Jazz pianist and composer, born in Chicago, Illinois, USA. During the 1960s he worked with such stars as Phil Woods, Miles Davis, the Poynter Sisters, and Stevie Wonder, and greatly influenced pop music with his Blue Note album Takin' Off (1962), which featured the hit song Water-melon Man. Later albums include Dedication (1974), Village Life (1985), and Possibilities (2005). He also arranged and conducted the soundtracks for the films Blow Up (1966) and Round Midnight (1986, Oscar). In 2006 he was the subject of Herbie Hancock: Possibilities, a documentary film about his life in music. He was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1995, and received a Jazz Masters Award from the USA's National Endowment for the Arts in 2004.
| Herbie Hancock | ||
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| Background information | ||
| Also known as | Herbert Jeffrey Hancock | |
| Born | April 12, 1940 | |
| Origin | Chicago, Illinois, USA | |
| Genre(s) | Jazz, Post-bop, Jazz-Funk, Fusion, Funk, Hard bop, Electro | |
| Occupation(s) | Composer, Band leader | |
| Instrument(s) | Synthesizer, Piano, Keyboards, Electric piano | |
| Label(s) | Blue Note, Warner Bros., Columbia, Polygram/Mercury | |
| Website | Official website | |
Herbert Jeffrey Hancock (born April 12, 1940) is an Academy Award and multiple Grammy Award winning jazz pianist and composer from Chicago, Illinois, USA.
As part of Miles Davis's "second great quintet", Hancock helped redefine the role of a jazz rhythm section, and was one of the primary architects of the "post-bop" sound.
Hancock's best-known solo works include "Cantaloupe Island", "Watermelon Man" (later performed by dozens of musicians, including bandleader Mongo Santamaria), "Maiden Voyage", "Chameleon", and the single "Rockit."
Early life and career
Like many jazz pianists, Hancock started with a classical music education;
Through his teens, Hancock never had a jazz teacher.
After Hancock spent three and a half years studying musical composition at Grinnell College, Donald Byrd hired Hancock in 1961.
Miles Davis quintet and Blue Note
Hancock received considerable attention when, in 1963, he joined Miles Davis's "second great quintet."
The second great quintet was where Hancock found his own unique voice as a master of jazz piano.
While in the Davis band, Hancock also found time to record dozens of sessions for the Blue Note label, both under his own name and as a sideman with other musicians such as Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, Grant Green, Bobby Hutcherson, Sam Rivers, Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard.
His albums Empyrean Isles (1964) and Maiden Voyage (1965) were to be two of the most famous and influential jazz LPs of the sixties, winning praise for both their innovation and accessibility (the latter demonstrated by the subsequent enormous popularity of the Maiden Voyage title track as a jazz standard, and by the jazz rap group US3 having a hit single with "Cantaloupe Island" from Empyrean Isles some twenty five years later).
Hancock also recorded several less-well-known but still critically acclaimed albums with larger ensembles — My Point of View (1963), Speak Like A Child (1968) and The Prisoner (1969) featured flugelhorn, alto flute and bass trombone. 1963's Inventions and Dimensions was an album of almost entirely improvised music, teaming Hancock with bassist Paul Chambers and two Latin percussionists, Willie Bobo and Osvaldo Martinez.
During this period, Hancock also composed the score to Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blowup which was to be the first of many soundtracks he would record in his career.
Davis had begun incorporating elements of rock and popular music into his recordings by the end of Hancock's tenure with the band.
In the summer of 1968, Hancock left Davis's band to form his own sextet, although he was formally kicked out under the pretext that he was late coming back from a honeymoon in Brazil. Despite his departure from the working band, Hancock would continue to appear on Miles Davis records for the next few years; Mwandishi
Hancock left Blue Note in 1969, signing up with Warner Brothers.
Hancock was fascinated with accumulating musical gadgets and toys.
Hancock's first ventures into electronic music started with a sextet comprised of Hancock, drummer Billy Hart and bassist Buster Williams, and a trio of adventurous horn players: Eddie Henderson (trumpet), Julian Priester (trombone), and multireedist Bennie Maupin.
The sextet made three experimental albums under Hancock's name: Mwandishi (1971), Crossings (1972) (both on Warner Brothers) and Sextant (1973) (released on Columbia Records);
Hancock's three records released in 1971-1973 became later known as the "Mwandishi" albums, so-called after a Swahili name Hancock sometimes used during this era (Mwandishi is Swahili for writer).
