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Sunlight
Sunlight

Sunlight in Bloomington, MN

Current price: $15.99
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Size: CD

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After
Man-Child
, alas,
Herbie Hancock
's American jazz-funk records in the 1970s grew gradually more commercial, less stimulating, and crucially, less truly funky with each release, even as his equipment rack grew larger. Just take a look at the staggering collection of keyboards on the back cover of the
Sunlight
LP -- all sought-after collectors' items now -- yet Hancock makes so little use of their possibilities here. For much of the album, he seems most interested in establishing a new career as an electronic vocalist.
"I Thought It Was You,"
"Come Running to Me,"
and the title track introduce the ghostly, gauzy sound of
Herbie
's singing voice as heard through a vocoder; there's even an electronic
scat choir.
Stevie Wonder
, he's not. There are still occasional splashes of
Hancock
harmonic color on the keyboards, but he also relies upon superfluous, self-arranged brass riffs and string backgrounds. The backup bands shift from track to track, from combinations of
Headhunters
alumni that offer soft-focused facsimiles of the old funk drive to a surprisingly strait-jacketed pairing of
Tony Williams
and
Jaco Pastorius
on the eccentric
"Good Question."
~ Richard S. Ginell
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