Herbie Hancock
Whether at the acoustic piano or between synthesizers and turntables, he always turned toward a sound no one had yet heard.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Companions ⏳🌊
- InfluenceBill Evans
Hancock recalled that as a self-taught teenager he learned a great deal from Evans's harmony and touch.
- MentorDonald Byrd
He brought him to New York, found him work, and advised him to keep the publishing rights to his own tunes.
- MentorMiles Davis
He called him into his second great quintet and taught him, through sound rather than words, how to embrace mistakes.
- FriendshipWayne Shorter
A friend for life, met in the quintet and close through V.S.O.P., the duo album “1+1,” and “River.”
- ColleagueBuster Williams
Bassist of the Mwandishi sextet, he introduced Hancock to Nichiren Buddhism in 1972.
- PatronageDavid Rubinson
The producer who made his Columbia recordings of the 1970s with him, “Head Hunters” among them.
I. A boy from Chicago · 1940–1960 (age 0–20)
(Chicago) He was born in April 1940 in Chicago, Illinois. His father, Wayman Edward Hancock, worked as a government meat inspector, and his mother, Winnie Belle Griffin, valued her children's education above all else. He was the middle child, between his older brother Wayman Jr. and his younger sister Jean. His given name, Herbert Jeffrey Hancock, is said to have come from the singer and actor Herb Jeffries, a favorite of his parents. (Piano) He began piano lessons at seven. In 1952, at eleven, he played the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 26 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at a young people's concert. He had set out, in other words, as a classical prodigy, and until then jazz was a foreign music to him. (The ear) At Hyde Park High School he was drawn to jazz after watching a classmate improvise without sheet music. With no one at hand to teach him, he played the records of the vocal group the Hi-Lo's again and again, transcribing note by note the harmonies stacked up by the arranger Clare Fischer. He also recalled many times how much he learned from the harmony and touch of Bill Evans. (Engineering) In 1956 he entered Grinnell College, a small school in Iowa, and at first studied electrical engineering. Realizing he could not leave music behind, he switched his major to composition, but his curiosity about circuits and machines stayed with him for life. When he later embraced synthesizers and personal computers ahead of his peers, the instincts of those engineering-student days lay underneath.
II. The watermelon man's song · 1960–1963 (age 20–23)
(Hawkins) Back in Chicago in 1960, he built his career working the clubs, and at twenty he got the chance to play with the tenor saxophone giant Coleman Hawkins. That winter he joined the band of the trumpeter Donald Byrd as its pianist. (Byrd) Byrd is known to have brought the young man to New York and kept him in work. Most valuable of all was his advice about money. Byrd told him never to sign away the publishing rights to his tunes but to set up his own publishing company and hold on to them, and Hancock remembered this as the lesson that became the financial foundation of his life. (Blue Note) In 1962 he signed with Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records and recorded his first album as a leader, “Takin' Off.” Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Dexter Gordon on tenor saxophone, Butch Warren on bass and Billy Higgins on drums joined him, and every track was his own composition. (Watermelon) The opening track, “Watermelon Man,” was written, he recalled, with the cries of a watermelon vendor and the rattle of his wagon wheels on the Chicago streets of his childhood in mind. In 1963, when the Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaría's Latin-rhythm version climbed to number 10 on the Billboard singles chart, the royalties began to arrive. Because he held the publishing rights himself, the twenty-three-year-old pianist was free to choose his own music without worrying about making a living.
A debut of nothing but original tunes, made at Donald Byrd's urging. The royalties from “Watermelon Man,” included here, went on to underwrite his musical adventures.
- “Watermelon Man” is not a standard twelve-bar blues but a bluesy form of sixteen bars. The short rhythmic figure repeated by the piano's left hand seems to echo his memory of the vendor's wagon clattering along.
- Billy Higgins's drums stand somewhere between jazz's lilting rhythm (swing) and the firm backbeat of gospel and rhythm and blues. That walking rhythm sounds like the key to the tune's popular appeal.
