Well, January whizzed past! Time to pick up the pace and get back to some blogging…

I absolutely love this. Even for those of you who are initially jazz-adverse, give this a spin as it might surprise you.

Jazz trios normally follow a specific procedure: you pick you standards and then every song the group plays ‘the head’ (the hook or main theme) and then players take in turn to trade solos over a set amount of bars, and then everyone returns to the head to finish. That’s it, in a most grotesquely simplistic nutshell.

Here, while the formula isn’t completely abandoned, Hancock surprises the listener from the off. Playing against the hypnotic brush groove (succ-o-tash, succ-o-tash, succo-tash), Hancock launches in not with a melody, but his own syncopated motif, driving the music further in a rhythm-intensive way.

Succotash is a cut from the album Inventions and Dimensions, where, on every song but one, the melodies and chords were improvised with Hancock’s harmonic ideas arising from the rhythms, not the other way around. From a structural perspective, much of the music, in its elimination of predetermined harmonic and melodic information, lay uncommonly open, but also – remarkably – warmer, more intimate, more alive. It’s almost like you can hear Hancock thinking out loud as he plays.

The genesis of ‘Succotash’ came from Hancock’s desire to work in 6/8. “I didn’t tell Paul (Chambers - the bassist) what chords to use,” Hancock has said, “because I didn’t know what they were to be myself. All he and the musicians knew was the time signature. The melody and the form of the piece developed spontaneously.”

For Hancock, ‘Succotash’ heralded a great doing away with the old assumptions and rules, and a bringing in of a new spirit of simply not knowing what is going to happen, and rising to the challenge, reaching ever new, ever more idiosyncratic depths. It’s a lesson for every musician – sometimes the best way forward is to just sit back and see what comes through.

Happy Sunday! See you next week