The Good Brother bought us both tickets to jazz legend Herbie Hancock on Saturday night. He was performing at the very-nice Michael Fowler Centre auditorium, and Ben and I were kinda surprised to see that it was only 2/3 capacity for the show. Wellington has a thriving jazz scene, with several jazz nights around the place each week and a damn solid jazz festival each year, but somehow this didn’t translate to bums on seats for HH.
Well, it was their loss, because the show was fantastic. I wish I had more musical knowledge with which to talk about it, but that not being the case, all I can do is say that I thought it was wicked. I have no language for music, and no detailed appreciation of what the heck they were doing up there, but I dug the heck out of whatever it was.
I have a lot of love for jazz. My grandfather introduced me to Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker back in my teenage years, and I was instantly blown away. Those two artists worked well together, with the awesome and accessible Armstrong matched by the wild and careening Bird, the two of them serving as end markers for my understanding of what jazz was and what it could do.
Yet my love for jazz must be of a pretty shallow kind, because I never dove far into the jazz pond. I had a lot of love for what I’d heard, but my music buying rarely extended to jazz and my listening time was likewise dominated by other, more contemporary, sounds. Apart from a fateful introduction to Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’ not long after the Armstrong/Parker encounter, my understanding of jazz has grown only in a trickle over the years, as I’ve encountered other bits and pieces through a series of happy accidents (like being suddenly free to see Jazz on a Summer’s Day one quiet afternoon; or house-sitting with some wild Coltrane free jazz recordings).
But for a long time I’ve loved to see jazz live. Jazz is a music style that makes enormous sense in a close, intimate environment. Which is why the MFC auditorium was a strange place to see Herbie Hancock play – the grand space, set up for orchestral performance, curiously neutered some untouchable aspect of the show. For all the musical wonders we experienced, I had to wish we were down in some sweaty cellar somewhere, surrounded by whiskey and cigarettes. As I’ve said before, if you have to go down some stairs to reach it, its a good venue for jazz. If you have to climb up, it ain’t.
Thanks Ben. I had a fantastic time.
4 thoughts on “Herbie Goes Bananas”
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I never saw a single ad for it, and had no idea it was on or I’d probably have schlepped down for it too. 🙁
I can lend you some Jazz if you want to hear more. 🙂
Mash – yeah, man. That’d be awesome.
I only heard about it when someone at work tried to flog a couple of tickets two days prior. Otherwise I might have made more of an effort to get tickets – though I think that the incredibly punitive pricing (well, I think it’s pretty expensive) probably put a few people off. Pity, though, sounds like it was a great gig.
If I had been there, I would have gone. In possibly the finest movie of my late teenage years, Tommy Boy, there is a reference to him. Tommy is taking a test, and the question is who was the 1st person to sign the Declaration of Independence? He says, “that’s easy. Herbie Hancock.”
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