Head Hunters
was a pivotal point in
Herbie Hancock
's career, bringing him into the vanguard of
jazz
fusion
.
Hancock
had pushed
avant-garde
boundaries on his own albums and with
Miles Davis
, but he had never devoted himself to the groove as he did on
. Drawing heavily from
Sly Stone
,
Curtis Mayfield
, and
James Brown
developed deeply funky, even gritty, rhythms over which he soloed on electric synthesizers, bringing the instrument to the forefront in
. It had all of the sensibilities of
, particularly in the way it wound off into long improvisations, but its rhythms were firmly planted in
funk
soul
R&B
, giving it a mass appeal that made it the biggest-selling
album of all time (a record which was later broken).
Jazz
purists, of course, decried the experiments at the time, but
still sounds fresh and vital decades after its initial release, and its genre-bending proved vastly influential on not only
, but
hip-hop
. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine