Gems: Future 2 Future by Herbie Hancock (2001)
When jazz takes over drum and bass
Gems is the Guerrilla Bizarre series that brings you special records worth (re)discovering. In these features you'll find forgotten albums by celebrated artists; promising releases that didn’t get the attention they deserved; surprising, underlooked, and plain cool stuff from the past.
If curiosity is a defining trait of an artist, then it’s no surprise that Herbie Hancock is a living legend of jazz. His great interest in contemporary music and popular genres allowed him to create compositions that would push the boundaries of what a jazz artist could do musically. Arguably the best example of this, or at least the most wildly blatant, is his trilogy of albums from the early 80s, produced with Bill Laswell: Future Shock, Sound-System and Perfect Machine. Out of the first one came 1983 electro-funk hit “Rockit”: that’s right, the same musician who helped shape jazz fusion with Miles Davis was also producing hard-edged dance floor material, just one year after “Planet Rock” by Africa Bambataa.
Eighteen years later Hancock and Laswell reunited to replicate the same idea for a new millennium: produce an album that’d wed jazz harmonies and electronic textures straight out of the modern dance scene. While the results were not as massively popular, Future 2 Future makes for a very interesting record, that’s been mysteriously left out of the keyboardist’s discography on Spotify and YouTube, and remains therefore a bit more obscure.
Herbie was never shy to include other musicians in his releases: every saxophone lick you hear is played by fellow Davis alum Wayne Shorter; producer Bill Laswell handles some of the bass duties, and Ethiopian singer Ejigayehu Shibabaw, also known as Gigi and then rising star of global fusion, provides vocals in Amharic. But some of the collaborators bring something different to the table, some more surprising elements.
Detroiter techno legend Carl Craig appears on “Kebero”, part 1 and 2, providing atmospheric production to the afro-futuristic track. Hancock’s keys solos and Gigi’s faraway melodies cut through the barrage of hi-hats like a seagull through a storm. “Black Gravity” features the programmed beats of A Guy Called Gerald, one of the protagonists of the mid-90s transition from jungle to drum and bass. His unpredictable breaks are front and center in the track, playing catch with Herbie’s hooks.
“The Essence” is perhaps the catchiest tune on the album, and was in fact released as a single. It’s a jazzstep track with vocals by groove-royalty Chaka Khan and a tight, smooth, double bass groove that drives the track. It’s groovy, it’s soulful, it’s stylish and just plain fun.
“Ionosphere”, “Alphabeta”, and “Virtual Hornets”, the tracks that close the album, show its most mature results. They take a considerable input from drum and bass and techno in sounds, sonicity and musical structure, and at the same time they slowly transport us back to jazzier shores, with more evident virtuoso solos pitted against rarefied electronic backdrops. It sounds like Herbie’s band has weighed all the influences brought by their guests and is now stating how future jazz should sound.
I can’t say they really succeeded in setting a new standard for the fusion of jazz and electronic music, which instead went in a different direction, where the playing itself was influenced by the musical structure of samples and beats. All in all, Future 2 Future is not as influential as other works by Hancock. And still, I can’t help but marvel at the talent of an artist so able to reinvent himself and always feel so confident in extremely different contexts. His inclination to find the right collaborators to express his view of the zeitgeist makes me look forward to his next album, now in the works since at least 2016. It is rumored to feature Thundercat, Kendrick, Snoop Dogg, Kamasi Washington, Travis Scott, Flying Lotus, and more.
Written by Alessandro Cebrian Cobos