- Dexter Gordon's tenor, broad and unhurried in tone, leans slightly behind the beat and unspools its solo as if speaking, while Freddie Hubbard's trumpet offers a bright, sharp contrast.
- Recorded in May 1962 at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in New Jersey, it has the warm, close grain of sound that is Blue Note's own.
III. Miles's quintet · 1963–1968 (age 23–28)
(The call) In May 1963 Miles Davis sent for him. For several days he played at Miles's house with the bassist Ron Carter and the seventeen-year-old drummer Tony Williams, and Miles himself, Hancock recalled, never came down but only listened from upstairs. That was how he took part in the recording of “Seven Steps to Heaven” and became a member of the band. (The quintet) When the tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter arrived in 1964, the lineup later called the second great quintet was complete. On the recordings that followed, “E.S.P.,” “Miles Smiles” and “Nefertiti,” the rhythm section of Hancock·Carter·Williams stretched and compressed the forms of the tunes, moving as if in conversation with the soloists. His friendship with Shorter also began then and lasted the rest of their lives. (The lesson) Miles was not one to teach with words. As Hancock told it, at one concert he played a wildly wrong chord, and Miles laid notes over it that turned the chord into the right one. That day, he said, he learned to accept a mistake without judging it and to make something live out of it. (The leader) While still in the quintet he released “Empyrean Isles,” “Maiden Voyage” and “Speak Like a Child” on Blue Note. In 1966 he scored Antonioni's film “Blow-Up,” and in 1967 he played piano on Wes Montgomery's “A Day in the Life.” (Marriage) In 1968 he married Gigi Meixner. When he failed to return on time from their honeymoon in Brazil, Chick Corea took over his chair, and so he left the quintet. Afterward Miles still called him in as a guest for recordings such as “In a Silent Way.”
An album on the theme of the sea, made with his colleagues from Miles's rhythm section, Ron Carter·Tony Williams, it records the open harmonies learned in the quintet flowering in his own compositions.
- The title track draws out chords that seem to hang in the air without resolving (suspended chords). Closer to dwelling on scales (modal jazz) than to following a set chord progression, it feels like gliding over still water.
- While piano and bass doggedly repeat the same rhythmic figure (ostinato), Tony Williams's cymbals ripple like waves. The form is a thirty-two-bar AABA, but its seams are softly blurred.
- George Coleman's tenor and Freddie Hubbard's trumpet each take a solo, and Hancock's own solo unfolds in restrained lines, as if building the harmony one layer at a time.
- The closing track, “Dolphin Dance,” keeps moving its harmony to unexpected places, and it has become a standard that jazz musicians love to play today.
Recorded when the second quintet breathed most freely, it lets you hear how Hancock's accompaniment changed beside Miles, who taught with sound rather than words.
- Wayne Shorter's “Footprints” is a minor blues with six beats to the bar (6/4 time). The low figure repeated by Ron Carter's bass holds up the floor of the whole piece.
- On several tracks Hancock stops altogether, or pares to a minimum, the accompaniment that fills in chords behind the soloist (comping). In the space the piano leaves, the bass, drums and horns seem to move more freely.
- Tony Williams's drums, rather than keeping time, keep shifting dynamics and density as if talking to the soloist. The interplay of four players hearing one another's cues and stretching or compressing the form on the spot is the heart of this album.
- It was recorded over two days in October 1966 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York with the producer Teo Macero.
IV. A name meaning composer · 1969–1973 (age 29–33)
(Independence) In 1969 he formed his own sextet and moved to Warner Bros. “Fat Albert Rotunda,” built on music he wrote for a television cartoon special, sounded close to rhythm and blues, but the band soon headed somewhere else entirely. (Mwandishi) The members were Eddie Henderson on trumpet, Julian Priester on trombone, Bennie Maupin on bass clarinet and saxophones, Buster Williams on bass and Billy Hart on drums. They gave one another Swahili names, and Hancock chose Mwandishi, meaning composer. With an echo unit hooked to his Fender Rhodes electric piano, and with the synthesist Patrick Gleeson joining, the sound spread out into long-breathed collective improvisation. “Mwandishi,” “Crossings” and “Sextant” are the records of this period. (In the red) The music deepened, but the audience stayed small. Touring with six musicians is known to have been hard to make pay. It was, in effect, the royalties from “Watermelon Man” that kept the experiment alive. (Buddhism) In 1972, at Buster Williams's urging, he encountered Nichiren Buddhism and began the practice of chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. As a member of Soka Gakkai International (SGI), he has kept up the practice to this day. Through it, he said in many interviews, he came to ask what he would share with his audience as a human being before being a musician, and that question helped set his next direction. (The move) Around this time he moved his base to Los Angeles and signed with Columbia Records.
