Barney Miller theme

When you heard that funky solo bass line, you knew what you were in for! Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson‘s Barney Miller theme has all the elements of the show in that opening line and then, as soon as you get into the groove, all hell breaks loose with that trumpet. It’s hip, cornball AND nostalgic all at the same time.

quotes wrote:I used to be in a band that would open the show with the Barney Miller theme. It was the bassist's idea, of course, so I worked out all the guitar parts & leads note-for-note, as well as all the boards parts and horn parts on guitar. It went over great with people born between 1946-1976. You could see all the frowns and tilted heads in the audience of those who didn't get it and you just knew those people were too young to remember the show.

quotes wrote:    This particular song brings back a great memory of a very special teacher I had when I played Bass in our High School Jazz Band. I'd start to play the opening riff, but it and it used to drive my music teacher nuts because the rest of my jazz-band classmates loved it so much that our rhythm section would start jamming it out, then the keys and brass section would kick in and he'd just stand there and shake his head at us. He hated when we played anything without sheet music...LOL. He was one of the nicest and most inspirational music teachers and people I ever met. But cancer took him shortly after I graduated. He was just 40. He's the one that pushed me to write music and perform it at our Winter Concerts. Over 40 years later there's not a day that goes by that I don't thank him for doing that...as I still play and write.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/herbie-hancock-head-hunters/ wrote:In 1973, Herbie Hancock, a virtuosic jazz dissident, stomped out an entire history of sound when he walked out a bassline on a modular synthesizer.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/herbie-hancock-head-hunters/ wrote:A year before Hancock plunked out that bassline, his woodwind player, Bennie Maupin, sat among the sold-out crowd at Los Angeles Coliseum for Wattstax, a 1972 benefit concert sometimes referred to as “Black Woodstock.”

Tributaries of jazz history flowed through Maupin, who had played with hard bop greats like Lee Morgan and avant-garde pioneers like Pharoah Sanders in the previous decade. But at Wattstax, he was tapping into a broader, more popular, more body-focused black experience.

As the bands grooved to soul, R&B, and funk onstage, Maupin watched a group of young kids dancing the funky robot, popping and locking their joints at right angles. “I just started to hear in my mind melodies centered around that kind of movement,” Maupin later said. The melody: two little hitches, a staccato double-tap, followed by a bluesy riff down a minor pentatonic scale.

The music Hancock was plotting, like the melody Maupin imagined, drew from the politics of the Watts Riots and Black Nationalism and the counterculture, but also the beat, the one, the groove that made kids want to free their mind and dance.

When the concert let out, Maupin brought his riff idea based on the funky robot back to Hancock at a rehearsal space in Los Angeles, where he fed it to the newly assembled Head Hunters lineup.

Maupin didn’t use the woozy timbre of the bass clarinet but rather the gritty R&B sound of the tenor sax. The upheaval of avant-garde and the donning of funk all poured into “Chameleon,” an indefatigable 15-minute track that staked a new epoch for jazz the minute Hancock plunked out its bassline. Nothing was what it seemed: the bassline was a synth; the guitar-sounding riff was a bass, played by Bay Area funk stylist Paul Jackson in the altissimo register. Hancock plays his clavinet like Hendrix comping time with a wah-wah pedal. The in-demand R&B session drummer Harvey Mason plays in a straight-eighth funk feel, like Clyde Stubblefield did behind James Brown. “Chameleon” slid in and out of the downbeat of ’70s funk, the looseness of cool jazz, the musical modes of R&B, all while drawing upon the rhythms of Anlo-Ewe and Afro-Cuban drumming, black counterculture, and the vanguard of modular synthesizers.

All this blending of traditional instruments and technology, of black American and African sound, was reflected on the album’s cover: Next to Maupin, there’s Jackson holding a Fender bass; Mason clutching a snare; a virtually unknown percussionist from the Bay Area, Bill Summers, holding gourd rattles. Front and center is Hancock, his face covered with something resembling the ritual kple kple mask worn by the Baoulé people of the Ivory Coast—the eyes, however, are radio knobs, and the mouth is a VU meter, an electronic tool for measuring loudness.

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