Herbie Hancock – Mwandishi (Warner Brothers, 1971)

Mwandishi [Herbie Hancock] (el p); Mganga [Eddie Henderson] (tr); Mwile [Bennie Maupin] (b cl); Pepo Mtoto [Julian Priester] (tb); Mchezaji [Buster Williams] (b); Jabali [Billy Hart] (d); Ronnie Montrose (g, 1 trk only); Leon "Ndugu" Chancler (d, perc, 1 trk only); José "Chepito" Areas (cga, tim, 1 trk only) 

Recorded in December 1970

In Swahili, Mwandishi means composer.  

Like many African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, Herbie Hancock decided to take a new name of his own choosing.  Whether in a political or religious context, the act of re-naming oneself represents the individual's assertion of a new identity, a self that owes nothing to the immediate past.  In the case of African Americans living in a post-Malcolm X world, choosing a name of African origin meant that the individual could re-claim what has been taken, forming a new kinship with an ancestral home.  Of course, no one can fully escape from history.  The "old self" carries on, despite the assertion of a new name and psychic identity.  This ongoing co-existence creates a sort of tension, a living dialogue between the old and the new, the familiar and the strange, the past and the present.  And, from an artistic point of view, that's what this album is about. 

Consider the album cover: It's a photograph of Herbie (familiar, old), but it's a negative image (strange, new).  He's also looking in a mirror at himself.  So he's doubled, an image of an image.  These same sorts of strange paradoxes exist in the music.  Commentators have made a big deal of the music's break with the past.  The jump from The Prisoner (Blue Note, 1969) to Mwandishi is indeed startling.  (And it must have been especially startling to contemporary listeners.)  But, with the passing of fifty years, it's clear that some aspects of Mwandishi are continuous with Hancock's earlier recordings, extensions of earlier ideas, rather than expressions of entirely new ones.  Listen to the harmonies in "You'll Know When You Get There"; they sound like musical ideas that Hancock explored in Speak Like a Child.  They're just made strange and new through the addition of electronic instruments. 

Naturally, these ideas wouldn't be worth a hill of beans if the music wasn't so good.  And it's SO MUCH better than good.  It's extraordinary, some of my very favorite music from the 1970s -- or any decade.  Listen to "Ostinato (for Angela)," dedicated to black activist and author Angela Davis.  I don't know how Buster Williams makes that ostinato figure sound so incredible for more than 13 minutes!  All of the music -- the entire band -- rotates around Buster's rhythmic figure like a planet turning on its axis.  So, on one level, the structure of the music is simple, even primitive.  But, at the same time, it's not simple at all.  The band transforms "basic" ideas into something futuristic and unfamiliar. These are sounds that you've never heard before, but in Herbie's/Mwandishi's world, the future goes through the ancient past. 

More Herbie Hancock
This group came to be known as the "Mwandishi Band." They made three albums, and all of them are special.  The other two are Crossings (Warner Bros, 1972) and Sextant (Columbia, 1973).  Of course, everyone should own Head Hunters (Columbia, 1973), which was Herbie's hugely successful bid to make music that was less heady and more immediately appealing.