The signature recording of the sextet whose members shared Swahili names, it lost money commercially but captures the sound of the period when he was exploring most deeply.
- The opening track, “Ostinato (Suite for Angela),” sets the bass repeating the same figure endlessly over an unfamiliar meter of fifteen beats to the bar (15/8 time). It feels awkward at first, but after a few cycles the body begins to follow the flow.
- Echo effects are run through the Fender Rhodes electric piano, so that each note, once struck, spreads and overlaps like an echo. That sense of space, impossible on an acoustic piano, sets the color of the whole album.
- On “You’ll Know When You Get There,” Bennie Maupin’s bass clarinet and the horns lay down long, slow chords, and collective improvisation, many voices weaving the sound together rather than following a fixed order of solos, takes center stage.
- It was recorded on the last day of 1970 at Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco. The guitarist Ronnie Montrose sat in as a guest on the first track.
V. Head Hunters and Rockit · 1973–1986 (age 33–46)
(Funk) In 1973, he later recalled, he broke up the sextet, wanting to form a band that would make bodies move the way Sly Stone did. Keeping only Bennie Maupin, he brought in Paul Jackson on bass, Harvey Mason on drums and Bill Summers on percussion. “Head Hunters,” recorded in San Francisco with the producer David Rubinson, is often cited as the first jazz album to sell more than a million copies. (Both paths) He never walked just one road. While making “Thrust” and the score for the film “Death Wish,” he reunited Shorter·Carter·Williams in 1976 for a retrospective set at the Newport Jazz Festival, placing Freddie Hubbard in Miles’s chair. The lineup went on touring under the name V.S.O.P. In 1978 he toured with Chick Corea in a two-piano duo, and that same year released “I Thought It Was You,” sung through a device that turns the voice into a machine sound (the vocoder). (Rockit) “Rockit,” from the 1983 album “Future Shock,” was made with the bassist and producer Bill Laswell and Grand Mixer D.ST, who played the turntable like an instrument. Its music video of moving mechanical figures was in heavy rotation on MTV, and the performance at the next year’s Grammy ceremony remains one of the early moments when hip-hop stood before a mass audience. (Jean) In 1985 his younger sister Jean died in the crash of Delta Air Lines Flight 191. A lyricist who had written words for some of her brother’s songs, she was a loss he recorded with quiet restraint in his memoir. (Oscar) In 1986 he scored Bertrand Tavernier’s film “’Round Midnight.” Its star was Dexter Gordon, who had played on his first album, and for the film Hancock won the 1987 Academy Award for best original score.
The fruit of choosing music people feel in their bodies after years of money-losing experiments, it brought him popular success and financial ease alike.
- “Chameleon” opens with a thick bass line that Hancock plays on a synthesizer (the ARP Odyssey). Over a simple frame that shuttles between just two chords, the groove builds for more than fifteen minutes.
- Paul Jackson’s bass and Harvey Mason’s drums lock together in a rhythm that hits the downbeat hard and finely subdivides the spaces in between (funk). Late in the track the rhythm shifts, and Hancock’s electric piano solo unfolds.
- The intro to the newly recorded “Watermelon Man” is the sound of Bill Summers blowing across a beer bottle. It is said to imitate a music of the BaBenzélé people of Central Africa that alternates whistle and voice (hindewhu).
- The album also includes “Sly,” a tribute to Sly Stone, revealing what he dreamed of doing with this band. The producer was David Rubinson.
