Legendary jazz-funk band the Headhunters plays the Guild Theatre in Menlo Park
MENLO PARK -- One of the most important jazz-funk ensembles to emerge during the '70s brings its current tour celebrating the band's 50th anniversary to the Guild Theatre Saturday when the Headhunters headline a rare Bay Area show.
The group came together around jazz keyboard great Herbie Hancock in the early '70s. While Hancock had already had substantial solo success as a band leader for Blue Note in addition to serving as one of the main keyboard foils for Miles Davis during the '60s, he had not scored the kind of hit his former boss had with his landmark electric jazz album Bitches Brew. Hancock reached the outer limits with the heady, spiritual expansiveness of his sextet Mwandishi (the efforts Crossings and Sextant still sound futuristic to this day), but decided to take his music into a more populist, funky direction with his album Head Hunters in 1973.
Retaining only woodwinds player Bennie Maupin from his Mwandishi ensemble, Hancock's new band featuring Oakland bass phenom Paul Jackson, percussionist Bill Summers and drummer Harvey Mason put a jazzy spin on the hard funk of Sly Stone and James Brown on the four extended cuts that made up Head Hunters. The epic 16-minute track "Chameleon" (co-written by Jackson) became a jazz-funk standard and help fuel sales that made the album Hancock's first million seller.
The group was soon headlining arena as the band welcomed drummer Mike Clark to the fold and backed Hancock on a string of successful records including Thrust, Man-Child (which also included new addition DeWayne "Blackbird" McKnight, later of P-Funk fame) and the double-live Japanese import Flood. The band would also release two of its own albums -- their heavily sampled debut Survival of the Fittest in 1975 and the follow-up Straight from the Gate two years later.
While the players would remain active after the band dissolved -- Jackson recorded a solo album with Hancock and Maupin in 1978 and Clark recorded and toured with fusion supergroup Brand X and post-bop trumpeter Jack Walrath -- they eventually reunited over two decades later. Recording with Hancock as well as contemporary fusion players (keyboard player Patrice Rushen) and more modern funk and hip-hop artists (Brand New Heavies singer N'Dea Davenport and MC with the Pharcyde Slim Kid Tre), the 1998 effort also led to a revival of live performances for the band. The Headhunters parted ways with Maupin, adding alto player Donald Harrison and regularly using fill-in players on keyboard. The band has released a number of live and studio albums since then, including their most recent studio effort Speakers in the House on Ropeadope Records last year and the recently released 50th anniversary concert document Live From Brooklyn Bowl that includes the current line-up with original members Clark and Summers alongside New Orleans players Harrison, Kyle Roussel on keyboards and Chris Severin on seven-string bass.
This date on the band's 50th anniversary tour at the Guild Theatre will also serve as a fundraiser for the documentary When the Sound Hits the Walls, a film that will tell the story of Wally Heider's Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco's Tenderloin. The Headhunters will be joined by eclectic local soul/jazz/rock outfit Seal Party. Founded by Bay Area-based session players Kevin Seal (keyboards and vocals) and Chris McGrew (drummer and engineer), Seal Party is in some ways an extension of their earlier collaboration as members of Oakland experimental funk outfit Griddle that made two albums in the early 2000s before reuniting for 2014's Meat Kite. Taking advantage of the downtime forced by the pandemic starting in 2020, the pair began writing tunes and inviting fellow musicians to contribute to the recording sessions at Wally's Hyde Out (part of Hyde Street Studios, where McGrew works as a recording engineer).
Fleshing out the jazz-inflected, evocative tunes with intricate horn and vocal arrangements -- while Seal fronts a bulk of the material, a number of singers take turns on the mic including Kimiko Joy and Renee Padgett and rapper Xanubis -- an eclectic array of sounds are found on the project's debut album MMXXII.
The songs offer a mix of Seal's acerbic lyrical wit (on "Turpentine") alongside evocative character studies ("Jimmy Just Clams Up" and "Elijah McCain," which was inspired by the real-life story of a Colorado man who was fatally beaten by police) and crafty instrumental tracks. Among the guests musicians who played on the effort are bassists Larry Boothroyd (Victims Family, Jello Biafra's Guantanamo School of Medicine) and Uriah Duffy (ex-Whitesnake, Points North) and guitarists Jon Axtell (ex-Psychefunkapus, George Clinton, Howard Jones and Notorius) and Sonny Climes.
Since the group self-released the album, they have played a number of local shows in addition to a brief tour of the Midwest (where both Seal and McGrew are originally from). In early March, Seal Party put out Sapa, a 44-minute instrumental suite built from tracks used on MMXXII. The band played its second swing of dates in the Midwest in the spring and just released a new video for the instrumental "Duende" earlier this month.
The Headhunters with Seal Party
Saturday, August 26, 8 p.m. $50
The Guild Theatre
