Given a dearth of interesting, new jazz releases, we must take such consolation as we can from reissued and recycled material. The most striking such collection newly available is an excellent retrospective in the Columbia Legacy series called The Essential Herbie Hancock.
One of the problems with most compilation albums is that they only sample an artist's history with a single label. As a result, even if they include most of the best-known tunes, the cuts selected are often not the definitive versions.
Every now and again, however, a record company bites the bullet and leases rights to the tracks it doesn't own to produce a genuinely representative compendium, which is what Columbia has done here, with impressive results.
It's easy to quibble over obvious omissions - we have, for example Watermelon Man, Maiden Voyage and Cantaloupe Island from his early Blue Note recordings, yet oddly not Dolphin Dance - but as compiler Bob Belden says in an illuminating liner note: 'It's impossible to actually create anything essential of Herbie Hancock unless you take the position that everything he creates is essential to somebody'.
Well, not quite. This collection is sensibly light on his vocoder pop hits, even though Columbia owns them, and I don't miss, for example, You Bet Your Love at all.
Much of Hancock's music, however, is essential for anybody who loves jazz, and Belden has risen magnificently to the challenge of illustrating the range of it in just 20 tracks.
Almost everything here has worn remarkably well. The aforementioned Blue Note tracks, alongside Circle from Miles Smiles - made with the classic 1960s Davis Quintet - admirably state the case for Hancock as the heir apparent to Bill Evans as the most notable jazz piano stylist and improviser of his era. Tell Me a Bedtime Story, from the Warner Brothers era beginning in 1969, comes from Fat Albert Rotunda, an album of music made for a Bill Cosby TV show, and features Hancock displaying his unique touch on the Fender Rhodes electric piano.
