The musician sits on his patio in the southern California sun, his broad smile revealing an engaging personal warmth and a triumph of American dentistry. This is 84-year-old musical catalyst Herbie Hancock at his ease, among the last of his jazz generation but also in the vanguard of synthesiser-driven jazz-rock and hip-hop-influenced electrofunk.
Ahead of his US and Canadian dates before New Zealand, Australia and home by way of China, you have to ask impertinently, why at his age would he want to still tour?
“Well, it makes it possible for me to pay my bills,” he laughs.
To which we might say, “Yeah, riiight.” In addition to all that jazz and beyond, the legendary Hancock has video masterclass teaching sessions at the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance and UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Jazz.
The man with 14 Grammys (plus numerous other awards and accolades) has also worked with Joni Mitchell, John Legend, Seal, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Tina Turner, Carlos Santana and others from the pop-rock end of the spectrum.
When it’s suggested that surely anyone would take his call, he looks almost bashful, laughs and simply says, “Thank you.”
In a career punctuated by many seminal moments, we go back to the beginning for Hancock, who was classically trained on piano and played with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when he was 11.
He recalls the first time he stepped away from formal training and onto a bandstand. “That was a long time ago,” he says, “but I played at a YWCA. A group of young Japanese-American women hired this band and I got the gig from a clarinet player in the dance band of the high school. I wasn’t in his band, I was in the orchestra. He called me to do this job … and that was what got my juices flowing.”
The anecdote offers something emblematic of Hancock’s subsequent career: the willingness to grab an opportunity, move out of the familiar and accept a challenge.
As much as the classical tradition, he grew up on Frank Sinatra, close harmony doo-wop groups and jazz pianists such as Bill Evans and George Shearing. He formally studied composition in New York. At 22, he had his debut album, Takin’ Off, released on the prestigious Blue Note label – it sprang one of his signature tunes Watermelon Man – and, at 23, he was asked by Miles Davis to join what became Davis’s Second Great Quintet.
The quintet carried the banner for sophisticated, complex jazz in the 1960s when young people were being drawn to pop and rock and the jazz audience was in decline. He says, “Miles was a genius and his musical reach was so extensive. Even though it was very challenging working with him, they were the top musicians: Ron Carter on bass, first George Coleman then Wayne Shorter on tenor and soprano sax, and Tony Williams, a really young drummer when he joined. But he changed drumming for all jazz drummers.
“Playing with musicians of that calibre was like putting lightning under me.”
Hancock acknowledges the genius of Davis, but draws a line between the musician and the man who could be volatile, violent towards women and had drug habits. It wasn’t until Hancock wrote his 2014 autobiography, Herbie Hancock: Possibilities, that it was revealed he had his own problems with cocaine before entering rehab in 1999.
The key trait Hancock shared with Davis, however – evident in that YWCA experience – was musical curiosity and a willingness to risk a new direction.
In the 70s, Hancock’s innovative group The Headhunters alienated conservative jazz listeners with their use of electronic keyboards, but were a commercial success with an audience attuned to jazz-rock that brought in the funk.
Ironically, one of the people in his 1981 acoustic band was the young trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who came in when Freddie Hubbard couldn’t make the tour. Marsalis would be loudly dismissive of jazz fusion and electro funk.
“Yeah, we had conversations, difficult ones, sometimes,” Hancock laughs. “But he and his brother Branford listened to The Headhunters band, he had the records. I hadn’t heard of him. He sent me a CD and there he was with a jazz group and playing a double trumpet concerto with his teacher and the New Orleans Symphony.
“He was a kid, but he played with such command of the instrument and such surety he could stand on his own two feet.”
In 1983, the ever-searching Hancock tapped the zeitgeist of hip-hop for his electro-rock album Future Shock, springing the MTV hit Rockit, which featured scratching.
Through exploring new idioms and technologies, offering opportunities to the likes of the young Marsalis and others, mentoring and teaching, Hancock carried the project of jazz into the future.
The band on his tour includes the great trumpeter Terence Blanchard (artistic director at Hancock’s Institute of Jazz) and his long-time guitarist from Benin, Lionel Loueke, who he mentored.
In a busy life, Hancock also found time early in his career for film scores. His first was for Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960s cult film Blowup (best remembered for The Yardbirds in a London club where Jeff Beck smashes his guitar). In 1974, he scored the soundtrack to Death Wish, and he wrote the Academy Award-winning music to the 1986 jazz film Round Midnight, in which he also acted.
The challenge with soundtracks, he says, is working with the visual creatives, “so it’s not like doing a record. There are more instruments and they’re not musical instruments, they are spoken word and emotions done from what the storyboard is. There’s also the possibility of hiring an orchestra,” he says, with obvious delight.
And the quest has continued: his 1996 album The New Standard explored songs by Nirvana, Prince, The Eagles, Peter Gabriel, Steely Dan and others; there was a 1998 album of Gershwin tunes; for River: The Joni Letters in 2007 – which won two Grammys – he undertook the music of his long-time friend Mitchell with stellar guest vocalists (Tina Turner, Norah Jones and others); 2010′s The Imagine Project (another Grammy, his last recording) had an impressive cast of world music players on material by John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke and Bob Marley.
“It’s a global outreach and I’ve worked with musicians from all over the planet in forms they’re not necessarily known for. I’ve even changed the arrangements of some of their more popular songs and put a whole new spin on them. For me, it’s an opportunity to work with great people, but at the same time, it’s an interesting challenge to put a spin on music they perhaps recorded. I love doing it.”
Herbie Hancock – a diligent Buddhist since the early 1970s – is among the few of his generation still playing: Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter and most recently keyboard player Chick Corea are all gone. But the road still beckons, so it’s not just about paying the bills.
“No, it’s a privilege to be able to express myself with a great band and to play music I’ve written or they’ve written. Each night, we get a chance to rewrite those through improvisation. And we’re doing it for an audience of hopefully adoring fans. There’s nothing like it.”
Herbie Hancock and his band play the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Aotea Centre, Auckland, October 8, 7pm; Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, October 9, 8pm.
