Review Summary: Contemplative, mystical, and explorative: “Crossings” isn’t a funktopia like Hancock’s opus, but instead is a spiritual and jazzy journey.
Crossings demands your attention.
Tribal insanity - tribal marches - start “Sleeping Giants” off with a bang. Tribal marches laced with electronic sonic sounds. This track is the centerpiece of this album. Encapsulated within this song is all of “Crossings” themes, textures, attitudes, and intentions. Seemingly off-beat, rhythmic and rapid clanging coupled with gyrating improv keyboard play that just grooves. If there is any trace of funk on this album it is stored in “Sleeping Giants”. This over-twenty-minute-long song drives into a hastening competition between each band-mate to out-groove each other, and just when you think our star Herbie is winning this competition you are pulled back by a refrain built on solemn, aware, and present trumpeteering. Shades of intelligent melancholy resonate in this refrain and appears throughout this escapade. Sorrow, tribal pride, funky grooves - this song feels like a display-case for Hancock’s internal everything. There is no solitudinous direction… only glimpses of Hancock and co., akin to Malick’s “The Tree of Life”. The result is a range of atmospheres to contemplate... all of which are good.
The middle track, “Quasar” is a brief detour between the mystical odysseys. This detour is thrusted upon us by an U.F.O. whose desire is throwing us off our spiritual course with an inbred demi-god resembling Tchaikovsky and Adz’ (of Sufjan Stevens “Age of Adz”) jazzy lovechild. Probably the most realized and cohesive track on the album (which is not saying much), its appeal is in its other-worldly effects and creeping trumpet riffs (resembling Romeo and Juliet Overture). Despite its “cohesive”ness, the latter half of the song tapers into unjustified aimlessness.
“Water Torture”. Something this song is not. The overlaying refrain throughout this song is a blend of a cooled, almost noir-like, reflectiveness resembling the image of smoke-filled jazz clubs... Clubs whose occupants’ countenances gradually fade into godly, alien-like appearances - appearances hexed upon them by the continuous exploration of tones and continuous devolvement into the radical jazz-fusion of their - now revealed - extraterrestrial captors: Herbie Hancock and co. Part traditional jazz, part disassembled fusion, part sporadic acid-trips into futuristic VHS tapes of the higher power, “Water Torture” parallels its predecessor “Sleeping Giants” in structure and objective but is fresh and different enough not to lose the listener.
4.3 / 5 is just.
