“Chameleon” Meets Soul Train : Herbie, James, Michael, Damita Jo, and Jazz-Funk

Abstract

Herbie Hancock must have felt great when he and his group, the Head- hunters, gave a live performance of their hit song Chameleon on the weekly television show Soul Train, airing September 28, 1974. Released late the previ- ous year, Chameleon and the album for which it was the lead single (Head Hunters)1 were enjoying an extended ride on the pop, rhythm and blues (RB public-radio jazz stations had little attraction to album cuts from Head Hunt- ers at first, but urban and free-form radio embraced Chameleon. Nevertheless, the album had been issued initially through jazz store outlets, and album sales were tracked on this basis. Soon enough, record bins in the RB perhaps a new, younger, and less category-bound jazz audience was emerging.5 Yet the album was not re- garded as precisely funk either, including by Hancock himself. Endeavoring to create a funk album, not a jazz one, Hancock fortuitously decided to pay atten- tion to the way things were flowing and not just stick to what [he] originally had in mind.6 The musical result fit precariously into a set of contested categorical terms: jazz-rock, funk-jazz, fusion jazz, and others, offered up by fans and crit- ics to both describe the music and set stylistic boundaries for exclusivity and inclusivity.While I explored Hancock's album largely through the lens of jazz studies in my earlier work, in this paper I consider Chameleon and Head Hunters from their collective perception as funk; I view the Soul Train performance as a metaphoric goal for Herbie Hancock. Hancock wanted to reconnect, through his new direction, with a young, hip, black listenership that had largely come to yawn at jazz. …