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Hancock's 70s work is revered by fusion adherents, a group where I will find few friends but who certainly have their own valid way to look at things. This review comes from someone who likes "real jazz" but not Bitches Brew; some folks may want to stop reading right here. Crossings is the third Warner-era album for Hancock's group, and the second with his classic 70s sextet. I find it best to view it in this light, as part of an evolution away from cloning Bitches Brew towards the new voice and inspiration of Sextant. There are passages here with groove and pulse, a progressive and artistic hybrid of funk and jazz, with Hancock and Gleeson's toys and effects complementing the rhythm section. The kind of sound groups like Area captured later; "La Mela di Odessa," arguably Area's greatest song, owes a lot to "Sleeping Giant." Hancock's lost nothing from his 60s playing, even if the timbres are much different. The Mellotron phase-out towards the end of "Water Torture" is... positively GERMAN. The creativity of the music is evident. And, yet, at other times, there's little more than noise, signifying nothing apart from a desire to emulate Miles Davis' work from a couple years previous. And then there are the slow ballady horn/sax duos, that steal the life from the rest of the work. Eddie Henderson's primary function appears to be to make the former master's odd trumpet wail when nothing else is going on, which is ironic when you consider he was releasing his own rather kick-ass solo albums around the same period with many of the same musicians, if I recall correctly. Sextant, which I would recommend hearing first, generally speaking has the strong qualities of this release and dispenses with the rest. As for Crossings, when it isn't boring, it's fucking great. Funny how that is. review by Sean McFee — 11-6-05 —

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Crossings, the second album from Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi sextet (plus new-addition Patrick Gleeson manning the synthesizers), is arguably the most experimental in his catalog. Yet even at Hancock's most far-reaching, he demands an order and purpose in his music that makes him a different kind of experimenter than his former employer, Miles Davis. Whereas Davis' '70s music could be orgies of sonic assaults and unexpected juxtapositions, Hancock preferred to carefully orchestrate timbres and to integrate the unknown with snatches of familiarity. Davis' music could crack the sky; Hancock could make a hearty gumbo out of whatever fell out. So, while "Sleeping Giant" (the only Hancock composition on the album) hits the listener right off the bat with a flurry of African percussion and the spacey Moog synthesizer effects of Patrick Gleeson, the tribal rhythms eventually congeal into something a bit more funky when the bass kicks in and Hancock starts up his Fender Rhodes. After a few minutes of setting down an abstract pattern, the band erupts into a groove around the 11:05 mark that portends the jazz-funk fusion of Hancock's subsequent albums. The track - which really is almost symphonic in both scope and execution - is, in my opinion, the greatest accomplishment of Hancock's electric era. The other two tracks, composed by Benny Maupin, are more synthesizer-dominated. If Mwandishi had a loping "underwater" character to it, "Quasar" and "Water Torture" are like space journeys. There is a restless, busy percussion throughout these tracks that, taken with the synthesizer effects, gives the music the character of being simultaneously ancient and alien. "Water Torture" has a magnificent ambience that reaches both the stars and the soul. review by Matt P. — 2-3-05 —