When the pandemic took 82-year-old jazz legend Herbie Hancock out of the way, his half-century-old passion for Buddhism Nichiren came to the rescue. “I could be unhappy with what I missed,” he says of his home in Los Angeles, “but for the first time in 50 years, I dined with my own wife every night and slept next to her in my own bed. It was a blessing. Music is what I do, but it’s not what I am. “With his slot in Glastonbury on the horizon – making it one of the oldest to ever adorn the Pyramid stage – Hancock reflects on his work with Donald Bird and Miles Davis. , plus its own revolutionary innovations in funk, soul, hip-hop and more.
What’s on the Glastonbury menu?
I will play [1973 album] Materials from the Head Hunters era, but also some newer things. I’m always on tour, so I don’t have much time to go out. But it’s huge, that’s what I remember about Glastonbury. And the audience is always very excited. And that it sometimes rains, and then you have to carry pockets.
Hancock performs in Tennessee, USA, in June 2022. Photo: Daniel DeSlover / ZUMA Press Wire / Shutterstock
Ten years have passed since your previous album The Imagine Project. Do you still have music to make?
Yes – my last album! No, let me paraphrase it – the last album I worked on. This new album has taken a long time and is not ready yet, but Terrace Martin is producing it, and Thundercat, Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington will be on it, as well as Kendrick Lamar. I’m looking for ideas from these guys because this is their century, and I’m from the last century. Some of them, their fathers or mothers were jazz musicians and inherited this feeling, while some of them learned it from training. I have a school, the Herbie Hancock Institute – it used to be Thelonious Monk Institute – and Terrace was one of our students, as was Kamasi.
In your lectures at Harvard on the ethics of jazz, you said that while you were making your first album, Takin ‘Off in 1962, you had a “subconscious feeling that this was going to be my last record.” Why?
I was 22 years old and I was lucky that Blue Note was even interested in my recording. I played in the band of Donald Bird, who found me and brought me from Chicago to New York. Donald said, “Herbie, it’s time to make your own record.” Blue Note had a reputation for signing the so-called “young guns” of the era, such as Freddie Hubbard and Wayne Shorter, these 20-year-olds, leading the next wave of jazz. But they are still reluctant to record someone completely new like me. Donald said, “We’ll tell them you’re up and you want to record before you go to Korea,” and Blue Note said yes, which was a surprise and meant I had to write some material – and fast! I wrote three tunes one night and three more the next. One of them was Watermelon Man, which Mongo Santamaria covered and made a huge hit. Within five days of the release of the Mongo version, Xavier Cougat cut out the version, as did Trini Lopez, with five different records in Jamaica alone.
Then Miles Davis attracted you to his Second Great Quintet.
Miles Davis on stage with Hancock in Berlin, 1964. Photo: Jan Persson / Getty Images
I had the feeling that the impossible had happened. Joining Miles and making Watermelon Man a hit at the same time made me feel like I was on top of the world.
Did success go to your head?
I couldn’t walk around and say, “Hey, look at me, I’m playing with Miles Davis.” No no. I had to be serious, right? Because the level of musicality was so high. You had to play your game with Miles, but it was so inspiring to work with him.
What was Davis like as the leader of the group?
He said [hoarse, Miles-ish whisper]”I’m not just paying you to play to get applause.” He told us he paid us to experiment on stage. He said, “I want you to try new things, brand new things.” And I told him that part of it might not work, so what about the audience then? He said: “Don’t worry about it. I liked to challenge him, to stimulate him, to throw him a crooked ball. It’s like playing baseball: he was the king of the home run, ready to hit every ball and send it over the stands.
Miles encouraged you to play electronic instruments in the later stages of your stay with him.
I was excited because I was majoring in electrical engineering in college and had some understanding of electronics. I actually got my first computer in 1979, which was really at the beginning of the game. I still have this computer today. It was an Apple II Plus and had 48k RAM and you had to store the programs on a tape. But I knew that computers would be important in music, and I encouraged every musician I met to learn how they work.
How did your term with Davis end?
