Herbie Hancock still vividly recalls the night, 51 years ago, when the Pointer Sisters skated circles around him.

“We came up and played our weird stuff, and when they came out, they were wearing roller skates,” he said in a video interview in June, recalling a show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, California. “The audience went insane.”

That humbling experience in the spring of 1973 sparked a major change in Hancock’s thinking. After establishing himself as one of the leading jazz pianists of the ’60s, he had embraced electric keyboards and homed in on the so-called weird stuff with the Mwandishi band, a sextet that was both fearlessly exploratory and largely oblivious to the tastes of the average listener.

“We need to learn from them,” he remembered thinking of the Pointers. “Maybe there’s something that can emerge from us that would work for a young audience.”

By the early fall, he had disbanded Mwandishi and was busy writing and recording with a new quintet, informed as much by contemporary funk leaders like Sly and the Family Stone as cutting-edge jazz. When the group ventured to clubs around the Bay Area to test out its in-progress material, “People went nuts,” Hancock said, beaming at the memory. “They were all dancing, and they loved it, and it just blew our minds.”

The resulting album, “Head Hunters,” released in October 1973, would be pivotal both for Hancock and for jazz. Peaking at No. 13 on the Billboard 200, it later went platinum, yielded a Top 20 R&B hit in the monstrously grooving “Chameleon” and leveled up Hancock’s concerts into arenas, proving definitively that jazz could make a significant impact on the modern pop mainstream. No instrumental jazz release since has made a bigger bang.

On Aug. 14, Hancock will commemorate the monumental “Head Hunters” legacy at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles with a rare retrospective show loosely timed to the album’s 50th anniversary. Unlike a brief late ’90s reunion, this one will feature all of the surviving musicians from the original album: woodwind player Bennie Maupin, percussionist Bill Summers and drummer Harvey Mason, with renowned bassist Marcus Miller subbing in for Paul Jackson, who died in 2021.

For Hancock, now 84, the show is a chance to celebrate an album that he said “changed my world” with a level of success that came as a “complete shock.” For those the album has affected, the reunion is an opportunity to toast a singular American classic and its uncanny reach.

“All I can say is: wow,” said multi-instrumentalist and producer Terrace Martin, who has worked with Hancock and played a key role in Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly,” arguably the 21st century’s definitive jazz-adjacent pop triumph. “It’s happening, and I’m alive to see it happen.”

In a phone interview from a tour stop in Marseille, France, Miller said he’d felt an immediate thrill when Hancock called him around six months ago and floated the “Head Hunters” reunion. “That’s just kind of like seeing the Beatles get back together,” he said. The bassist, 65, had absorbed the album while growing up in New York City’s Queens borough. “The kids in my hood, they were playing ‘Head Hunters’ at the block parties,” he recalled, where the typical soundtrack included acts like Parliament, War and Kool & the Gang. “Herbie’s records got played right in there.”

Trumpeter and genre-spanning composer Terence Blanchard, 62, a frequent Hancock collaborator who will appear with him at the Hollywood Bowl in a separate set, recalled the impact of first hearing “Head Hunters” in high school. “It blew me away because prior to that, we hadn’t heard anything coming from the R&B world that had that sophistication of the jazz harmonic legacy,” he said.

Hancock, leaning back on a couch in his Los Angeles home in a spiffy checkered button-up and his signature rectangular tinted glasses, said he’d wanted to make a funky album: “I’m from Chicago — that’s part of my own personal heritage. I used to sing the doo-wop songs and listen to the Five Thrills and all that when I was a younger kid in high school. And so I said, ‘Well, let me bring up some of my own ethnic stuff.’”

Crucially, the original “Head Hunters” lineup wasn’t simply a funk outfit. Hancock brought his considerable jazz know-how, as did Maupin, the sole holdover from the Mwandishi band, while Mason had already established himself on the pop scene, playing sessions in Los Angeles and touring with Carole King. Summers was studying ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley, when he met Hancock. The percussionist introduced one of the band’s signature ingredients when he adapted a technique called “hindewhu” — a combination of singing and whistle-playing that he had heard on an album of Central African field recordings — into an unshakable hook that led off the quintet’s new arrangement of “Watermelon Man,” an early ’60s Hancock tune made famous by Mongo Santamaría.

