It’s not every night you get a chance to catch a legendary jazz fusion band such as The Headhunters.
That’s what Minneapolis’ classic jazz club, Dakota, was offering up Tuesday.
As I mentioned in my weekly concert roundup, they were formed in 1973 by Herbie Hancock.
The Headhunters were essentially Hancock’s band during one of the most impactful stretches of his amazing career, including 1973’s Head Hunters, 1974’s Thrust, the live LP Flood (1975) and 1975’s Man-Child.
While they haven’t toured with Hancock in decades, they have remained active as their own entity since cutting their first standalone record, Survival of the Fittest in 1975. The LP is a favorite in my record collection — that word usage is a nod to Mike Clark, who noted at last night’s show that the term vinyl is preferred these days.
Clark, a drummer, and percussionist Bill Summers are the only two remaining original members of the band still touring as the Headhunters. Bennie Maupin, the multi instrumentalist who played the sax, flute and bass clarinet, is still living and performed with the band and Hancock at a reunion this past summer at Hollywood Bowl, along with Harvey Mason, the band’s first drummer with Hancock (Clark, not Mason, was the the drummer on their first standalone record, Survival of the Fittest). I’d have made an effort to attend myself were it not for a conflict with Phish’s Mondegreen festival in Dover, Dela.
That’s how dearly I hold Hancock and The Headhunters. I’m certain there would be no Phish, at least as we know them, without the former. The impact the early jazz fusion era has had on modern improvisational rock (and a lot of modern music) can’t be overstated.
I’ll mention that Maupin, 84, lost his home and just about everything in it this month in the Eaton Fire. There’s a GoFundMe for his family here.
The other main component to the original band was bassist Paul Jackson Jr., who died in 2021 at age 73.
The band is touring with New Orleans saxophonist Donald Harrison, a renown jazz man, and keyboardist Shea Pierre, also from New Orleans. Filling in on bass on short notice was Yohannes Tona, the Minneapolis-based musician who plays with the likes of Cory Wong and others, asides from his own Ethiopian-influenced project, Yohannes Tona Band.
“He played the gig better than I do and I’ve been in the band for 50 years,” Clark said of Tona.
Harrison worked with the Headhunters on their latest LP, The Stunt Man, released last September, and he led vocals late in the set when the band covered The Meters’ “Hey Pocky A-Way,” a song they chose to honor New Orleans. It also made me happy because it’s a song the Grateful Dead covered about 30 times between 1987 and 1990.
Clark and Summers did most of the talking during this show between songs. They’re both great story tellers, and Clark, with his New York dialect reminded me of Lennie Briscoe from Law & Order, if Lennie instead had an illustrious career as a jazz drummer.
“Bill and I,” Clark said at one point. “I’ve been married five times and I’m still playing with Bill.”
He gave the story behind the song “Loft Funk,” which they played.
He moved from Los Angeles to New York, completely funked out, he said, but he couldn’t escape the funk.
“I moved 3,000 miles to get away from the funk and here’s (jazz legends including Jack DeJohnette) playing funk in a loft,” he said.
Summers told the audience at the outset that they would be blessed.
He didn’t lie,
Summers, wearing a classy white jacket emblazoned with the mask that Hancock wore on the cover of Head Hunters, blew into a Stella Artois bottle for the whistling of “Watermelon Man.”
A setlist offered up by the band via Instagram message as what was played, though might have been changed on stage was:
“4 String Drive ESP
Stunt Man
Butterfly
Watermelon Man
Embraceable You
Loft Funk
Chameleon
Hey Pocky
Along with this Monk song Mike wants to do”
The band is on a short winter tour with stops also in Chicago, Ann Arbor, Mich., Indianapolis, Baltomore and Charleston, W.V. Click here more tour information.