Hancock relishes challenge of playing music
Herbie Hancock At: Edmonton International Jazz Festival Where: Winspear Centre When: Thursday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $64.45 – $85.45 from the Winspear box office (780428-1414 or winspearcentre.com) Making music is a multi-faceted endeavour which very few people ever get completely right. Real artists aren’t always adept entertainers, while stage personas sometimes stand in for a lack of talent.
At 73, Herbie Hancock is one of those rare humans who seems to have it all.
Few musicians in modern times have straddled and coled innovations over such a range of musical styles — from helping to define post-bop jazz with Miles Davis in the 1960s, excursions into the avantgarde, setting a new definition of funk with his Headhunters band in the 1970s, charting a No. 1 hip-hop hit with Rockit in 1984, creating the Oscarwinning soundtrack for the film Round Midnight, interpreting Gershwin with the likes of Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell, and tapping the possibilities of pop and global music collaborations and performing contemporary classical works with orchestras.
The author of tunes like Maiden Voyage, Cantaloupe Island and Chameleon has a sense of charm tempered only by his innate style, humility and erudite speech.
It’s no fluke that Hancock was only the second bonafide jazz artist to win the Album of the Year Grammy, for his 2007 release River, a tribute to friend Joni Mitchell (he has won 14 Grammys in all).
“It was a shock, but of course I was extremely happy about that and I think Joni was thrilled too,” he says. “She is so amazingly talented as a lyricist, a poet, a musical craftsperson, and then a visual artist.”
How does the music master explain his own broad-based success?
A stable personal life might have something to do with it. Hancock spoke on the phone from the West Hollywood home he has owned since 1972, the home he shares with Gigi, his wife of 45 years.
Then there’s his spiritual life, long centred in the Nichiren sect of Buddhism. But music has clearly been a driving force, ever since he made his stage debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performing a Mozart piano concerto at age 11.
“I think what’s happened to me has been a combination of fate, deliberation and a lot of hard work. And certainly opportunities came my way in a lot of different forms — like the opportunity to play with Miles Davis’s band and to work with a lot of other great musicians.”
While the man’s creative energies show little sign of abating in his senior years, he has taken on new responsibilities, as a goodwill ambassador for UNESCO, and as an educator for the Thelonious Monk Institute at UCLA and next year, at Boston’s Harvard University.
Could there be a better ambassador for music in general and jazz in particular?
The UNESCO work led to Hancock’s part in spearheading International Jazz Day (April 30), which he just helped celebrate for the second year in a netcast from Istanbul, Turkey.
“It gives me a formal, global platform to promote one of the great virtues of jazz, that it brings people of various cultures together.”
His last album The Imagine Project (2010, Sony Music) had the broadest scope yet, bringing together musicians from five continents and even more disparate traditions, from Derek Trucks, Jeff Beck, Pink and Anoushka Shankar to Tinariwen, Los Lobos and The Chieftains, collaborating on various covers that started with John Lennon’s anthem for peace.
“We live in a difficult world, a threatening world from many standpoints that’s constantly changing. Human beings need to pay attention to some areas that we’ve been sleeping on, like taking care of the planet, and each other. It’s insane and egotistical. We’re sitting here in the middle of the universe like these little flies in the ointment, killing each other. I believe we’re here to help each other. That’s kind of the message behind what I do musically, and for UNESCO, and as a human being living on the planet.”
But at the root of it all, you sense there are few things Hancock relishes more than sitting down with his quartet to make music in the moment. “It’s one of my favourite challenges. If I’m playing music and it’s not a challenge, it means I’m not working hard enough.”
Following the lessons of his past bosses, Hancock’s current band features players who are at least a generation younger than him, all the better to facilitate his fearless energy level. Veteran bassist James Genus has been with him several years, while guitarist Lionel Louecke and drummer Jonathan Pinson are both talents he discovered through his work with the Monk Institute. Pinson, just in his mid-20s, is still attending the jazz school.
“If I’m playing and it’s not a challenge, I’m not working hard enough.”
Herbie Hancock
“He’s an amazing player. We’ve been indoctrinating him into the flow and of course making our own adjustments for him as the new drummer in this collaboration. We’re still discovering each other. I’m excited to play with him and see what happens.” Their trip across Canada will be Pinson’s first full tour with Hancock.
This tour could involve quite a mixed bag, touching on a few eras of Hancock’s vast career.
“We’ll have a set list. We’re gonna rehearse and figure out the game plan. There will be a few of the favourites, but when I play tunes like Maiden Voyage now, it’s usually just on solo piano. I’m going to be using acoustic piano and synthesizer, and what’s being called the keytar, a portable wireless keyboard. I’ve also started to reincorporate the vocoder. We’ll see how that goes.”
The vocoder is something he first used back on his 1978 album Sunlight, an electronic device that can transpose notes on a synthesizer to fit vocal inflections. Long before the advent of the auto-tuner, Hancock — who admits he’s not a great natural singer — used it to integrate words into his funk tunes.
In fact, Hancock was a real pioneer in bringing electric instruments into jazz. He still recalls the first time he was asked to sit down at an electric keyboard by his then-boss Miles Davis in 1967.
“I had heard about the Fender Rhodes electric piano and musicians were saying derogatory things about it. I just fell into that even though I had never played one. So when I went into the studio to make this record with Miles, I didn’t see an acoustic piano and I said, ‘What do you want me to play?’ and he points to the corner to the Fender Rhodes. I said OK, thinking, ‘He wants me to play this toy.’ But I turned it on and played this chord and it sounded nice. I liked the sound of it. I was shocked. I learned a big lesson that day that served me well long afterwards; that is, don’t take the opinions of others as gospel until you check things out for yourself.”
Hancock had already done his first solo album Takin’ Off before he joined the Miles Davis Quintet in 1963. He acknowledges the late trumpeter had a huge impact on his career.
“Miles was very much a fighter, a courageous man who really stood up for the core of what jazz is all about, to invent and explore, and to have the courage to try things you haven’t tried before and not just rest on the things you know are easy for you, to explore new territory in front of a live audience. And that applies to life. We need to have the courage to explore and get out into new avenues, in my case, outside of music. To become more of a citizen and a human being, to improve your life as a human being.”