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The Fine Art of Breaking Ground: Herbie Hancock Turns 2 the Future Again
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Not much more can be said about the contribution that Herbie Hancock has made to music since he hit the international stage in 1961. As a composer, pianist, and innovator, Hancock has played a significant role in ushering in several new waves of musical styles. As the artist himself would probably prefer to have it considered, he has helped broaden the minds of musicians and music lovers alike, categories be damned. Besides his mentor Miles Davis, Hancock has probably done more to further the use of technology in music than any other individual artist. His late '60s synthesizer experimentations helped drive jazz music into the 21st century, and more importantly, helped knock down the barriers that separated rock and jazz, as well as electronic music and everything else.
Inevitably, Hancock's integration of styles and sounds have led the way for others to further push the boundaries of musical expression, creating such diverse genres as techno, drum & bass, hip hop, funk, jam-oriented rock, modern Ramp;B (in the last 30 years), and electronica. Especially electronica, which utilizes samples, synthesized sounds, drum programming, and even live musicians to create a constant but unpredictable soundscape whose purpose is to move rumps and expand minds. This is where history begins to come full circle…or maybe it's more like a complex matrix that is built upon the interconnectivity between all artists. Inspired by young pioneers like DJ Rob Swift, Carl Craig, and A Guy Called Gerald, Hancock and producer Bill Laswell, who worked with the keyboardist on his classic Future Shock album, took the modern electronic medium and threw in the jazz sensibilities of improvisation and chordal variation, thus creating a brand new form. As one reviewer puts it: "If techno is our common future, Future 2 Future offers a shadowy glimpse of the inevitable morning-after, a post-Ecstasy moment of contemplation."
Musictoday recently spoke with Herbie Hancock about his rise to stardom, his views on the music industry, and the making of his latest album. Read on to find out why this legendary genius is always striving toward the future, aspiring to unleash the limitless possibilities of the human mind.
Musictoday: You were labeled a child prodigy when you were young; were you aware of that at the time (i.e., were you treated that way by parents, teachers, etc.)? How did that affect your outlook as a child?
Herbie Hancock: Nobody told me I was a child prodigy. That word never came up then…I was very much an adult [before I heard that term]. How does one treat a child prodigy anyway? People put you on a pedestal when you become famous, in their eyes, or if they really respect your work, they might put you on a pedestal, but I didn't get that as a kid.
MT: I understand you were born and raised in Chicago, then moved to New York right around the time that electric blues was making its mark. How did the blues affect your music, once you moved on to the Big Apple?
HH: I wasn't really aware that the blues was making the transition from acoustic to electric then, but that doesn't mean it didn't have any effect on what I was doing at the time. I went to New York in January of 1961 and I wasn't following blues per se when I went to NY. I wasn't following Muddy Waters, even though I'd heard of him, and I actually saw him perform one time in Chicago. I was very much aware of blues, because it was on the radio all the time. There were blues records everywhere; we didn't have a lot of blues records in our apartment, but it was in the building [laughs], in other people's apartments. I heard it…a lot of it. When did I hear the name John Lee Hooker? I think I heard the name Muddy Waters first, then John Lee Hooker. Let's see…like some of the harmonica players, Sonny Boy Williamson, I didn't follow them that much. There was a radio station in Chicago, there was a guy named Al Benson, and he pretty much dominated black radio in the '50s. and he had shows on that played R&B, and certain hours, he would play all blues records. Other hours, he would play a mixture of things, even some jazz things. At the time, I wasn't listening to jazz; I was listening to doo-wop groups, and I didn't listen that closely to the blues, it wasn't what motivated me, but it was part of the fabric that I grew up on. Not too many people my age really zeroed in on the blues. Most of the people that listened to it were older than teenagers.
As the 1960s began, jazz music was still at an apex, with hard bop groups led by the likes of Miles Davis and John Coltrane remaining a force on the musical landscape. At the time, Herbie Hancock had not yet begun to imagine the life of a career jazz musician, such as the one that trumpeter Donald Byrd was leading. Byrd had risen to prominence in the late '50s as a collaborator with luminaries Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, and Art Blakey. In 1961, Byrd invited a young Hancock to sit in with his band for a weekend, thus catapulting the pianist into the realm of professional musician and eventual canonization.
MT: What was it like to be asked to join a band like Donald Byrd's in one of the most exciting periods of jazz history?
