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
On a human level, the garbage man is just as important as the teacher or a rock star or a president, because you have to have them. The world would have been dead a long time ago without garbage men.
Oh yeah, the funny thing is that all my pictures in the past were all smiley pictures, and it's only been in recent pictures where I've had some where I don't smile.
Most people think that classical music is a higher form than jazz only because it is from Europe, and we were taught in schools only about Western European history.
I'm an American man, and I'm concerned about the present and the future as has as this country and its people are concerned.
I'm aiming that towards people, towards humanity, not even just musicians. Because this is about life, not about musicians.
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.
Now we see that we have to pay attention to the environment. We have to protect it. It's become a real issue and a lot of people are still looking at it from a 20th century standpoint.
It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.
At first I sounded like any stiff classical musician, trying to play that stuff.
It's a statement of our position, which is that we are not making this record in order to honor technology; we're not slaves to that, we don't want to be slaves to that.
It's primitive now, but when you get to the point where you could see someone's face on your screen while you perform with them, that's a step in the right direction.
It might have been somewhat derivative otherwise, and I'm not the kind of person who's satisfied with being derivative.
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.