About

For his third Blue Note album Inventions & Dimensions (1963), pianist Herbie Hancock began moving away from the modernist hard bop sound that defined his first two albums Takin’ Off and My Point Of View. Inspired by explorers like Eric Dolphy and Tony Williams, Hancock went in search of greater musical freedom by composing a set of ingenious originals each with their own unique inner logic that did away with what he considered the established jazz “assumptions” of the time.

Hancock also pared the instrumentation down to feature his piano with Paul Chambers’ bass and a nuanced rhythmic bed laid down by percussionists Willie Bobo and Osvaldo “Chihuahua” Martinez. On the album’s unforgettable cover the designer Reid Miles lets Francis Wolff’s imposing photo of Hancock on an NYC street do all the talking. — (via Label)

For his third album, Inventions and Dimensions, Herbie Hancock changed course dramatically. Instead of recording another multifaceted album like My Point of View, he explored a Latin-inflected variation of post-bop with a small quartet. Hancock is the main harmonic focus of the music - his three colleagues are bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Willie Bobo, and percussionist Osvaldo "Chihuahua" Martinez, who plays conga and bongo.

It is true that the music is rhythm-intensive, but that doesn't mean it's dance music. Hancock has created an improvisational atmosphere where the rhythms are fluid and the chords, harmonies, and melodies are unexpected. On every song but one, the melodies and chords were improvised, with Hancock's harmonic ideas arising from the rhythms during the recording. The result is risky, unpredictable music that is intensely cerebral and quite satisfying. Inventions and Dimensions displays his willingness to experiment and illustrates that his playing is reaching new, idiosyncratic heights. Listening to this, the subsequent developments of Miles Davis' invitation to join his quartet and the challenging Empyrean Isles come as no surprise. — (via AllMusic)

Recorded in August of 1963, pianist Herbie Hancock's Inventions and Dimensions puts pulsing, grooving rhythms at the center of the music, with Latin percussive elements and—in the best jazz tradition of the times—lots of blues. This isn't Hancock's most well-known date from his tenure at Blue Note, but it's an important recording for both its structural sophistication and the notably high quality of the piano improvisations, no small feat for so superlative an artist.

The title of the opening "Succotash" suggests some down-home blue burner that might have been at home on one of the label's funkier soul-jazz recordings, but is, in fact, nothing of the sort. A precursor to "The Egg," that would appear on Empyrean Isles (Blue Note, 1964), it balances on the back of drummer Willie Bobo's steady, undulating 4/4 brushwork and bassist Paul Chambers' complex but ultimately trance-like repetition. Variations from the core rhythmic structure are virtually nonexistent, even as the pair makes subtle adjustments within the framework. Hancock's melodic statement—if it could be called that—sounds more like a fragment from some forgotten longer melody, as though he plucked one measure from something larger and then just dwelled on it. It's a model of an extremely sophisticated performance with just a few spare parts. Adding percussionist Osvaldo Martinez, here playing the guiro, covers the whole thing with some tangy Latin sauce.

Switching up immediately on "Triangle," Hancock returns to a modal progression that could have been an outtake from Miles Davis' Kind of Blue(Columbia 1959). Using sparse chords as a foundation, à la Kind of Blue's "Freddie Freeloader," Hancock proceeds to overlay the blues over the top. The pianist had just joined Davis' band in May of that year, and was regularly playing the music from Kind of Blue, so it makes sense that he was experimenting with its forms in his own music. The rhythm section here is toned down a bit, as Martinez lays out for most of the track leaving the piano to lead the charge. Hancock is generally a pretty accessible player, and his work here doesn't entirely deviate from that, but the complexity of his work on this track approaches some of the avant-garde inventions of Andrew Hill. Careful listening is rewarded with this one. — (via All About Jazz)

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Label: Blue Note
Series: Blue Note 80 Vinyl Reissue Series
Format:  Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Stereo, 180g
Reissued :2019 / Original release: 1963
Genre: Jazz
Style: Hard Bop, Modal, Free Improvisation

File under: Jazz // Blue Note Records
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