Herbie Hancock
Herbie Hancock
Herbert Jeffrey "Herbie" Hancockis an American pianist, keyboardist, bandleader, composer and actor. Starting his career with Donald Byrd, he shortly thereafter joined the Miles Davis Quintet where Hancock helped to redefine the role of a jazz rhythm section and was one of the primary architects of the post-bop sound. He was one of the first jazz musicians to embrace synthesizers and funk music. Hancock's music is often melodic and accessible; he has had many songs "cross over" and achieved success...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPianist
Date of Birth12 April 1940
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
I'm a human being all the time, even when I sleep. But I'm not a musician when I sleep, and I'm not a musician when I eat, unless I'm paying attention to music or talking about music.
I had just come out of college, and I figured that I would probably be in Chicago for the next couple of years, and then maybe, I 'd get a chance to go to New York and hang out with the big boys.
We talked for a couple of hours before we played a note. We didn't talk about music, we talked about life - families, children, issues in the world, politics, so many things. The kind of camaraderie we developed helped make the music what it is. I wanted to find a common ground and connect as people first.
This was put together not just as a series of notes and chords. If I depended on what anyone else thinks, I never would have stretched and discovered the various dimensions of myself.
When I sense a more conservative and limiting attitude coming from musicians, than my impression is that they're really moving away from the true spirit of jazz.
We've been looking at machines for so long, I really wish the technology community would look at human beings first for a change, let's balance the thing out.
Tradition can be negative though, if the importance of having roots outweighs the importance of searching for what's valuable in new things being presented.
You asked me before about being an innovator and I mentioned that I've always been some kind of leader.
We wanted to share creativity and didn't want to be bound by traditional jazz conventions.
When the suggestion was made that I might consider doing music of Joni Mitchell, I thought it was a fantastic idea. Joni, I admire not only for her music but for her person, because she's a person that really stands out for what she believes in.
When I was six, my best friend's parents bought him a piano. My mother noticed that every time I would go to his house, the first thing I would say to him was 'Levester' - His name was Levester - I said, 'Levester, can I go play your piano?' So, on my 7th birthday, my parents bought me a piano.
But once Miles would start to play on top of these things we were doing, all of a sudden, it was as though he would go to the core of it.
I took a different view of what it was I had been doing before and started to come to some realizations about the way I looked at life.
It's very different from classical music. In classical music, you are playing something that is written by someone else.