Among the instruments Hancock and Gleeson utilized were Fender Rhodes piano, ARP Odyssey, ARP Pro-Soloist Synthesizer and the Minimoog.
Head Hunters and Death Wish
After the sometimes "airy" and decidedly experimental "Mwandishi" albums, Hancock was eager to perform more "earthy" and "funky" music. The Mwandishi albums — though these days seen as respected early fusion recordings — had seen mixed reviews and poor sales, so it is probable that Hancock was motivated by financial concerns as well as artistic restlessness.
Despite charges of "selling out", later ears have regarded the album well: "Head Hunters still sounds fresh and vital three decades after its initial release, and its genre-bending proved vastly influential on not only jazz, but funk, soul, and hip-hop." Allmusic.com entry
Mason was replaced by Mike Clark, and the band released a second album, Thrust, the following year (a live album from a Japan performance consisting of songs from those first two Head Hunters releases was released in 1975 as Flood. The Headhunters made another successful album (called "Survival of the Fittest") without Hancock, while Hancock himself started to make even more commercial albums (often featuring members of the band, but no longer billed as The Headhunters).
In 1973, Hancock composed his second masterful soundtrack to the controversial film The Spook Who Sat By The Door.
Hancock's next jazz-funk albums of 1970s albums were Man-Child (1975) ;
Back to the Basics: VSOP and the Future Shock
During late 1970s and early 1980s, Hancock toured with his "V.S.O.P."
In 1978, Hancock recorded a duet with Chick Corea, who had replaced him in the Miles Davis band a decade earlier. He also released a solo acoustic piano album titled The Piano (1978) which, like so many Hancock albums at the time, was released only in Japan, though it was finally released in the US in 2004.
From 1978-1982, Hancock recorded many albums consisting of jazz-inflected disco and pop music, beginning with Sunlight (featuring guest musicians like Tony Williams and Jaco Pastorius on the last track) (1978); Albums such as Monster (1980), Magic Windows (1981), and Lite Me Up (1982) were some of Hancock's most criticized and unwelcomed albums, the market at the time being somewhat saturated with similar pop-jazz hybrids from the likes of former bandmate Freddie Hubbard. Hancock himself had quite limited role in some of those albums, leaving singing, composing and even producing to others. The album contains a wide variety of different styles, including a disco instrumental song, a Latin-jazz number and an electronic piece in which Hancock plays alone with the help of computers.
Hancock also found time to record more traditional jazz whilst creating more commercially-oriented music. He toured with Tony Williams and Ron Carter in 1981, recording Herbie Hancock Trio, a five-track live album released only in Japan.
In 1983, Hancock had a mainstream hit with the Grammy-award winning instrumental single "Rockit" from the album Future Shock. Despite the success of "Rockit," Hancock's trio of Laswell-produced albums (particularly the latter two) are among the most critically derided of his entire career, perhaps even more so than his erstwhile pop-jazz experiments. Hancock's level of actual contribution to these albums was also questioned, with some critics contending that the Laswell albums should have been labelled "Bill Laswell featuring Herbie Hancock."
In 1986, Hancock performed and acted in the film 'Round Midnight. At the end of the Perfect Machine tour, Hancock decided to leave Columbia Records after a 15-plus-year relationship.
1990s and later
After leaving Columbia, Hancock took something of a break.
Hancock's next album, Dis Is Da Drum released in 1994 saw him return to Acid Jazz. A 1997 duet album with Wayne Shorter titled 1 + 1 was successful, the song "Aung San Suu Kyi" winning the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition, and Hancock also achieved great success in 1998 with his album Gershwin's World which featured inventive readings of George &
In 2001, Hancock recorded Future2Future, which reunited Hancock with Bill Laswell and featured doses of electronica as well as turntablist Rob Swift of The X-Ecutioners. Hancock later toured with the band, and released a live concert DVD with a different lineup which also included the "Rockit" music video. Also in 2001, Hancock partnered with Michael Brecker and Roy Hargrove to record a live concert album saluting Davis and John Coltrane called Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall recorded live in Toronto.
Also in 2005, Hancock toured Europe with a new quartet that included Beninese guitarist Lionel Loueke, and explored textures ranging from ambient to straight jazz to African music.
Also in 2006, Sony BMG Music Entertainment (which bought out Hancock's old label, Columbia Records) released the two-disc retrospective The Essential Herbie Hancock. This became Hancock's second major compilation of work since the 2002 Columbia-only The Herbie Hancock Box which was released at first in a plastic 4x4 cube then re-released in 2004 in a long box set.
