Herbie Hancock and the band that backed him on the disc that won the album of the year Grammy has announced the first five dates of a U.S. tour that begins June 15 at the Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl.
Hancock will appear with bassist Dave Holland, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta and guitarist Lionel Loueke. Saxophonist Chris Potter is taking Wayne Shorter’s place on the tour. Band will perform at Carnegie Hall on June 23. Cities already booked are Seattle, Vancouver, B.C., and Ottawa, Ontario; East Coast cities are in the process of being booked.

"Nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Hey man, paint 'Starry Night' again.' He painted it and that was it."
- Joni Mitchell retort to a Universal Amphitheater audience on the difference between the performing and visual arts.
Herbie Hancock, whose interpretations of Mitchell's work are up for album of the year, won't get a chance to display those works as he has been saddled with performing George Gershwin on the Grammy telecast. Perhaps that's the price to pay when you make an album that is completely down-tempo and introspective.
Or maybe it is television's way of saying jazz has no place on a network broadcast and the closest we can come is yet another Gershwin "Rhapsody in Blue" performance that will put a piano master, Hancock, and a classical  speed demon, Lang Lang, in a pairing that has "exclusivity" as its promotional tagline. (It will be nice, though, to see our old friend John Mauceri conducting behind them.)
Yet there's an unfortunate paradox here: Hancock is the one name musician in jazz attempting to keep the music moving forward and here he is to returning to work, written eight decades ago, that won him a Grammy nine years ago.  At a time when the Grammys have the opportunity to celebrate an artist, they instead put a genre of music in a cage, ensuring that it's safe for public viewing by looking at a style's history and not using that history as a prism for the future.
Safe performances will also be coming from duets of Fergie and John Legend and Andrea Bocelli and Josh Groban. John Fogerty, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis will pay tribute to rock's history and I'm guessing, make that hoping, they won't be forced to play an Elvis tune.   

Granted he's the ultimate dark horse, but Herbie Hancock could well be the first living musician to win album of the year and not support his album with a full tour since Henry Mancini won in 1958.
The pianist says has been invited to do some shows in the spring and early summer that will include songs he recorded for the Grammy-nominated "River: The Joni Letters," but the shows would also include material from throughout his career.
Beyond that, Hancock is looking at the possibility of the ultimate Joni celebration - Hancock and Mitchell together.
He gets very cagey about the double bill, saying "there's a discussion of the possibility of entertaining the idea of a tour." How's that for vague?
"If that were to happen, all bets are off. There are no conclusions yet but it would be a cool thing to do."
If it were to happen, though, it would likely be outside the U.S. in late summer. Last year, Mitchell released "Shine," her first album of new songs in a decade. Plain and simple, though, Mitchell has avoided touring - with one exception - for more than 20 years.

The long song - a dying art form trampled at various times by the new wave, boy bands beat-driven R&B-pop  - is not about to recapture its early '70s heyday. But in looking back on 2007, particularly the  dramatic concert moments that stick with this listener, it was the lengthy, stretched out numbers that have a lasting impact, most notably Neil Young turning "No Hidden Path" into a 20-minute suite one night at the Nokia and veering close to half an hour the next.
On the surface it seemed like 2007 was a comeback year for long songs - even the Eagles entered that picture -   and a few of my favorite tunes went on much longer than the average pop record. This year's David Gilmour DVD of a London concert, for example, was a splendid celebration of the extended rock piece. 
In creating a top 10 of long songs, the idea was to find pieces that luxuriate in sound and work in a linear fashion with form in mind. It meant crossing off many straight ahead jazz tunes, soundtrack scores and works that were a few verses and a single lengthy solo. No classical  pieces were considered either. And listening to an 18:50 minute version of Jimi Hendrix's "Machine Gun" while writing this reminds me of  how near impossible it is to hold a listener's attention that long unless you are some sort of visionary.
Then came the idea of what constitutes a long song. Suggestions  from friends were as low as 4 minutes, 30 seconds; five minutes seems to be a demarcation for a number of people. I went with seven minutes, 30 seconds. Play a piece that long in concert and people definitely check their watches; put a tune that long on an album and plenty of folks are going to skip over it. (Bizarrely, after I finished this list, I saw that Rolling Stone had posted an all-time list of songs over seven minutes long. They went alphabetical, starting with the Allman Brothers' "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed," one of my all-time favorite instrumentals.)
Also had to stick to recordings released in 2007 and not include any previously issued tracks getting a re-release. Only one of the top 10 tunes comes from a reissue, but the track itself has never been issued. After listening to about three dozen tunes clocking in at more than seven minutes, it was intriguing how many of the more interesting tunes relied on drones and fugues,  a suggestion that the old way might still be the best way.
We start with No. 10.

