An elite jazz pianist who played with Miles Davis and led one of the most cerebral bands of the early 1970s asks a friend to blow across a glass beer bottle, loops it, and creates one of the earthiest dance grooves of the decade. This episode zooms in on Herbie Hancock in the fall of 1973 and the making of Head Hunters. The hosts set the context: hard bop roots on his 1962 debut Takin' Off, boundary pushing with the Miles Davis Quintet, and the Mwandishi sextet albums Mwandishi, Crossings and Sextant, with their early synthesizers, abstract improvisation and measures of seven and nine beats that scramble the listener's internal metronome.

Hancock described that upper-atmosphere music as heavy and craved something rooted in the body. He dismantled the sextet, keeping only Bennie Maupin, and built a new rhythm section of Paul Jackson, Harvey  ...