Wow, these are incredibly exciting titles!
Herbie Hancock's Thrust was one of the ones
I reccomended in the Sony/AF thread back in the summer so needless to say I'm really happy that it's coming out. The quad mix is excellent, and it very much has the same vibe as the stereo mix - I don't think there was a mixing credit on the album sleeve but I wouldn't be surprised if it was done by Fred Catero and David Rubinson like Headhunters was. This was one of my most played Q8's, and I'm sure as a full-range SACD it's going to be even better.
Someone was asking what Herbie Hancock's music is like - to me his playing (as a keyboardist) is very much in the same neighbourhood as some of the other Miles Davis alumni like Joe Zwainul (Weather Report) and Chick Corea (Return To Forever) but also with some of the down-to-earth R&B sensibility of Joe Sample from The Crusaders. What sets Hancock's material from the Headhunters album in 1973 onward is the rhythm section (and arrangements). Hancock relates a story of going to a party in the early 70's, when he was l eading his Mwandishi band - they were jazz-fusion too, but more in the avante-garde mediative spacey variety. At this party someone was playing a Sly & The Family Stone record and Hancock was struck by the way it connected with the people there, who were dancing and having a good time, and he knew he couldn't put one of his records on and have it have the same effect. After that he resolved to make his music more 'danceable' and you hear it starting in Headhunters and just continuing to get stronger and stronger in importance to him as the decade went on. However I don't think he ever dumbed down his soloing even as he was smoothing out some of the rhythms - for my money I don't think you can find a stronger Rhodes soloist in the 70's, and that's saying something because there were a lot of good ones. Hancock is not only a remarkably muscular soloist, he's also incredibly harmonically complex with a lot of chordal stuff in his solos rather than just single note runs, not to mention the interaction between his left and right hands. Sometimes they sound so independent of each other it sounds like his right hand is one keyboardist soloing, and his left hand is another keyboardist playing rhythm.
AF releasing the previously unreleased quad mix of Billy Cobham's Spectrum is even more exciting. I was never happy with the wonky DVD-A mix, and even
ripped it apart to examine it but even with the tweaks I made it was still deeply unsatisfying. It's great to hear from Jon's description that the quad mix is the discrete kind of mix this album deserves, and I can't wait to hear it. Jon mentions two guitarists, one in each rear speaker - I think one of those is actually keyboardist Jan Hammer playing his Moog synthesizer in a way that makes it sound like a guitar. He had a remarkable technical facility with the pitch bend wheel that enabled him to sound almost indistinguishable from a guitarist - for years I thought the intro solo on the first track of this album 'Quadrant 4' was a guitar, but it's not, it's Hammer playing keyboard. You can tell because right at the end of the solo (before the main theme starts) the last few notes of the solo dissolve in to a bunch of squonky bleep-bloop noises that only a synthesizer could make. I suppose the years he spent playing with John McLaughlin in The Mahavishnu Orchestra was basically a masterclass in aggressive guitar sounds and soloing, because I've never heard another analog synth player get close to him in getting their soloing style close to that of a guitar. Even guys like George Duke who were very fond of using the pitch bend wheel in their solos always still sounded like they were playing a synthesizer.
I can't wait for this title and hope it signals that Warner is willing to let more unreleased quad mixes out of it's vaults. Bring on Black Sabbath 'Sabotage'!
