"Cantaloupe Island" (Herbie Hancock)

You can't help but admire Herbie Hancock as an artist.  
He was a child prodigy who, by age 10, could play any classical piece anyone threw at him.  Then he became famous playing with Miles Davis in the early 1960s, making a name for himself by combining a feel for the blues with his ear for classical composition.  Then, as Davis nudged him toward the Fender rhodes in the late 60s, Hancock went full-on into tha Funk before reinventing himself yet again as an R&B futurist/hip-hopper.
Anyway, as much as I appreciate his "gather no moss" work ethic, I still enjoy his early post-bop stuff.  It's still so inventive, fluid, and rhythmically complex.  
I especially love the song "Cantaloupe Island" from the album Empyrean Isles (1964).  It has this great syncopated groove that tugs at your ear, making you think it might not be in straight 4, even though it is.  That running Latin-tinged riff throughout also lays down a foundation that allows cornettist Freddie Hubbard to play the melody straight or go off exploring wherever he wants.  That little repeating pattern gets etched in your brain so that, when Hancock goes off and solos and is only playing the skeleton of the riff with his left hand, you think you still hear it.  The presence of it is still there, even though the foundation is only being held up by Ron Carter and Anthony Williams on bass and drums.  
It's genius.
Like most people my age, I discovered the song via Us3's "Cantaloop," which sampled Hancock's core piano riff.  At the time (1993), I couldn't get enough of "Cantaloop" and its pastiche of samples that were cobbled together from various Blue Note Records sides.  But as time went on, its novelty wore thin.  In hindsight, the verse by the MC (who can even remember the dude's name?) wasn't that great.  The sampling paled in comparison to the kind of mind bending stuff that Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Pete Rock were doing at the same time, even though they were sampling some of the same jazz records as Us3.
But that "Cantaloupe Island" riff stuck with me.  It's the kind of thing that I'd find myself humming or playing on the piano to warm up my fingers.  "Cantaloupe Island" also was the gateway to me searching for the sources of the crazy jazz samples I heard on A Tribe Called Quest/Gang Starr/De La Soul/Digable Planets/etc records and buying up tons of jazz recordings from the 1950s-70s in turn.