HH: I was blown away when Donald asked me to stay in the band. He said that both he and the band really liked my playing. I was just playing a weekend with them, and then he said that they all agreed that they wanted me to stay in the band and move to New York, 'cause I was living in Chicago at the time. I was flattered. I hadn't dreamed that that would happen to me, not at that time. 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. I was excited about the possibility of going to New York. Of course, he had to ask my parents first [laughs], which is kind of funny, but I was living in their house. I was developing to become a man, but I was still pretty much their son, as opposed to being a separate entity. And he asked them, and they said if that's what I wanted to do, I would go with their blessings. I mean, they would much rather have me say that I was going to New York to go to Julliard or to play with the New York Philharmonic to play classical music [laughs], but I still went with their blessings. And later on, when they saw that I could survive like that, and they saw that I was making records that they could be proud of, then it was alright with them. Then I truly had their blessings, not just their words, but their happiness at the way I had shaped my future.
MT: I find your music to be very visual, and I know you have scored films before; have you used film itself as a medium for your creative talents?
HH: Not really. I actually own Final Cut Pro, which is software for editing video, and Premiere from Adobe, I have that. I've dabbled with that, mostly because the editing process is one that's done on a computer, and I have interest in computer technology. It is an art form that gets edited on a computer and I'm fascinated with all that stuff, so that's how I got into it. As far as actually writing scripts or stories…now scenarios, most people have ideas for scenarios that could be the basis for a film. I have done that, as a matter of fact. A couple of years ago, I came up with the idea for a film that I thought could be interesting, and I took it to a couple of people—nobody professional or anything—but I thought it was kind of cool.
MT: Throughout the course of your career, you've played many different styles of music. Which kind makes your juices flow the most when performing it?
HH: It's not the style that motivates me, as much as an attitude of openness that I have when I go into a project. When I'm sensitive to the circumstances surrounding me, then I can be inspired by them or use them in whatever I may be creating. When I feel that kind of freedom, then I'm stimulated. But if I'm banging my head against a wall because I can't come up with any ideas, that's not so much fun. The concept of improvisation is an idea that's very close to my heart, but I can manifest that in a lot of different genres. It really comes from a jazz sensibility.
Herbie Hancock's 33rd album, Future 2 Future, was released last September on Transparent Music, a label Hancock co-owns with manager David Passick and ex-Verve chief Chuck Mitchell. The record was co-produced and co-conceptualized by underground visionary Bill Laswell, who helped Hancock realize a stunningly new approach to electronic music. The record has been praised by jazz and techno critics alike, triumphantly underscoring just how valuable Hancock is and has been to the world of music.
MT: Okay, I want to talk about the new album, but first, I have to ask you: You look so tough on the cover. Are you sending a message to all the young punks?
HH: I'm not smiling for two reasons: first, because you'll find that somewhere between 95 and 98% of the pictures that anyone has ever seen of me is me smiling, and so this makes it rare that I have an album cover where I'm not smiling [laughs]. The other reason is the concept of attitude. I didn't want to appear angry, but it's okay to appear serious or to not smile. So that's a response to that; I was allowing myself to be influenced by that particular trend. One more thing: I like the cover; it looks cool to me, especially what I'm wearing, I think it fits with my expression.
MT: Tell me about who or what led you to delve into the modern styles on Future 2 Future.
HH: First of all, most people might think that I would sit down, compose the music before anything was recorded, work with Bill Laswell about how we're going to put it on tape, etc. But I've never worked with Bill Laswell that way. What usually happens…what always happens is that he prepares something first on tape—this is all his own doing; I'm not even involved in that, you know—Bill puts maybe a bass player and a drummer on there and lays a track down. I can't even tell you how he does it, in terms of how much of the idea was his and how much was the musicians' own doing. I can't tell you, because I wasn't there. Sometimes, maybe there's a keyboard pad or some synthesizer sound that occurs periodically or some ambient sound that might be happening in the background, and he does that preparation before he brings it to me. Up until this project, we would take whatever he had and I would listen to it and we talk about it and pick out things that we thought…some moments that we thought we could use as thematic material. Or to define the form and use it as a metaphor. Sometimes you can hear something, and it will trigger a metaphor in your mind that you can use as a direction. Then we would analyze that and figure out what the next step would be in putting things together in layers. This time, Bill did bring things to me, but he changed the process. The first time I was hearing the things he prepared, I was in the studio, sitting at a keyboard with the record light on. So, I didn't hear in advance what I was going to play on. He wanted to hear my gut-level response to whatever he prepared, and just let it be whatever it was going to be. You can always manipulate things in the editing process to make them sound better, or leave things out or add things after the fact. We used that kind of process as the foundation of the record, that was our springboard. So there was lot of improvisation that went into Future 2 Future.
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