Maiden Voyage

Herbie Hancock

album cover

A True Voyage

One way to think about jazz is as a protracted conversation. A musician tosses out a radical new idea on a record, and then, months or years later, another artist will pick up the same device and take it someplace else. For example, after Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (see p. 208) appeared in 1959, many young jazzers embraced its unorthodox harmonic schemes, which replaced the mile-a-minute chords of bebop with slowermoving and more contemplative "modes."

Of the many recordings built on the ideas of Kind of Blue, Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage stands among the very best. It's a return volley of the long-distance sort, as it was recorded six years after Davis's groundbreaking work. But the influence is unmissable. When he recorded Maiden Voyage, pianist and composer Hancock was in Davis's band, and thus intimately familiar with the song strategies. He put them to use in interesting fashion, writing a five-song suite about the ocean. Hancock explains in the liner notes that his intent was to capture the "vastness and majesty" of the sea, and his songs evoke the ebb and flow of open water, with periods of modal calm followed by cresting tumult. The title track is a direct descendent of Davis's "So What," with chords that change so slowly they become major events. But through most of Maiden Voyage, and particularly on tunes like the deceptively tricky "Dolphin Dance," Hancock uses modality to create moments of pause, places to take a brief rest before diving in again. A sophisticated expansion of the Kind of Blue idea and at the same time a showcase for Hancock's ear-stretching chords, Maiden Voyage is one of the great pensive pleasures of jazz.

Genre: Jazz
Released: 1965, Blue Note
Key Tracks: "Dolphin Dance," "The Eye of the Hurricane," "Maiden Voyage"
Catalog Choice: Empyrean Isles
Next Stop: Wayne Shorter: Speak No Evil
After That: McCoy Tyner: The Real McCoy
Book Pages: 338–339