“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 Headhunters, gave a live performance of their hit song "Chameleon" on the weekly television show Soul Train, airing September 28, 1974.Released late the previous 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 (R&B), and jazz charts.Head Hunters and the follow-up album, Thrust (1974), would become foundational to the jazz-funk movement throughout the 1970s.2 "Chameleon" in particular gave listeners plenty of reason to rethink just how separate funk and jazz were or needed to be.However, to a percentage of Hancock's mainstream jazz fans, as well as a cadre of jazz critics and scholars, the music represented a strange turn.Throughout the better part of the 1960s, Hancock had solidified a kind of Mount Rushmore position in jazz circles as the pianist in Miles Davis's "second great quintet," considered then (and since) to be one of the most influential small jazz groups in history.Hancock had gone on to form an avant-garde jazz group: the Herbie Hancock Sextet (later Septet), known colloquially as the Mwandishi group, after Hancock's Swahili sobriquet, loosely translated as "composer."Now, with "Chameleon's" extended groove, hundreds of thousands of young, platform-soled funk fans were listening-and dancing-to a kind of jazz that discomfited many of their seated predecessors.Overall sales figures for the single and the album were stunning.Industry sales charts made a convincing statement about "Chameleon's" popularity, whether

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