kimiko Kasai

[JSngry]

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=y_hjzm9ehso

if this really WAS "smooth jazz", we'd live in a better world than we do...

[danasgoodstuff]

Really, I don't see how 'smooth jizz' could be any worse than this, and the chicks ain't that hot to me either, YMMV IMHO yada yada...couldn't even get to the end of the clip.

[JSngry]

MM does indeed V! Significantly!

[Jim Alfredson]

That's a great cut.

[JSngry]

Thanks for noticing!

I really like this version too (an edited version of the one on Sunlight, it seems), goofy as the visual is...the song itself has a beautiful melody, Herbie could always write a good melody, nice changes, logical but not cliched...and it's got HOOKS! A jazz musician who understands HOOKS! Not that anybody "should" or "needs to", but if it was that easy, everybody could do it...and everybody most definitely can't... I mean, if that descending bassline into the chorus doesn't suck you in, wellsir, no longass roadtrips with you then!

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=zDdpD5P2ytU

Ya' know, "Dolphin Dance" meets those same criteria...only this is funk/disco. Oh well! But take away the funk/disco, plug in 1965 instead of 1978, record it on Blue Note, and I bet plenty of people would be talking about what a neat "composition" "I thought It Was You" is...

Edited March 29, 2010 by JSngry

[Jim Alfredson]

I hear you. I was just having a discussion about this with a keyboardist friend of mine last night. Herbie amazes me. He can be extremely "heady" when he wants to, like when I saw him at the Clearwater Jazz Festival in 2003 in a trio, acoustic piano, upright bass (Scott Colley), and drums (Terri Lynn Carrington) and they played for 90 minutes straight, morphing from one tune to the next, improvising at an extremely high level.

And the next minute he can funk it up, again at an extremely high level, without losing the stank.

And the next minute he can write a great, catchy pop tune that has surprises.

The dude is amazing.

[JSngry]

Skills. simple as that. skills. Making a good pop song and a good pop record (so not the same thing...) takes skills.

I mean, yeah, ok, a lot of his late 70s stuff is "iffy", but...you get something like this, and it's just so damn good being what it is that all the lesser crap fades away when it comes time to feel the love or not.

Funny thing is, back in the day, Herbie pretty much lost me after Manchild (really, after Thrust, but...), so when Sunlight came out, I heard about this godawful new Herbie record with vocoders and pop songs and shit like that and I just immediately...RECOILED.

But then a few months ago, somehow, (blogs, probably), I found out about Herbie's band with Webster Lewis (an interesting cat in his own right), found a version of this song, and said WOW, that's a really nice song. One thing led to another (including the side w/Kimiko Kasai, not exactly "essential" but a good listen or three nevertheless), and the more I heard this song the more it ingratiated itself to me.

So yeah, Herbie! Sorry it took me 30+ years to get it.