A meeting of an engineer’s curiosity and young street culture, the track introduced the name of a jazz pianist past forty to the hip-hop generation.
- The star of the track is the scraping sound Grand Mixer D.ST makes by pushing and pulling a record back and forth by hand (scratching). It is a landmark early recording in which the turntable is used as an instrument.
- The drums are a hard, repetitive beat laid down not by a person but by a machine (the drum machine). Over it, Hancock’s synthesizer repeats a short, catchy melody.
- It was built by having Hancock layer keyboards over rhythm tracks assembled by Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn. It is a piece driven more by sonic texture and editing than by improvisation.
- In the music video made by Godley & Creme, mechanical figures move in time to the music. The track won the 1984 Grammy for best R&B instrumental performance.
VI. Joni’s letters, the world’s jazz · 1987–2026 (age 47–86)
(Acoustic) In the 1990s he returned to the piano. There followed “The New Standard,” which reread pop and rock songs as jazz; “1+1,” recorded as a duo with Wayne Shorter; and “Gershwin’s World,” which cast Gershwin’s music in a light stretching to classical and African music. (Teaching) As chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, he long devoted himself to nurturing young players. The institution, once named for Monk, was renamed the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz in 2019. (River) In 2007 he released “River: The Joni Letters,” devoted to the songs of Joni Mitchell. The album won the Grammy for album of the year in 2008, the first jazz album to do so since Stan Getz and João Gilberto’s “Getz/Gilberto” in 1965. In all, he has won more than ten Grammys. (Ambassador) In 2011 he became a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, and from the following year, with April 30 established as International Jazz Day, he led celebratory concerts in many countries. In 2013 he received the Kennedy Center Honors; in 2014 he delivered the Norton Lectures at Harvard University, and that same year published his memoir, “Possibilities.” (Today) In 2023 he said farewell to his lifelong friend Wayne Shorter. Past eighty in the 2020s, he still takes the touring stage with young musicians, moving between acoustic piano and electronic keyboards.
An album that rereads Joni Mitchell’s songs as jazz alongside his old friend Wayne Shorter, it became the first jazz album in 43 years to win the Grammy for album of the year.
- The producer Larry Klein is said to have had the musicians first examine together what each song’s lyrics were saying before recording. That is why, even in the instrumentals, one hears a flow that seems to follow the feeling of the song more than its melody.
- Norah Jones, Tina Turner, Corinne Bailey Rae and Luciana Souza sing, and Joni Mitchell herself sings one song. Leonard Cohen, instead of singing, recites the lyrics in a low voice as if reading a poem, and Hancock’s piano fills the spaces between his words.
- Wayne Shorter’s soprano saxophone makes long silences out of a few short notes. The rapport the two built together over decades comes through in the exchange between piano and saxophone.
- Besides Joni Mitchell’s songs, the album includes Ellington’s “Solitude” and Shorter’s “Nefertiti,” shedding light on the bond Joni’s music has long had with jazz.
Lesser-known stories
(The commercial) The lyrical classic of the sea, “Maiden Voyage,” began, Hancock himself recalled, as a short piece of music written for a television commercial for a men’s cologne. A few bars from a commercial commission became a jazz standard by way of a Blue Note recording, yet this origin is seldom mentioned, overshadowed by the album’s artistic renown. (The stand-in) Chance, too, played a part in “Watermelon Man” passing to Mongo Santamaría. After Chick Corea left Santamaría’s band, Hancock, introduced by Donald Byrd, was sitting in at a New York club one night when he played the tune for them, and the band, it is said, began playing along on the spot. Since it was also Corea who later took over Hancock’s seat in Miles’s quintet, the two men’s connection began earlier than one might think. (Transcription) His distinctive harmonic sense came first not from jazz pianists but from a vocal group. As a high-school student he transcribed, note by note, the chords Clare Fischer had arranged on records by the Hi-Lo’s, an experience he named as the starting point of his study of harmony. It was a self-taught method, taking records as teachers in an era when formal jazz education was rare. (The beer bottle) The sound at the start of the “Head Hunters” version of “Watermelon Man” is not a synthesizer but Bill Summers blowing across a beer bottle. Modeled on an ethnomusicological recording of the music of the BaBenzélé people of Central Africa, it is a little-known fact that a trace of African folk music lies hidden at the opening of a funk album.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Hard bop
(In jazz) A jazz style popular on the American East Coast in the 1950s and ’60s, it added the earthy flavor of the blues and Black church music (gospel) to fast, complex bebop. The Blue Note label recorded a great deal of it, and Hancock’s “Takin’ Off” belongs to this current too. It is like friends singing a school choir piece and mixing in the handclap rhythms and fervor they learned in church — the bones of the song are the same, but it gets the body moving far more.
