Sleeping Giants: The Brief Reign and Brilliant Legacy of Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi Band

Fifty years ago, Herbie Hancock formed a sextet on the vanguard of electroacoustic music. We remember it now as Mwandishi, after the title of its debut album — the first of three studio releases in as many years, during a run that has largely been overshadowed in the scope of Hancock’s career. Wedged between the curvilinear post-bop of the 1960s and the strutting jazz-funk of Head Hunters , Mwandishi embodied a distinct alignment of time and space, a moment unlikely to be replicated.