Herbie Hancock

Musician

• Born: April 12, 1940
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois

Jazz musician and composer

Hancock became one of the premier jazz pianists and composers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He worked successfully in an array of musical forms, including classical music, funk, rhythm and blues, hip-hop, and pop music, although his chief contributions are found in jazz.

Areas of achievement: Film: music; Music: classical and operatic; Music: composition; Music: funk; Music: jazz; Music: Latin, Caribbean, and reggae; Music: pop; Music: rhythm and blues

Early Life

Herbie Jeffrey Hancock was born in Chicago on April 12, 1940. A precocious musician, he earned a seat in the Chicago Symphony at the age of eleven. Years later, he began his college career as an engineering major at Iowa’s Grinnell College, although he ultimately decided to study music composition. Hancock continued his education at the Manhattan School of Music and embarked on a career as a professional musician. Debuting with Coleman Hawkins at Chicago’s Bird House in September, 1960, Hancock began his career alongside Donald Byrd, which allowed him to develop his distinctive playing style, and through Byrd he was introduced to Blue Note Records.

Life’s Work

For his debut solo album, Takin’ Off, recorded in May of 1962, Hancock assembled trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, saxophonist Dexter Gordon, bassist Butch Warren, and drummer Billy Higgins. The album was successful enough that Hancock went on to record five more albums for Blue Note in the 1960s. My Point of View, recorded in March of 1963, revealed Hancock’s versatility and anticipated his entirely improvised recording Inventions and Dimensions (1963), on which he teamed with bassist Paul Chambers and Latin percussionists Willie Bobo and Chihuahua Martinez. Famed trumpeter Miles Davis is credited with encouraging Hancock to work with these Latin jazz artists as a way of incorporating new sounds. In May of 1963, Hancock joined a reconstituted Davis quintet that included drummer Tony Williams, bassist Ron Carter, and saxophonist George Coleman to record Seven Steps to Heaven for Columbia Records.

While Hancock’s reputation grew as a member of Davis’s group, he continued to develop his own sound on later Blue Note releases while still recording with Davis. In 1964, Hancock recorded Empyrean Isles, which contained improvisation on tracks such as “The Egg” that recalled Inventions. The following year he recorded Maiden Voyage, which would become one of Hancock’s most lasting contributions to the vast canon of jazz standards.

Touring with Davis and working on side projects (such as scoring Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up) occupied Hancock’s time for the next several years. He returned to Blue Note and recorded his penultimate album for the label, Speak Like a Child, in March of 1968. Later that year Hancock left Davis’s quintet, which was increasingly experimenting with electric instruments and crossover with rock and pop music in what would become known as fusion. Although he charted his own musical path post-Davis, the trumpeter continued to recruit Hancock for studio dates, such as on the experimental, controversial In a Silent Way (1969). Hancock’s final album for Blue Note, The Prisoner (1969), was arguably the most distinct album of his Blue Note years. Not yet thirty years old, Hancock had already established himself as one of the premier jazz pianists of his generation.

Hancock’s final Blue Note recording marked a turning point of another sort for Hancock. His contract with Warner Bros. began with Fat Albert Rotunda (1969), an album that took its name from the Bill Cosby television show. Cosby was instrumental in Hancock’s move to Warner Bros. In this period, including his ongoing appearances on Davis' albums, Hancock was increasingly exposed to the use of electronic instruments, especially keyboards and synthesizers, resulting in a fusion of jazz and funk. The growing popularity of artists like James Brown and Sly Stone, as well as declining sales of straight-ahead jazz to mainstream listeners, influenced Hancock’s new direction.

