HERBIE HANCOCK INTERVIEWED (2024): The master and his past

The musician sits on his patio in the southern California sun, his broad smile revealing an engaging personal warmth and the triumph of American dentistry.

This is 84 year-old musical catalyst Herbie Hancock at his ease, among the last of his jazz generation but also in the vanguard of synthesiser-driven jazz-rock and hip-hop influenced electrofunk.

On this day – ahead of US and Canadian dates before New Zealand, Australia and home by way of China – you have to ask impertinently, why at his age would he want to still tour?

“Well, it makes it possible for me to pay my bills,” he laughs.

To which we might say, “Yeah, riiight”.

In addition to all that jazz and beyond, the legendary Hancock has teaching at the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance and UCLA's Herb Alpert School of Jazz, video masterclass sessions . . .

The man with 14 Grammys (plus numerous other awards and accolades) has also worked with John Legend, Seal, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Tina Turner and others from the pop-rock end of the spectrum.

When it's suggested anyone would take his call he looks almost bashful, laughs and simply says, “thank you”.

In a career punctuated by many seminal moments we go back to the beginning for Hancock who was classically trained on piano and played with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when he was 11.

He recalls the first time he stepped away from formal training and onto a bandstand.

“That was a long time ago,” he laughs, “but I played at a Y.W.C.A., a group of young Japanese-American women hired this band and I got the gig from a clarinet player in the dance band of the high school.

“I wasn't actually in his band, I played in the orchestra. He called me to do this job. . . . and that was what got my juices flowing.”

The anecdote offers something emblematic of Hancock's subsequent career: the willingness to grab an opportunity, move out of the familiar and accept a challenge.

As much as the classical tradition, he grew up on Frank Sinatra, close harmony doo-wop groups and jazz pianists like Bill Evans and George Shearing. He formally studied composition in New York, at 22 his debut album Takin' Off was released on . . . 

To read the rest of this extensive interview with Herbie Hancock which appeared in the Listener, subscribe to the magazine's online version. Here.