“It was such a mystical sound that I had to learn how to do it,” Summers said in a phone interview. (Lacking an instrument that was pitched correctly, he improvised a replacement that he still employs today: a beer bottle filled with water.)

The musicians are quick to credit the contributions of their late bassist. “Hands-down, Paul Jackson was the slam-dunker,” Summers said. “He was the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of the band.” Maupin said Jackson “brought the funk” and “put the feeling on it, and all we had to do was just go with the flow.” When asked about the signature hiccuping beat he plays on “Chameleon,” Mason also deferred to Jackson: “It was derived from what the bass was playing.”

That track, with its unshakable ARP Odyssey vamp and bright, tenor-saxophone-led fanfare, helped usher along a breakthrough. “‘Chameleon’ was played on R&B radio, and I think the tune is like 15 minutes long,” Summers said, still sounding incredulous. “And it was the first time in my life that I heard that kind of music played on a popular format.”

Even as it brought in a flood of new listeners, Hancock’s aesthetic shift riled jazz purists. Reviewing a 1976 Hancock performance that featured a rendition of “Chameleon,” New York Times critic John Rockwell wrote that the artist’s funk direction “will no doubt continue to sell lots of records, but in a way that doesn’t seem to do justice either to Mr. Hancock’s jazz potential or to the best of what he might offer the world of popular music.”

Maupin said that the group “drew a lot of heat,” recalling returning to Paris after an earlier, well-received show there with Mwandishi: “When we went back with the funk, they threw [expletive] at us. They threw apple cores and toilet paper rolls and all kinds of stuff.”

Hancock laughed as he recalled the backlash from certain corners. “People that we now call the jazz police — and many of them were writers, critics — they just said I was a sellout,” he said.

For listeners like a young Miller, the immediacy of the music was all that mattered. “I was 13,” he said. “I didn’t need a damn critic to tell me about ‘Head Hunters.’”

The album’s success freed up Hancock to follow his restless creative spirit, whether that meant incorporating DJ scratching into his 1983 hit “Rockit” or interpreting the work of his longtime friend Joni Mitchell on the Grammy-winning 2007 LP “River: The Joni Letters.”

And for subsequent generations, “Head Hunters” has remained a shining example of how to break out of genre-based strictures. Growing up studying saxophone, Martin, now 45, felt that it was “kind of sacrilegious” to play anything other than straight-ahead jazz. But hearing “Head Hunters,” he said, “I saw it was OK to make people dance. It was OK to get hit records and still play your ass off. It was OK to be this upper-echelon artiste but to come party and hang out, have a good time, and smile and make others feel good.”

All the musicians are looking forward to tapping into that celebratory feeling at the Hollywood Bowl, but the show will be extra special for Mason, who bowed out of Hancock’s group after recording the album because of his studio commitments. “It’ll be fun to play the music and see where it goes,” he said, “and see the acceptance of the people, which I never got to see.”

The original group dissolved around the mid-’70s as Hancock moved on to other projects, but along with drummer Mike Clark, Mason’s hard-grooving replacement, Summers has consistently held down a version of the band in the studio and on the road. “Believe me: Everybody will be there, including Oprah,” he said with a laugh of the coming concert.

Even though the arrangements for the show will stick close to the original album, Hancock seems enthused by the potential for surprise. “I don’t know what’s going to happen: I mean, we’re all older gentlemen now,” he said with a chuckle. But as he reflected on the “Head Hunters” legacy, what came through most was the satisfaction of following his instincts and ultimately outlasting his detractors — yes, even the jazz police.

He recounted a time when Leonard Feather, the prominent critic, who had reviewed “Head Hunters” poorly upon its release, approached him backstage at a jazz festival. “He said to me, ‘Here’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a while.’ He said, ‘I remember with your “Head Hunters” record,’ he said, ‘I only gave you two stars,’” Hancock recalled. “‘I was wrong.’ I had never, ever heard a critic do that before.”

The gesture stuck with Hancock. “I was thinking, Wow, Leonard Feather just apologized to me. It’s hard to believe, but that was a real thanks, for him to acknowledge what I had done,” he continued, “and the path that I had taken.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.