Modal jazz
(The word) “Modal” comes from the English word mode, meaning a musical mode (旋法). Its Latin root, modus, means a measure or standard, a manner. The name itself contains the idea of a way of deciding which notes to sing with. (In jazz) Instead of chords changing busily every few beats, it is a way of playing that lingers on a single scale for a long time and freely shapes melodies within it. Miles Davis popularized it in the late 1950s, and Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” is close to this approach. It is like the difference between a relay race run along a set course and free time on a wide playground where you can run around as you please. (Elsewhere) “Mode” is also used for choosing a way to play in games, as in hard mode or easy mode.
Comping
(The word) A shortening of the English accompanying, meaning to play an accompaniment, it also overlaps with complementing, meaning to fill in alongside. (In jazz) It is the accompaniment in which a piano or guitar supports a soloist from behind with short, clipped chords while the soloist improvises. Rather than following a written score, the player listens to the solo and decides moment by moment when, and how much, to play. It is like nodding or chiming in at the right moments while a friend gives a presentation — interrupt too often and you get in the way; stay completely still and the presenter feels alone.
Ostinato
(The word) In Italian it means stubborn, persistent. It shares a root with the English obstinate. The character of stubbornly repeating the same figure is right there in the name. (In jazz) It is a technique of repeating a short rhythm or melodic fragment throughout a piece. Over that repetition, the other instruments play freely. Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” and the first track of “Mwandishi” use this approach. It is like group jump rope: because the two people turning the rope always keep the same beat, the one in the middle can show off whatever jumping tricks they like.
Jazz fusion
(The word) Fusion comes from the Latin fundere (to pour, to melt), meaning to melt many things together into one. (In jazz) It is music that, from the late 1960s on, mixed rock and funk rhythms and electronic instruments such as electric guitar·electric piano·synthesizer into jazz. Miles Davis opened the way, and Hancock’s “Head Hunters” is counted among its landmark works. Think of fusion cuisine, where dishes from different countries meet on one plate to create a new flavor, like pasta made with tteokbokki sauce. (Elsewhere) In science it means nuclear fusion, the joining of light atoms.
Funk
(In jazz) A rhythm-centered music that grew out of African American music in the 1960s, marked by a hard accent on the first beat of the bar and by bass, drums and guitar interlocking tightly in short, clipped notes. The star is not the melody but the rhythm (the groove) that sets the body moving. It is rather like a cheering section at a school field day, where everyone takes a different part, some clapping, some stamping, each in its own rhythm, and put together they become a single exhilarating beat. (Elsewhere) In everyday Korean, the peongkeu of a flat tire is an entirely different word, taken from the English puncture ('a hole'), and it is different again from the punk of rock music.
Scratching
(Literally) The English scratch means 'to scrape.' The name comes from the sound, like a record being scraped. (In jazz) A playing technique in which a DJ pushes and pulls a record back and forth by hand on the turntable to produce a distinctive scraping sound. It began in hip-hop, and Hancock's “Rockit” is a famous example of bringing that sound into a jazz musician's music. It is like the fun of making funny noises by rapidly rewinding and replaying a recorded voice, except that the DJ plays it like an instrument, precisely in time with the beat. (Elsewhere) A scratch means a mark on the surface of an object, and the English expression from scratch means making something anew from the very beginning.