Hancock’s prowess as a technician, drawn from a combination of intuition, skill, and an engineer’s knack for tinkering, allowed him to explore and arrange music that was both eclectic and original. Hancock’s other Warner Bros. albums, Mwandishi, recorded in December of 1970, and Crossings, recorded a year later, represent Hancock’s exploration of an avant-garde sound that seemed far from his bebop roots or even the earthiness of Fat Albert Rotunda. Additionally, these albums reflected Hancock’s (and his band’s) attraction to the pan-African aesthetic as he added more percussion to the sextet’s sound. Each member of the band adopted Swahili names: Mwile (Bennie Maupin), Jabali (Billy Hart), Mganga (Eddie Henderson), Mchezaji (Buster Williams), Pepo Moto (Julian Priester), and Mwandishi (Hancock).

After recording three albums for Warner Bros., Hancock signed with Columbia Records. After the band relocated to Los Angeles, Sextant (1973) was its last album. Although the album was not a commercial success, it portended Hancock’s expansive futuristic vision. The critically acclaimed Head Hunters, released the same year with a new band lineup, appealed to mainstream audiences but resisted easy classification as jazz, funk, fusion, or even a simple a hybrid of the three. With albums such as Thrust (1974), Man-Child (1975), and Secrets (1976), and a film score for The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), Hancock evolved with a funk-infused, African-inspired global musical consciousness that sounded equally abstract and funky.

Hancock continued to evolve and explore new directions, often defined by his frequent associations with other musicians and artists. In the 1980s he collaborated with guitarist Bill Laswell and Gambian griot and kora player Foday Musa Suso on the albums Village Life (1985) and Jazzvisions: Jazz Africa (1986). His groundbreaking collaboration with disc jockey Derek Showard on the 1983 Columbia release Future Shock brought Hancock recognition from a new generation of listeners and the kind of mainstream popularity few jazz artists could hope for. Showard’s turntable “scratches” accenting the hit single “Rockit” made Hancock a progenitor of hip-hop and earned him a Grammy Award in 1984, the first of many such awards. The song was also accompanied by an influential music video popularized on MTV.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Hancock continued to push the boundaries of jazz, often working with pop, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll artists such as Paul Simon and Christina Aguilera, while maintaining a traditional jazz core with fellow musicians such as Jack DeJohnette and Roy Hargrove. Hancock’s twenty-first century releases included the contemporary jazz album Possibilities (2005); the Grammy Album of the Year–winning River: The Joni Letters (2007), a collection of jazz covers of songs by singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell; the compilation Then and Now: The Definitive Herbie Hancock (2008); and The Imagine Project (2010), an expansive covers album featuring many collaborators from various genres with recordings made all over the world.

Hancock continued to perform through the 2010s. He continued to garner awards and other recognition for his influential career, including Kennedy Center Honors in 2013 for his contributions to performing arts. His autobiography, also titled Possibilities, was published in 2014. In 2017 he released an expanded special edition of River: The Joni Letters.

Significance

Hancock’s wide-ranging musical sensibilities paralleled the community of artists with whom he worked, and many performers and composers across a range of genres have acknowledged his pervasive influence. Despite reaching the highest levels of the jazz hierarchy early in his career, he refused to rest on his laurels, instead continually innovating with new instruments, sounds, and forms. With an evolving blend of tradition and experimentation Hancock established himself one of the most versatile musicians in any genre. He blended a dedication to his art with a melodic sensibility that made his work both progressive and accessible, bringing him a widespread popularity not enjoyed by many of his contemporaries.

Bibliography

Banfield, William C. Musical Landscapes in Color: Conversations with Black American Composers. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2003. Print.

Degiorgio, Kirk. “Journeys into Space: Herbie Hancock and His Mwandishi Band Explored the Funky Outer Limits of the Avant-Garde.” Wax Poetics 29 (2008): 81-96. Print.

Ginell, Richard S. "Herbie Hancock: Biography." AllMusic, 2021, www.allmusic.com/artist/herbie-hancock-mn0000957296/biography. Accessed 20 July 2021.

Hancock, Herbie, and Lisa Dickey. Possibilities. New York: Viking, 2014. Print.

"Herbie Hancock." National Endowment for the Arts, www.arts.gov/honors/jazz/herbie-hancock. Accessed 20 July 2021.

Pond, Steven F. Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005. Print.