When the commercial failure of the brilliant Sextant left Herbie Hancock disillusioned with floating around in the cosmic-jazz exosphere, the jazz great pulled off the unusual coup of aiming for a more commercial sound and, in Head Hunters, finding every bit as much creative freedom in it as he did with the experimental stuff. This new sound was such a smash that the namesake group he assembled to help him realize his not-exactly-compromised vision of funky synthesized fusion broke out on their own, carrying over circa-Thrust core members Bill Summers (percussion), Paul Jackson (bass, or more accurately BASS~!), Mike Clark (drums and, two decades later, every hip-hop producer’s MPC), and Bennie Maupin (damn near everything else). If all this album was good for was sample fodder, it’d still be the greatest sample-fodder album ever recorded — but its almost toying-with-you knack for taking funk vamps into incredibly strange places gives away the game that maybe these guys weren’t too far from the outer reaches of the cosmos themselves. Bookends “God Make Me Funky” and “If You’ve Got It, You’ll Get It” are the best jams the J.B.’s never cut, and the other highlights — run through with burbling, metamorphosing tension like “Rima” and “Here and Now”  — are the best jams nobody else could’ve cut.