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 Mason and Bill Summers. We examine the radical decision to record funk with no rhythm guitar, using the Hohner Clavinet D6’s rubber pads and metal anvil to supply the percussive strum, Hancock handling all synthesizer duties on the Fender Rhodes, ARP Odyssey and ARP Pro Soloist, the September 1973 sessions at Wally Heider Studios and Different Fur Trading Co. in San Francisco, the rebuilt Watermelon Man with its beer-bottle imitation of a Mbuti hindewhu flute, balafon, shekere and agogo, the ARP Odyssey bass line on the 15-and-a-half-minute Chameleon, the dedication Sly, the Victor Moscoso cover with its Baule mask, and the purist backlash to a record that hit number 13 on the Billboard 200 and became the best-selling jazz album to that point.

• Avant-garde as a dinner party of different languages versus funk as a rowing team that must hit the water together
• Why the hosts reject the idea that a locked-in groove is dumbing down rather than translating genius
• How removing the guitar forced Hancock to become a one-man rhythm and melody machine
• Ancient acoustic roots layered under cutting-edge 1970s studio technology
• Thrust, Man-Child, Flood, and the 2008 National Recording Registry induction that vindicated the pivot