Verve VERF01615-2 |     ***
Herbie Hanock (p; el p; key; vocoder) and various ensembles from 1962 to present day.

Herbie Hancock is a fully certified jazz giant, and this career retrospective skims over the wave-tops of a remarkable career in jazz. Shoe-horning almost 50 years of recorded music (over 400 albums either in his own name or on which he has played) into just 12 selections is an unenviable job, and rather than bemoan the inevitable omissions which the limited space of one CD offers, it is better to concentrate on what is represented on this album, which end-to-end makes for an enjoyable 70 minute listen.

Including selections from his Blue Note, Warner Bros., Columbia and Verve periods there are some nice surprises en route, such as a live version of ‘Rockit’, the Grammy award winning single from Future Shock which was one of the biggest instrumental dance singles and video hits of the 1980s, and a live version of Joni Mitchell singing ‘River’, a composition that appeared on his double Grammy award winning album River: The Joni Letters where sung by Corinne Bailey Rae.

Then there’s ‘Maiden Voyage,’ a jazz classic famous for its rhythm scheme which is adhered to throughout the performance, ‘Cantaloupe Island,’ which in its sampled form by Us3 as ‘Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)’ in 1993 provided Blue Note records with their biggest selling album pre-Norah Jones, and an edited version of ‘Chameleon,’ another mega-Hancock hit, this time from the 1970s, from the album Headhunters that propelled Hancock onto the  arena rock circuit. There’s an appearance by Stevie Wonder on ‘St. Louis Blues’ from Gershwin’s World (albeit written by W. C. Handy) and ‘All Apologies’ from the hugely underrated album The New Standard that all in all contribute to capturing the remarkable range of a remarkable artist.  Stuart Nicholson