Trivia
Prior to the VSOP period of the mid-1970s, Wayne Shorter never appeared as a side-man on Hancock's own records; however, Hancock appeared on some of Shorter's Blue Note records of the 1960s and also his 1975 album Native Dancer.
Hancock was one of the first mainstream musicians to use an Apple computer in creating music in the early 1980s.
Hancock is a Nichiren Buddhist, and writes about the influence Buddhism has had on his life and his music in the introduction he wrote to the nonfiction bestseller The Buddha In Your Mirror.
Hancock filmed an infomercial where he served as spokesman for the Bose Corporation.
Hancock is the musical director of the Tokyo Jazz Festival as well as Chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz.
Hancock also started an organization called ROLO -- the Rhythm of Life Organization dedicated to using technology in a responsible way to make the world a better place.
In the movie Tommy Boy, Chris Farley's character inadvertently confuses Herbie Hancock with John Hancock when he's asked on a history final to identify the first signer of the Declaration of Independence. In a later scene, when David Spade's character asks Brian Dennehy's character to put his "John Hancock" on forms, Tommy then says, "John Hancock....it's Herbie Hancock."
Discography
As a Leader
Takin' Off (1962) – Blue Note My Point of View (1963) – Blue Note Inventions and Dimensions (1963) – Blue Note Empyrean Isles (1964) – Blue Note Maiden Voyage (1965) – Blue Note Blow Up (Soundtrack) (1966) – MGM Speak Like A Child (1968) – Blue Note The Prisoner (1969) – Blue Note Fat Albert Rotunda (1969) – Warner Bros. Sextant (1973) – Columbia Head Hunters (1973) – Columbia The Spook Who Sat By The Door (Soundtrack) (1973) Thrust (1974) – Columbia Death Wish (Soundtrack) (1974) – Columbia Dedication (1974) – Columbia Man-Child (1975) – Columbia Flood (1975) – Columbia - live album only released in Japan Secrets (1976) – Columbia VSOP (1976) – Columbia VSOP: The Quintet (1977) – Columbia VSOP: Tempest at the Colosseum (1977) – Columbia Sunlight (1978) – Columbia Direct Step (1978) – Columbia An Evening With Herbie Hancock & Chick Corea: In Concert (1978) – Columbia The Piano (1979) – Columbia Feets, Don't Fail Me Now (1979) – Columbia VSOP: Live Under the Sky (1979) – Columbia Monster (1980) – Columbia Mr. Hands (1980) – Columbia Herbie Hancock Trio (1981) – Columbia Magic Windows (1981) – Columbia Lite Me Up (1982) – Columbia Quartet (1982) – Columbia Future Shock (1983) – Columbia Sound-System (1984) – Columbia Round Midnight (Soundtrack) (1986) – Columbia Perfect Machine (1988) – Columbia A Tribute to Miles (1994) – Qwest/Warner Brothers (with Wallace Roney, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams) Dis Is Da Drum (1994) – Verve/Mercury The New Standard (1995) – Verve 1 + 1 (with Wayne Shorter) (1997) – Verve Gershwin's World (1998) – Verve Future2Future (2001) – Transparent Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall (2002) – Verve Possibilities (2005) – Concord/Hear Music The Essential Herbie Hancock (2006) – Columbia/Sony BMGThere are also these albums: Cantaloupe Island (CDP724382933120) & Piano Genius (QED076)
As a Sideman
To Miles Davis:
Seven Steps to Heaven (1963) – Columbia E.S.P (1965) – Columbia Miles Smiles (1966) – Columbia Sorcerer (1967) – Columbia Nefertiti (1967) – Columbia Miles in the Sky (1968) – Columbia Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968) – Columbia In a Silent Way (1969) – Columbia A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1970) – Columbia On the Corner (1972) – Columbia Big Fun (album) (1974) - Columbia (on portions of album) Get Up with It (1974) - Columbia (on portions of album) Water Babies (1976) (recorded in 1968) - ColumbiaTo Milt Jackson:
Sunflower (1974) – CTI/ColumbiaTo Wayne Shorter:
Native Dancer (1974) – ColumbiaTo Tony Williams:
The Joy of Flying (1979) – ColumbiaTo Ron Carter:
Third Plane (1996) – ColumbiaWith Quincy Jones:
Sounds...and Stuff Like That (1978) – A&M
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