The highlight of Sonoma Jazz+ so far has to be Herbie Hancock’s globe-trotting, mind-blowing set under the tent last night.

Digging back into the catalog for classics like “Cantaloupe Island” and “Watermelon Man” and pulling from the recent Grammy-winning “River: The Joni Letters,” the dude was on fire.

photo: Kopol Bonick Studio/dkbphoto.com

He was also in a super chatty mood: Introducing West African guitarist Lionel Loueke, he reached way back to the early roots of jazz: “He’s not from here. He’s from a country that invented the music that came over here. Right? Well we invented our end of it. But it had to start somewhere and it didn’t start here.”

In explaining how the band was planning to warp to light speed by cutting up “Watermelon Man” with crazy 17-beat measures, he had to make sure the crowd was with him:
“Did you have enough wine to be able to accept this? This is the Wine Country after all.”

Marcus Miller got his groove on bass and Loueke had his moments on West African guitar, but it was harpist Gregoire Maret who ran away with the solos – rapid-fire runs thinning out into ethereal stretches, wah-wah squawk-box chirps melting into rich molasses tones.

“I’ve never heard anybody play harmonica like this,” Hancock warned the crowd when he introduced the 33-year-old Swissman.

Me neither (all apologies to my friend Charlie Musselwhite).

The highlight for me had to be when Hancock tapped a funky vein and busted out the Keytar, trading solos with Maret on “Watermelon Man.”

Watch it and weep: