Hancock, Herbie

HERBIE HANCOCK

Born: Chicago, Illinois, 12 April 1940

Genre: Jazz, Fusion, Electronica

Best-selling album since 1990: Gershwin's World (1998)

Keyboardist Herbie Hancock has the past, present, and future much on his mind. Since 1990 he has reimagined the pre–World War II contexts of George Gershwin, revisited the 1960s jazz of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, kept up with hip-hop rhythms, turntable disc jockeys, and the latest keyboard technology, and looked for new standards among popular songs of rock, pop, and soul genres.

Hancock has the experience to justify such a range of interests. A piano prodigy who performed a Mozart concerto movement with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age eleven and had his own high school jazz band, Hancock studied electrical engineering at Grinnell College in Iowa before switching to composition. He left school in 1960, one course short of graduation, to accompany saxophonist Coleman Hawkins in a Chicago engagement. By 1962 he was in New York City with a contract from Blue Note Records, and with challenging work as a pianist for avant-garde reeds player Eric Dolphy.

Hancock is as accessible as he is advanced. He had his first hit song almost by accident with the gospel-inflected "Watermelon Man" (1963), covered by Afro-Cuban congero Mongo Santamaria. Besides leading his own albums, he was the highly regarded house pianist of the Blue Note label through 1968, recording with trumpeters Donald Byrd, Lee Morgan, and Freddie Hubbard; saxophonists Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Sam Rivers, and Wayne Shorter; vibist Bobby Hutcherson; guitarist Grant Green; and drummers Billy Higgins and Elvin Jones. In 1963 Hancock joined Miles Davis's quintet. With bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams, he developed a jazz rhythm section concept that was elastic in regard to time and dynamics.

At Davis's direction, Hancock became the first musician in jazz to adapt electric pianos to regular stage performance and was the keyboard anchor of the electric jazz revolution. In 1969 Hancock converted his acoustic octet into an electrically amplified and processed band—Mwandishi—in which he employed the most advanced electric synthesizers and keyboards as they evolved. Hancock had his first crossover fusion hit with "Chameleon" introduced by his band Headhunters (their debut self-titled recording was the first jazz album to sell platinum). Hancock was also the first fusion star to reassert his straight-ahead acoustic background with fellow refugees from Davis-inspired amplification—Carter, Williams, and Shorter—in the quintet V.S.O.P., from 1976 to 1979.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Hancock kept a hand in two camps, as street-smart future funkster, recording the breakthrough hip-hop hit "Rockit," as well as acoustic trio albums, in large part for Japanese and European markets. He hosted two television series: Rock School, a music education program on Public Broadcasting Service, and cable network Showtime's Coast to Coast, featuring in-concert performances and interviews. He won an Academy Award for Round Midnight (1986), excelling at the soundtrack sideline he began with Michelangelo Antonioni's counterculture film Blow-Up (1966).

Hancock has won eight Grammy Awards, including Best Instrumental Jazz Performance, Individual or Group for A Tribute to Miles (1994), and Best Traditional Jazz Album for Gershwin's World (1998). In that project, Hancock, with Shorter, Chick Corea, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Kathleen Battle, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, interprets Gershwin's Roaring 1920s and depression-era milieu.

Hancock's works have been endlessly sampled and licensed. "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)" from the British turntablists US3 became a Top 20 radio success on the basis of thirty-five signature seconds of Hancock's composition and recording of "Cantaloupe Island" (1964). Rather than be historified by younger musicians, Hancock rejoined the fray, producing Dis Is Da Drum (1994), a disappointing release that wore its electronic percussion and street credibility too heavily. He followed with a contrasting tack, The New Standard (1995), for which he convened an all-star band to perform repertoire associated with pop songs from the 1970s through the 1990s. This album was better received—one track, "Manhattan (Island of Lights and Love)," won a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition—and it gave rise to Hancock's Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall (2002), a collaboration with saxophonist Michael Brecker and trumpeter Roy Hargrove. True to form, between those albums Hancock released an austere program of spontaneous duets with Shorter, 1+1 (1997). After Directions in Music he and Bill Laswell produced another electro-jazz-pop-fusion effort, Future2Future (2001).

In a project co-sponsored by Berklee College of Music, he has been a Distinguished Artist in Residence at Jazz Aspen Snowmass (Colorado) since 1991, mentoring promising young jazz musicians selected from worldwide applicants. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Thelonious Monk Institute, and established his Rhythm of Life Foundation in 1996, aiming to "narrow the gap between those technologically empowered and those who are not; and to find ways to help technology improve humanity." Hancock is a full partner in Transparent Music, a multimedia company that produced his concert DVD, even while he records larger projects under contract with Universal Music/Verve. Whether interpreting the past or doing something new in the present, Hancock contributes to jazz's future.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Takin' Off (Blue Note, 1962); Maiden Voyage (Blue Note, 1965); Head-hunters (Columbia, 1973); V.S.O.P. (Columbia, 1977); Future Shock (Columbia, 1983); Mwandishi: The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (Warner Bros., 1994); A Tribute to Miles (Qwest, 1994); Dis Is Da Drum (Mercury, 1994); 1+1 (Verve, 1997); Gershwin's World (1998); Future2Future (Transparent, 2001); The Herbie Hancock Box (Columbia, 2002). With Michael Brecker and Roy Hargrove: Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall (Verve, 2002). With Miles Davis: E.S.P. (Columbia, 1965); Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970). Soundtracks: Blow-Up (MGM, 1966); Death Wish (One Way, 1974); Round Midnight (Columbia, 1986).

WEBSITE:

www.herbiehancock.com.

howard mandel