In 1968 I got married. I told my wife, either we can have a big wedding in New York and invite all our friends to give us gifts we don’t want, or we can take first class tickets to Rio de Janeiro and spend our honeymoon on top. wanted there. She said, “Where’s my ticket?”
But I got food poisoning in Brazil and the doctor said my liver was swollen and I had to stay a few more weeks. I was supposed to play with Miles, but I stayed another week because I didn’t want to endanger my life. When I returned, he had already replaced me with Chick Corea. I later learned that Miles knew that I, drummer Tony Williams, and saxophonist Wayne Shorter had their own recording contracts, and we talked about leaving his band. He realized that if he moved Chick into the group, he wouldn’t have to start from scratch when Tony and Wayne left.
But I was in love with this band – we had such an amazing time and there is nothing like accompanying Miles Davis. What he did was always ingenious. And Wayne Shorter, too. I couldn’t figure out how I would ever leave. But the sequel opened up a whole new side of my career that I hadn’t explored before.
You went on to form your own future-oriented, challenging unit, the Mwandishi, with mergers of jazz, funk, and early synthesizers that were later recognized by writer Kodvo Yeshun as masterpieces of Afrofuturism.
The Mwandishi band played in New York in 1976, with Hancock on keyboards. Photo: Tom Copi / Getty Images
Dr. Martin Luther King’s work on civil rights was a defining moment for many of us in this country, and our friend James “Mtum” Heath, who was the son of Jimmy Heath and the musician himself, continued to wonder when I and the musicians who work will join the “movement”. He gave us all the Swahili names – my name, Mwandishi, means “writer.” We wore dashis and talismans and other things that were identified with the homeland – the homeland of humanity.
Musically, Mwandishi has always explored new territories. We were always trying to find new ways to explore our “space music.” We did all this – we had joined the avant-garde, although my manager David Rubinson knew I was looking for ways to pass this music on to the common man, not just the avant-garde enthusiast. David said, “These new instruments are starting to be used in rock recordings called synthesizers,” and he connected me to a man named Dr. Patrick Gleeson who had a studio nearby. I asked Patrick to record an intro for one of the tracks on our next album, Crossings. And what he recorded blew me away, so I hired him right away. He would take the ARP 2600 on the road, but there was a large modular Moog synthesizer in the studio. They were huge in those days.
Was your next band, The Headhunters, an additional attempt to win over the average listener?
For the last year and a half on Mwandishi, I’ve listened to Sly Stone and James Brown a lot and I liked them. I’m from Chicago, which is a city of blues and R&B, so that’s part of my personal roots. I had done cosmic things, now I wanted something from Earth. So back in 1973, I started Headhunters.
Your 1983 album Future Shock and its breakthrough single, Rockit, marked your early foray into the world of hip-hop.
My dear friend Maria Lucien Krishna’s teenage son was a percussionist and he told me that I should look for this record, Buffalo Gals by Malcolm McLaren. He said, “You can find an interesting sound there.” My assistant, Tony Mylon, was always looking for underground stuff, and he met Bill Laswell and Michael Bainhorn, two musicians who produced foreign recordings and made their own. [as Material]. I said, “I want to do something with a scratch!” Rockit was the first thing we worked on, and I decided, “Let’s do the whole recording with these new guys.” Rockit got so big it opened everything up. Rap was just starting to happen and then the whole scene exploded. And here we are today.
People say that jazz has been dead for decades and say that records you’ve worked on, like Davis’ On the Corner, killed it. Is he dead? Where do you see the future of music?
The thing is, jazz is so open that it’s a little hard to kill it. An individual can kill their own career – if you keep it limited to one sound or era, it’s hard to get past the audience you started with, and they get older as you get older. This is not exciting for me. I want to be open enough to attract audiences of all ages. That’s why I work a lot with younger people. They are the future and I am always looking ahead. When I was young, musicians from the generations before me really helped and encouraged me, showed me mistakes in my thinking about the structure of the song. I’m at this point in my life when it’s time to pass the baton to younger musicians. But I’m not ready to leave yet.
Herbie Hancock performs at Glastonbury’s Pyramid Festival …
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