Herbie Hancock will always be one of the most revered and controversial figures in
jazz -- just as his employer/mentor
Miles Davis was when he was alive. Unlike
Miles, who pressed ahead relentlessly and never looked back until near the very end,
Hancock has cut a zigzagging forward path, shuttling between almost every development in electronic and acoustic
jazz and
R&B over the last third of the 20th century. Though grounded in
Bill Evans and able to absorb
blues,
funk,
gospel, and even modern
classical influences,
Hancock's piano and keyboard voices are entirely his own, with their own urbane harmonic and complex, earthy rhythmic signatures -- and young pianists cop his licks constantly.
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Having studied engineering and professing to love gadgets and buttons,
Hancock was perfectly suited for the electronic age; he was one of the earliest champions of the Rhodes electric piano and Hohner clavinet and would field an ever-growing collection of synthesizers and computers on his electric dates. Yet his love for the grand piano never waned, and despite his peripatetic activities all around the musical map, his piano style continues to evolve into tougher, ever-more-complex forms. He is as much at home trading riffs with a smoking
funk band as he is communing with a world-class
post-bop rhythm section -- and that drives purists on both sides of the fence up the wall.
Having taken up the piano at age seven,
Hancock quickly became known as a prodigy, soloing in the first movement of a Mozart piano concerto with
the Chicago Symphony at the age of 11. After studies at Grinnell College,
Hancock was invited by
Donald Byrd in 1961 to join his group in New York City, and before long, Blue Note offered him a solo contract. His debut album,
Takin' Off, took off indeed after
Mongo Santamaria covered one of the album's songs, "Watermelon Man." In May 1963,
Miles Davis asked him to join his band in time for the
Seven Steps to Heaven sessions, and he remained there for five years, greatly influencing
Miles' evolving direction, loosening up his own style, and upon
Miles' suggestion, converting to the Rhodes electric piano. In that time span,
Hancock's solo career also blossomed on Blue Note, pouring forth increasingly sophisticated compositions like "Maiden Voyage," "Cantaloupe Island," "Goodbye to Childhood," and the exquisite "Speak Like a Child." He also played on many East Coast recording sessions for producer Creed Taylor and provided a groundbreaking score to Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow Up, which gradually led to further movie assignments.
Having left the
Davis band in 1968,
Hancock recorded an elegant
funk album, Fat Albert Rotunda, and in 1969 formed a sextet that evolved into one of the most exciting, forward-looking
jazz-rock groups of the era. Now deeply immersed in electronics,
Hancock added the synthesizer of Patrick Gleeson to his Echoplexed, fuzz-wah-pedaled electric piano and clavinet, and the recordings became spacier and more complex rhythmically and structurally, creating its own corner of the
avant-garde. By 1970, all of the musicians used both English and African names (
Herbie's was
Mwandishi). Alas,
Hancock had to break up the band in 1973 when it ran out of money, and having studied Buddhism, he concluded that his ultimate goal should be to make his audiences happy.
The next step, then, was a terrific
funk group whose first album,
Head Hunters, with its
Sly Stone-influenced hit single, "Chameleon," became the biggest-selling
jazz LP up to that time. Now handling all of the synthesizers himself,
Hancock's heavily rhythmic comping often became part of the rhythm section, leavened by interludes of the old urbane harmonies.
Hancock recorded several electric albums of mostly superior quality in the '70s, followed by a wrong turn into
disco around the decade's end. In the meantime,
Hancock refused to abandon acoustic
jazz. After a one-shot reunion of the 1965
Miles Davis Quintet (
Hancock,
Ron Carter,
Tony Williams,
Wayne Shorter, with
Freddie Hubbard sitting in for
Miles) at New York's 1976 Newport Jazz Festival, they went on tour the following year as V.S.O.P. The near-universal acclaim of the reunions proved: that
Hancock was still a whale of a pianist; that
Miles' loose mid-'60s
post-bop direction was far from spent; and that the time for a neo-traditional revival was near, finally bearing fruit in the '80s with
Wynton Marsalis and his ilk. V.S.O.P. continued to hold sporadic reunions through 1992, though the death of the indispensable Williams in 1997 cast much doubt as to whether these gatherings would continue.
Hancock continued his chameleonic ways in the '80s: scoring an MTV hit in 1983 with the scratch-driven, proto-
industrial single "Rockit" (accompanied by a striking video); launching an exciting partnership with Gambian kora virtuoso Foday Musa Suso that culminated in the swinging 1986 live album Jazz Africa; doing film scores; and playing festivals and tours with the Marsalis brothers,
George Benson,
Michael Brecker, and many others. After his 1988
techno-pop album, Perfect Machine,
Hancock left Columbia (his label since 1973), signed a contract with Qwest that came to virtually nothing (save for A Tribute to Miles in 1992), and finally made a deal with PolyGram in 1994 to record
jazz for Verve and release pop albums on Mercury. Well into a youthful middle age,
Hancock's curiosity, versatility, and capacity for growth showed no signs of fading, and in 1998 he issued Gershwin's World. His curiosity with the fusion of
electronic music and
jazz continued with 2001's
Future 2 Future, but he also continued to explore the future of straight-ahead
contemporary jazz with 2005's
Possibilities. An intiguing album of
jazz treatments of
Joni Mitchell compositions, called
River: The Joni Letters, was released in 2007. ~ Richard S. Ginell, All Music Guide
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