Chameleon. Herbie Hancock. 1973. Columbia.

 Some artists leave evidence of their restless musical imaginations strewn across their corpus like impassioned signatures of timely obsessions. The omnipresent whisper of keyboard on your favorite Prince song; John Lennon’s tendency to revert to fifties pop song structures; the growing warmth in Dylan’s vocal delivery beginning with Blonde on Blonde’s fourth side. Herbie Hancock, when he wasn’t striking those lyrical chords of brilliance that gave flight to the grounded blues of Miles Davis’ second great quintet, was often drawn in his solo career to the crowd pleasing sense of order and organization that pop musicians tend to make so memorable. His wasn’t so much a restless mind as it was tireless, the difference being the sense of mess you want to leave your aesthetic; for all his adventurousness, Hancock leaves extremely cleanly produced recordings. Chameleon, from his landmark early seventies record Head Hunters, is jazz-funk fusion that tests the formal elasticity of both genres by restoring jazz, like his former bandleader Miles Davis before him did, to its lived urban experience, and also by modulating the tempo to a Sly Stone-influenced blues essence punctuated with solos by both Hancock and Bernie Maupin. Driven by rhythm and counter rhythms, Chameleon is a direct reckoning with musics stripped of tradition; its vision of a timeless now does not stray outside of its contemporary bounds, and so even today it retains an invigorating cross-generational fluency whose mysteries, still intact, work the entrancing magic of showing us, and the generations of us to come, how we live, the unseen dimensions of our inner and future lives. Ironically, the chameleon of the title song, with its survival instinct to self camouflage when in danger, may have been funk itself. Head Hunters reached such a mass audience that its exponential influence pleasantly disrupted how some nascent American artists conceived of song construction, and even considered their musical role in the recording studio. Chameleon opens with a simplified bass line that regulates its first half’s tempo, and is featured with such robust prominence in the mix that it prefigures the DJ’s presampled sequenced loop. Though it was still a few more years before the DJs of early hip-hop would know how best to exploit this fissile material, and though Prince’s and George Clinton’s solo work would continue well into this century, funk had largely flamed out by the time of the Reagan administration. Funk and disco, before their commodification, gave proof, through a calculus of liberty exercised by marginalized communities, that human sexuality is equality’s only metric. In contrast, hip hop artists went in another direction, deploying the nuclear option once it became clear that racism was being used by Republican strategists to gain white voters support, thus, for a time, making all other music redundant. But that was only made possible by a quintet of young working musicians back in 1973 when, in recording studios in San Francisco, Herbie Hancock first split the atom.