6 x 9. 288 pgs. 18 B&W photograph section, approx 30 music examples, 3 tables. (2005) Cloth 978-0-472-11417-7 $27.95T  Available Add to Cart Search this Book's Content About the Book Praise Look Inside Series Jazz Perspectives Subjects Cultural Studies / Music--Jazz

Head Hunters
The Making of Jazz's First Platinum Album

Steven F. Pond

Winner of the IASPM-US 2006 Woody Guthrie Award

The story of one of the most influential and controversial jazz recordings of the twentieth century

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Praise for the Book

"Pond comes at the music every which way, from discussions of African aesthetics as they related to jazz history and culminating in the Head Hunters sessions, to musical transcriptions of key passages from the disc and from pioneer Sly Stone, to the backstory of how legendary Columbia promo man Vernon Slaughter pushed "Chameleon" with R&B radio."
---Detroit Metro Times

"By using musical analysis and insightful reflections from Head Hunters band members . . . Pond explains Hancock's concurrent interests in Africa, r&b, modern European classical music and black political consciousness of the early '70s . . . . The book illustrates how things can happen simultaneously--that a populist minded album can brim with artistic integrity."
---Downbeat

"Pond dissects and analyzes what went into the making of this album, both musical and extra-musical with enthusiasm and thoroughness."
---ARSC Journal

". . . an academic but very readable dissection of all the different ways in which Herbie Hancock's 1973 album Head Hunters broke the mould. . . . An entertaining and thought-provoking read."
---Brian Priestley, Jazzwise Magazine

"An important and timely book. Pond's work reflects the insight an informed researcher and skilled performer can bring to the study of music. In exploring varied dimensions-sonic, cultural, technological, economic-he renders the tale in all its complexity, without sacrificing clarity of expression. This is the kind of book jazz scholarship has long needed."
---Travis Jackson, Associate Professor of American Music, University of Chicago

"Head Hunters uses Herbie Hancock's famous 1973 album as a jumping-off point for considering broader aesthetic and historiographical issues. In terms of methodology, Steven Pond produces his own "fusion" with a seamless blend of ethnographic and historical research. This book will fascinate scholars and fans of jazz and popular music, as well as those interested in the emerging interdisciplinary field of sound studies, and in the broader relationship between genre and identity in contemporary music."
---David Brackett, McGill University, is author of Interpreting Popular Music, and The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates

"'Jazz Fusion'-fighting words for jazz purists-can no longer be wrestled over as simply 'inside' or 'outside' real jazz. Digging deeply into the many expected and unexpected fusions that produced the music on this iconic 'Jazz Fusion' album, Steve Pond achieves more than writing Head Hunters squarely into the jazz tradition-remarkably, he makes a case for 'fusing' as a preferred framework for rethinking jazz classification. Deftly fusing musicological and socio-historical cultural analysis, Head Hunters, the book, like Head Hunters, the album, will enliven debates about the sounds and meanings of jazz. Unabashedly scholarly, yet as gripping and readable as the album is unapologetically popular and danceable, this book will be gobbled up like a musicological mystery novel that incites and invites readers to listen again and rethink 'who-done-it' and how in the jazz history we thought we knew."
---Sherrie Tucker, University of Kansas, author of Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s (2000), and Dance Floor Democracy: the Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen (forthcoming)