Library Album
Sextant
Herbie Hancock's 1973 album, the Mwandishi sextet's densest electronic fusion, built around Patrick Gleeson's ARP 2600.
Released on Columbia in 1973 and recorded at Wally Heider’s and Different Fur Trading Co. in San Francisco, Sextant is the last and most electronically dense studio album by Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi sextet before it disbanded. Patrick Gleeson, hired as a synthesizer technician on the previous album Crossings (1972), returned on ARP 2600, threading modular synthesis through Hancock’s electric piano, clavinet, and Mellotron across three long, loosely structured pieces (“Rain Dance,” “Hidden Shadows,” “Hornets”). The album is a high-water mark for synthesizer integration into acoustic jazz performance practice in the early 1970s, predating Hancock’s later, more song-based electronic work on Sunlight (1978) and Future Shock (1983).