burbling effects, amounts to a primitive version of Nineties ambient music.

A sales flop, Sextant prompted Hancock to own up to his commercial ambitions. In late 1973 he cut the hook-rich Headhunters, one of jazz's all-time best sellers (imagine a jazz album hitting Number Thirteen on today's Billboard album chart!). Remarkably, Hancock hit Number Thirteen again with his follow-up, Thrust. Yet where Headhunters was undergirded by the capable, facile drummer Harvey Mason, Thrust's drummer was jazz-funk genius Mike Clark, a scrawny little fiend who'd rather play music than eat. On extended jams like "Palm Grease" and "Actual Proof," Clark and bassist Paul Jackson are a two-headed computer disgorging off-kilter but irresistibly fat-bottomed licks; Hancock's Fender Rhodes and Bennie Maupin's reeds, meanwhile, dance on the ceiling. Thrust is a great album: brave, risky music making.

Hancock cut a few more albums with Thrust's personnel before he went on his way in 1976. The rest of the band, calling themselves the Headhunters, cut a few first-class funk albums and disbanded. Today, with groove bands like Medeski, Martin and Wood proliferating and hip-hoppers like Mobb Deep sampling Headhunters licks, Hancock has seen fit to give his old mates another shot.

Return of the Headhunters has a surface sheen that Sextant and Thrust (both newly reissued) could never have aspired to but little of those albums' raw fervor. Mike Clark keeps trying to break free, but he's hamstrung by candy-coated synths and generic R&B vocals. Hancock, who guests on four tracks, is content to glide complacently. Live, these guys probably kill. On record (this record, at least), they make you long for the brave experimentation of Sextant, the loose-limbed slip and slide of Thrust. (RS 794)

TONY SCHERMAN