HERBIE HANCOCK

Herbie Hancock

Herbie Hancock

Introduction

Herbie Hancock is a true icon of modern music. Throughout his explorations, he has transcended limitations and genres while maintaining his unmistakable voice. With an illustrious career spanning five decades and 12 Grammy® Awards including the 2007 Album Of The Year for 'River: The Joni Letters', he continues to amaze audiences. There are few artists in the music industry who have had more influence on acoustic and electronic jazz and R&B than Herbie Hancock(Szwed, 2006).

Development of Performance Technique

Herbie Hancock is one of the few living musicians who has been able to command respect simultaneously in the high-art field of jazz and in the commercially-oriented world of popular music. Since coming to prominence with jazz trumpeter Miles Davis's pathbreaking fusion ensemble of the 1960s, Hancock has in effect maintained two separate careers, winning acclaim as an acoustic jazz pianist in pure bebop and post-bop traditions on one hand while keeping up with, making creative use of, and sometimes even giving birth to trends in black popular music on the other (Davis, 2009). In the words of Down Beat writer Pat Cole, "Hancock has been the quintessential border crosser."

An adherent of the chant-oriented Nichiren Shoshu sect of Buddhism, Hancock might also be said to have led a quintessentially creative life. He was born April 12, 1940 to Wayman and Winnie Hancock, and was recognized as a piano prodigy as a child. His musical career has been shaped and defined by the sheer fascination he feels when new sounds come his way; when a string on his piano broke during a 1986 New York concert, Hancock adapted by seamlessly weaving the twang of the damaged string into the thread of his improvisation. People magazine once described him with this memorable headline: "Cat curious, with as many creative lives, he thrives Round Midnight," the last phrase referring both to Hancock's tendency to work through the night when excited by a project and to his award- winning score for the film biography of jazzman Dexter Gordon, Round Midnight(Kirchner, 2007).

Born April 12, 1940, in Chicago, Herbert Jeffrey Hancock showed enthusiasm for the sound of a piano while still a toddler. His parents bought him a five-dollar, church-basement-salvaged piano when he was seven, and the quiet, determinedly investigative young man mastered the instrument rapidly. A mere four years later he performed the first movement of a Mozart piano concerto with the prestigious Chicago Symphony Orchestra after winning a school contest. He continued studying classical music at Chicago's Hyde Park High School, but turned to jazz after becoming interested in the improvisational performances of a classmate named Don Goldberg. "People laugh when they find out Herbie Hancock learned to play the blues from a nice Jewish boy," he told People.

Hancock enrolled at Iowa's Grinnell College, beginning with a parentally-mandated engineering major, but eventually switching his major to music. He returned frequently to Chicago and began to search out performing opportunities there; in the winter of 1960 a blizzard provided the opportunity for him ...