Gig Review: Herbie Hancock, MFC, Wellington, 5 June 2019

Maybe I expected too much. Maybe the slow build anticipation of seeing a living legend perform up close had set me up for disappointment. Maybe if I’d been able to stand and sway rather than be forced to endure the rock-hard all-too-compact seating at the Michael Fowler Centre, Herbie Hancock’s set at the opening night of Wellington’s Jazz Festival would have been far more bearable for me. Enjoyable even. 

Perhaps it was a combination of all of the above, but whatever it was, my own enthusiasm for “jazz” had been well and truly diluted by the time I left the venue last Wednesday night. My gig-going companion was far more upbeat about it all, and I’m quite certain the vast majority of the sold out crowd enjoyed the gig a lot more than I did.

The band - Herbie Hancock (piano, keys), James Genus (bass, orgasmic facial expressions), Lionel Loueke (guitar/various vocal FX), and Vinnie Colaiuta (drums) - was fantastic, polished, and thoroughly professional throughout the near two-hour set. That wasn’t the issue. No question, these guys are all world class musicians, and it was a privilege to be in their company. 

But I’ve got to be honest; there just wasn’t enough “funk” for me, and the entire set was an excursion into the trippy excesses of what might otherwise be called prog-fusion. I knew enough about Hancock - a spritely 79 years of age - to know that work from 1983’s Future Shock album was always unlikely to feature, but most of his best material has always featured horns/brass and there wasn’t much of that on the night. 

We got variations on ‘Actual Proof’, ‘Chameleon’, and ‘Cantaloupe Island’ (during the encore), and some great Afro-fusion-vocal stuff from Loueke at various points, plus a raft of other work this jazz-pleb struggled to identify, but it was clearly more about an appreciation of the “vibe” for most in attendance, and I was having some difficulty with that. A little bit of variety, and a little more wiggle room might have helped. 

In his review for the Dominion Post, learned scribe Colin Morris, a man who knows a thing or two about this stuff, called it “a contender for concert of the year” ... so what do I know?

Maybe it was just me.

Retail Therapy 5: Colin Morris Records, Wellington

If the Soul Mine was my record digging poison of choice when I lived in Wellington’s Eastern suburbs in the late Eighties, then later moves to more central locations like Aro Street, Majoribanks Street, and Dixon Street, meant I also found myself frequenting inner city record shops more than ever before. One of Wellington’s most iconic and best loved shops of that era was Colin Morris Records in the heart of downtown Willis Street, a staple of the Wellington record-digging scene for the best part of two decades either side of my ‘OE’.

I don’t really know Colin Morris, but I know enough about him to say he’s an expert in the art of music retailing. And he was always a mine of relevant information on those occasions I dared to engage him long enough in chat. For whatever reason, I always felt a little wary of Morris. I was perhaps a bit in awe back then, probably because he was that bit older, but also for the fact that he was prolific in music critiquing circles, and a regular contributor to The Dominion’s music pages – something that continues to this day. I guess it was because he was an authority in a field I was passionate about.

By the time Colin Morris Records became the most convenient central option for me, there was a mainstream shift away from vinyl and tapes, and CD’s had taken hold as the music consumer’s vehicle of choice. Me? … I had been buying vast quantities of music on cassette, mainly for the portability it offered … but the Compact Disc definitely appealed. I had a few, and I just needed to invest in some decent hardware before I could delve too heavily into that format. Curiously enough, it was my obsession with buying product that kept me too poor to do just that.

The thing about Colin Morris Records was not only its central location, but the sheer variety the shop offered. Morris is obviously a serious jazz fan, and as I recall it, his shop also stocked a wide range of classical material. I was not particularly interested in either genre, but it’s fair to say it was one of the most well rounded “small” record shops I’ve ever visited. I’m not even sure it was all that small, it certainly felt like it expanded in floor space sometime between the mid Eighties and mid Nineties, and I spent many a Friday night or midweek lunch break diligently digging through the seemingly endless rows of product on display.

My recall of the shop’s demise is hazy – it was at least a decade or so ago now, or maybe even longer if my suspicion that the shop as an ongoing music outlet was swallowed up by one of the chain brands is correct. Morris himself has continued a career in retail, and for a while ran a music mail order business called Slipped Disc. He’s clearly a passionate music man, and his thoughts on the subject can be found just about everywhere you care to look. He currently has shows on both National and Concert radio.

I’d loved to have sourced a decent photo of the shop in its prime, but sadly there don’t appear to be any online.

Such was its wide range of stock genre-wise, and its overall longevity, it would be impossible to sign off with a single clip truly representative of the shop, so here’s something local, something very Wellington, and something from an era I associate strongly with Colin Morris Records …