The year was 1971. I was barely out of my teens and listened to nothin’ but rock’n’roll. I had no idea who Herbie Hancock was and never listened to jazz. My ears were filled Surf’s Up by The Beach Boys, Rory Gallagher’s Deuce, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, John Lennon’s Imagine, Fragile by Yes, Sticky Fingers by the Stones, George Harrison’s Concert For Bengladesh, The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys by Traffic, The Allman Brothers Band At Fillmore East, T-Rex’s Electric Warrior, Led Zeppelin IV, Who’s Next, L.A. Woman by The Doors, McCartney’s Ram, Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells A Story, Alice Cooper’s Killer, Santana III, Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Schmilsson, Emerson Lake & Palmer’s Tarkus, Deep Purple’s Fireball, Elton John’s Madman Across The Water, Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey, and those are just a few of the albums released in ’71!

I don’t know how Mwandishi, Herbie Hancock’s ninth album, reached me, but it changed the course of my music listening life. It was like nothing I had ever heard before. In fact, nobody, even those into jazz, had ever heard anything like it before…because nothing like it had ever been recorded before! Hancock’s brilliant mix of mystery, funk, world-music, jazz and soul like a soundtrack to a movie that didn’t exist, was, in a word, otherworldly, hallucinogenic and certainly THC-friendly. I played it over and over, wearing out that vinyl until it started skipping and I had to buy it again. That one album led me to the likes of Return To Forever, Weather Report, The Mahavishnu Orchestra and, ultimately, Miles, Monk and Mingus.

The Mwandishi rhythm section was bassist Buster Williams and drummer Billy Hart. I never bothered to find out where they were from. At the time, who cared? Williams is now 83 and living in Teaneck. Hart is now 84 and living in Montclair. They’ve since played with the biggest and the best. (Our “Jersey History” section this month goes a little deeper into the Williams oeuvre.) When I told my cousin, Marla Kleman (who books the hippest jazz room in Boston, Sculler’s), my plan, she casually said, “do you want me to give you Buster’s phone number?”

From an octogenarian to a teenager: Our “Up-Close” this issue is another music industry veteran, well, not quite yet, but 13-year old rapper Myzz-London, born in Hackensack, appeared in The Jersey Sound documentary when she was nine, performing a song, “Ice Cream,” she wrote when she was eight.

Elsewhere, one of my musical heroes, Steve Earle, cracks “The Hot 100.” You’ll meet Princeton band Strawberry Milk, and read about the memoir of longtime Asbury Park resident Wayne B. Olivieri, who toiled in the New Jersey club scene for years. Check the “Calendar,” the “Events,” “Visual Sound”—with clips of My Chemical Romance (Essex County), country singer Clint Black (Monmouth County), Rick Nelson and Squanderers (Bergen County) plus my latest crush, Annabelle Chairlegs (Hudson County).