Celebrating Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters & Santana-McLaughlin’s Love Devotion Surrender

As part of the 2023 Philly Music Fest, Ars Nova Workshop celebrates the 50th anniversary of two landmark albums that expanded the boundaries of jazz fusion: Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters and the Carlos Santana / John McLaughlin collaboration Love Devotion Surrender.

Two of Philadelphia’s most genre-defiant artists will share a bill that looks back to 1973, at a pair of landmark albums that helped lay the foundations for the next half-century of stylistic hybridization. Drummer Charlie Hall of The War on Drugs will perform the music of Herbie Hancock’s psych-funk masterpiece Head Hunters with a band of Philly all-stars including bassist Anthony Tidd. Guitar wizard Chris Forsyth will delve into the spiritual jazz-rock alchemized by the meeting of Santana and The Mahavishnu Orchestra on Love Devotion Surrender, leading a band that includes guitarist Nick Millevoi, bassist Douglas McCombs, drummer Ryan Jewell and percussionist Mikel Patrick Avery. An avowed Miles Davis fanatic, Hall has previously ventured into the trumpet icon’s fusion era with recreations of In a Silent Way, Jack Johnson and On the Corner. Both Hancock and McLaughlin took Miles’ electric innovations in wildly disparate directions with their own projects, the legacy of which is ripe for exploration at the hands of these dauntless musicians.