Rockit!

Let's put it this way: Imagine a world without Herbie Hancock, especially without his most pivotal albums, like Takin' Off, Headhunters and Future Shock, and you've got to reimagine how funky jazz, early fusion and an awful lot of contemporary funk, electronica, acid-jazz and hip-hop jazz would have turned out. Or to put it another way: Despite fashionable intellectual trends, individuals can and do change the course of history. They work within contexts, naturally. No man is an island, even if he is a cultural catalyst. Evolution shows many examples of parallel development, in which key adaptations arise in several places at roughly the same time, to allow for a better chance of survival. The rise of funk with James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, Fela Kuti and Miles Davis created a context for Hancock, a set of languages he could learn, intermingle, retranslate and reformulate, finding a voice of his own in how he did that. That is his genius. And it's why, for nearly forty years, Herbie Hancock has been making things that didn't exist before.-- Gene Santoro, The Nation (Vol. 270, 2000).