Herbie Hancock, whose album of Joni Mitchell tunes secured three Grammy noms Thursday, will make his final U.S. performance of the year on Dec. 16 at Royce Hall in Los Angeles, playing at the International Committee of Artists for Peace's Founder's Concert.
He and saxophonist Wayne Shorter has composed an original piece for the event and will be accompanied by Vinnie Colaiuta, Nathan East and the UCLA Wind Orchestra.

With covers albums swamping the release schedule this month, the Set List decided to explore whether anyone has anything positive to say about this discs. First stop was Metacritic, which does a fine job accumulating reviews, assigning a value to the reviewer’s opinion and then producing an average score. The problem was that Metacritic had deciphered data for only one of the albums on my list, Ann Wilson’s “Hope & Glory.” Based on four reviews, they gave it a 79. (That’s a lot higher than I would have given it).
Deciding to take on the data collection myself, suddenly I have new-found respect for what a chore this is. It appears major publications are either cutting way back on CD reviews or hiding them so Google’s search engine won’t discover them until the searcher has gone through four pages of Amazon, cduniverse and Barnes and Noble pages.
While overall it’s a glimmer hope that typing in the word “Tesla” does not yield many results or fan sites, it becomes a bit staggering to think Babyface just doesn’t get his albums reviewed like he did back in the day.
Searching for anything on some of these discs takes you to some rather clueless reviews. One self-appointed typist-critic of New Found Glory’s latest decided a) he didn’t like the songs they selected; b) that he didn’t like the way the songs were performed; and c) admitted that he went in with high expectations. But, he notes, it’s “a good time.” Oy.
Most shocking is how well liked some of these discs were. Have negative reviews become passé?
Barry Manilow’s “Greatest Songs of the Seventies” earned a rave from the BBC that said “For those who love Manilow, this is a must. For those who don’t, this could well be the disc to make them change their minds.” The Boston Herald said  his singing is “more impassioned” than ever.
Chaka Khan’s “Funk This” got two thumbs up from Robert Christgau at Rolling Stone and Mark Edward Nero’s Guide to R&B. The dean of rock criticism noted: “Chaka Khan has never bothered with great albums because she has such a great voice -- juicy, airy, spunky, transported. Though she's 54, it's also unfrayed, one reason this committed if never classic comeback makes its mark.”
“Playlist,” a collection of 1970s singer-songwriter material from Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds , finds Entertainment Weekly noting that he can take bland or treacly material and “render it superior to the original with delicate or atypical phrasing plus sheer commitment.” They loved his take on Bob Dylan's ''Knockin' on Heaven's Door''; disliked Jim Croce's “'Time in a Bottle.”
Herbie Hancock has released a tribute to Joni Mitchell titled “River: The Joni Letters.” New York magazine called it “a success”; the L.A. Times called Hancock “interpreter (who) really grasps the key to Mitchell's genius”; and the Boston Phoenix was impressed with his  “languid, meditative takes on the Mitchell songbook.”
The soundtrack to “Across the Universe” —  actors and Bono singing Beatles songs — received an indifferent review from the L.A. Times. “Even with many inviting arrangements and inventive production work from T Bone Burnett and Elliot Goldenthal, the Lennon-McCartney and Harrison songs too often wind up in nowhere land.”
The two-CD  “Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino” features a multitude of artists who got allmusicguide.com to rave: “Just how loved Fats Domino is by the music community is borne out by the A-list names who've contributed to one of the more remarkable tribute albums to surface in recent years.”
The Boston Globe uses words such as “fizzy,” “zippy,” “sultry” and “sassy” in a complimentary assessment of  “Trav'lin' Light” by Queen Latifah.
No publication or website has published anything on “Real to Reel Vol. 2” by Tesla or Boyz II Men’s “Motown: A Journey Through Hitsville USA.”
But as covers go, will any of them endiure or even compare with this?