Maiden Voyage

Credit where credit's due. When I worked at an unemployment benefit office in a well-known resort on the south coast of England, a befuddled young man released from the safety net of higher education, I was befriended by a human problem known to his fellow officers as the poisonous dwarf. Since no one wanted to deal with the problem, he was offloaded onto the section of a new and callow supervisor who knew nothing outside the covers of a modern American novel. Moi.

Predictably, he proved a pain in the rear. Even though I would have come to it eventually under my own steam, give the fellow some Brownie points, he did introduce me to Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage. It seems hardly credible that such a sociopathic little snot-rag would have appreciated anything of such intricate beauty, but maybe the private person behind the public persona was not quite so obnoxious. He was certainly fervent enough in his enthusiasm for Herbie's earliest masterpiece almost to force it into my hands. There was no alternative but to listen to it.

I knew the gorgeous title track – one of the most hummable and beguiling melodies in the whole of jazz – via Brian Auger & the Trinity's fine album, Befour. But I couldn't believe at that point in my musical education that any modern jazz album could be consistently up to such quality. It is. In fact, I realised on first playing it back at home, that I knew both the opening title track and the final, equally beautiful 'Dolphin Dance' – via one of Grover Washington jr.'s polished if somewhat samey albums.

Book-ended by two such indelible melodies, Maiden Voyage is one of the most accessible jazz records of the modern age. Yet my initial unease was born out to a degree by the chaotic fury of 'The Eye of the Hurricane' and 'Survival of the Fittest', both of which – take out of context – could be considered a little challenging.

In between these two more difficult tracks, lies the beautifully hypnotic 'Little One', taken at an even slower tempo than the version which appears on Miles Davis' ESP. The link between these two great albums is not serendipitous. Hancock recorded Maiden Voyage with the other two members of the rhythm section that propelled Miles Davis' legendary quintet of the 1960s – with Freddie Hubbard substituting for Miles himself on trumpet and one of my unsung heroes of the tenor saxophone, the surprisingly delicate 'Big George' Coleman, sitting in for Wayne Shorter.

Taken all together, too, the five extended tracks work thematically in the way that the five tracks of Miles' earlier Kind Of Blue, say, slide one after another into a modal suite. Given such obviously thematic titles as 'Maiden Voyage', 'The Eye of the Hurricane' and 'Dolphin Dance', it's easy as you listen to picture in your mind some sailing vessel negotiating the wind-tossed waves of 'Hurricane' and 'Survival of the Fittest' to reach the final calm of 'Dolphin Dance'. Which is one reason why individual tracks lifted onto a Best of compilation can never work as well as they do in the context of the album. And which is one reason why Jazzwise magazine selected it as one of their '100 albums that shook the world'.

When you think that another listed Herbie Hancock album, The New Standard, was recorded more than 40 years later, it gives you an idea of how incredible has been the pianist's durability. Part of that, I suppose, comes from his willingness – like that of his former employer – to explore new musical frontiers. In between the two albums came Herbie Hancock's other indisputable unalloyed masterpiece, Headhunters, which more or less created the template for jazz-funk. The ridiculously infectious funk of 'Chameleon' would serve as a soundtrack to my one and only year in a hall of residence.

Not long after that, my brother drove his girlfriend and me to the French Alps to visit an old friend. Never shy of spending a bob or two on the latest technology, he had an in-car stereo cassette player that bettered any others I have heard since. I only have to hear his disco-era vocod-ified Columbia hit, 'I Thought it was You', and I'm transported straight back to a long tree-lined road rising gently but relentlessly up from the environs of Grenoble to the dark ominous mountain peaks ahead.

Thankfully, I don't think of the poisonous dwarf every time I hear Maiden Voyage. Instead, it continues to delight and wonder as it reinforces my conviction that it was the finest hour of one of the jazz world's most charming, intelligent and innovative artists – and, for me, one of the five greatest jazz albums made during my lifetime.