But that’s not where they found Fat Albert Rotunda. Prodigy’s grandfather Budd Johnson had been a world-famous jazz musician, and he gave his grandson an extensive LP collection to go with the recording equipment his grandmother, one of the original Cotton Club dancers, purchased for her home in Hempstead, on Long Island. Havoc began producing out of necessity, and he was digging for records to sample. Their record company had dropped them, and they were looking for a new deal, but wasn’t everybody? Their friends didn’t play it, and when they signed autographs at record stores, employees piped in music by a different rapper from Queens. They were a few months removed from an album, Juvenile Hell, that sounded rote and tonally confused. Though still teenagers, Albert Johnson and Kejuan Muchita-who rapped under the names Prodigy and Havoc, respectively, in a group called Mobb Deep-had reached a dead end. But it stuck around in record crates from Chicago to Rio to Queens. “Jessica” is far from the most famous song on Rotunda-it’s not the one Quincy Jones would later cover or the one Pac would flip when he was living in Oakland-and Rotunda is far from the most famous Herbie Hancock record. But the song starts with an eerie piano theme that doesn’t recur until it shatters the mood around the three-minute mark, a bad dream biting at your heels. The lone exception is the first song on the B-side, a subdued cut called “Jessica.” In its middle, “Jessica” is supremely laid-back-a glut of horns and some light keys like the ones you might hear right before the bar closes, tranquil and happy enough. Most of Rotunda is bright and breezy, fitting for a cartoon. Those would be collected and expanded for his first release on Warner, an album called Fat Albert Rotunda. In November of that year, NBC aired Bill Cosby’s animated special Hey, Hey, Hey, It’s Fat Albert, complete with songs by Hancock. It would be a few years before he’d bend critics’ brains with Head Hunters in the meantime Hancock scored cigarette commercials, Standard Oil spots, a movie. He was seven albums into a solo career and had played in countless sessions with the most celebrated jazz musicians of the era. This was 1969 the Chicago native had just left Miles Davis’s second Great Quintet-or rather, he’d been fired while holed up in a Rio de Janeiro hotel room, honeymooning and food-poisoned-and satisfied his contract with Blue Note. By the time he was 29, Herbie Hancock was already one of the best piano players on earth.
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