Song of the Day 10/23: Herbie Hancock, “Watermelon Man”
Herbie Hancock’s “Head Hunters” LP, released in 1973, might be the best jazz fusion album ever; certainly it’s the funkiest. It was the best-selling jazz album ever, peaking at No. 13 on the Billboard album chart, until George Benson’s “Breezin'” surpassed it three years later.
One of the LP’s highlights was a song that had already been a hit. Hancock was 22 when he wrote “Watermelon Man” and recorded it for his 1962 debut solo album, “Takin’ Off,” with Freddie Hubbard on trumpet and Dexter Gordon on tenor sax for his
The song became that rarity, a jazz hit, the next year, after Hancock played some gigs with Afro-Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaría’s band after Chick Correa quit. Hancock described what happened one night when trumpeter Donald Byrd, who gave Hancock his big break when he hired him in 1960, was in the audience.
During one of the intermissions, Donald had a conversation with Mongo, something about, “What are the examples of the common thread between Afro-Cuban or Afro-Latin music and African-American jazz?” Mongo said he hadn’t really heard a thing that really links it together, he was still searching for it. And I wasn’t paying much attention to that conversation, it was a little too heavy for me at the time.
But then all of a sudden Donald Byrd says, ‘Herbie, why don’t you play ‘Watermelon Man’ for Mongo?’ And I’m thinking, ‘What does that have to do with the conversation they’re talking about?’ I thought it was a little funky jazz tune. So I started playing it, and then Mongo, he got up and he said, “Keep playing it!” He went on the stage, and started playing his congas, and it fit like a glove fits on a hand, it just fit perfectly.
The bass player looked at my left hand for the bass line, and he learned that. Little by little, the audience was getting up from their tables, and they all got on the dance floor. Pretty soon the dance floor was filled with people, laughing and shrieking, and having a great time, and they were saying, “This is a hit! This is fantastic!”
It was like a movie! So after that, Mongo said “Can I record this?’ I said “By all means.”
Santamaria’s version reached No. 10 on the Billboard chart — not the jazz chart, the Hot 100.
It was 10 years later that Hancock ventured into funk with “Head Hunters,” and he took “Watermelon Man” with him, but in a radically different arrangement. The intro and outro feature percussionist Bill Summers blowing on beer bottles in imitation of a style of Pygmy singing/whistle-playing called hindewhu.
