When the pandemic took jazz legend Herbie Hancock, now 82, off the road, her half-century passion for Nichiren Buddhism came to the rescue. “I could have been miserable for what I was missing,” she says from her Los Angeles home, “but for the first time in 50 years, I had dinner with my own wife every night and slept next to her in my own bed. “It was a blessing. Music is what I do, but it’s not what I am.” With his Glastonbury slot on the horizon, making him one of the oldest to ever grace the Pyramid stage, Hancock reflects on his work with Donald Byrd and Miles Davis, as well as his own groundbreaking innovations in funk, soul, hip-hop and more.
What’s on the Glastonbury menu?
I will be playing [1973 album] Head Hunters era material, but also some newer stuff. I’m always on tour, so I don’t have much time to hang out. But it’s huge, that’s what I remember from Glastonbury. And the audience is always very excited. And that sometimes it rains, and then you have to wear booties.
Hancock performing in Tennessee, USA, June 2022. Photo: Daniel DeSlover / ZUMA Press Wire / Shutterstock
It’s been a dozen years since your previous album The Imagine Project. Do you still have music to make?
Yes, my latest album! No, let me rephrase it – the last album I was working on. This new album has taken a long time and is not ready yet, but Terrace Martin is producing it, and will feature Thundercat, Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington, as well as Kendrick Lamar. I look for ideas in these guys, because this is their century, and I’m from the last century. Some of them, their parents, were jazz musicians, and have inherited that feeling, while some have learned it by studying. I have a school, the Herbie Hancock Institute, it used to be the Thelonious Monk Institute, and Terrace was one of our students, just like Kamasi.
In your lectures at Harvard on the ethics of jazz, you said that while you were making your first album, 1962’s Takin ‘Off, you had “the subconscious feeling that it would be my last record.” Because?
I was 22 and I felt lucky that Blue Note was even interested in making my record. I played in Donald Byrd’s band, who discovered me and took me from Chicago to New York. Donald said, “Herbie, it’s time for you to make your own record.” Blue Note had a reputation for signing the so-called “young guns” of the era like Freddie Hubbard and Wayne Shorter, these 20-year-olds leading the next wave of jazz. But they were still reluctant to record someone new like me. Donald said, “We’ll tell them you’re writing and you want to make a record before you go to Korea,” and Blue Note said yes, that was a surprise, and he meant I had to write a little bit of material, and fast! I wrote three songs one night and three more the next. One of them was Watermelon Man, which Mongo Santamaria covered and was a great success. Five days after the release of Mongo’s version, Xavier Cugat cut a version, and so did Trini López, and in Jamaica alone there were five different recordings.
Miles Davis then recruited you for his Second Grand Quintet.
Miles Davis on stage with Hancock in Berlin, 1964. Photo: Jan Persson / Getty Images
I felt that the impossible had happened. Joining Miles and making Watermelon Man a success at the same time, I felt like I was on top of the world.
Has success gone to your head?
He couldn’t walk around saying, “Hey, look at me, I’m playing with Miles Davis.” No, no. I had to be serious, right? Because the level of musicality was very high. You had to play with Miles, but it was very inspiring to work with him.
How was Davis as a band director?
He said [hoarse, Miles-ish whisper]: “I don’t pay you to play just to get applause.” He told us he paid us to experiment on stage. He said, “I want you to try new things, new things.” And I told him that maybe some won’t work, so what about the audience? He said, “Don’t worry about it. I got the audience.” He loved to be challenged, to be stimulated, to be thrown a curved ball. It’s like playing baseball: he was the king of the homeruns, ready to hit any ball and throw it down the stands.
Miles encouraged you to play electronic instruments in the later stages of your time with him.
I was excited, because I was an electrical engineer in college and had a certain understanding of electronics. In fact, I got my first computer in 1979, which was very early in the game. I still have this computer today. It was an Apple II Plus and had 48k of RAM and the programs had to be stored on a cassette. But I knew computers would be important in music and I encouraged all the musicians I met to learn how they worked.
How did your term with Davis end?
In 1968 I got married. I told my wife, we can have a big wedding in New York and invite all our friends for free charge so they can give us gifts we don’t want, or we can get first class tickets to Rio de Janeiro and spend our moon honey at the top. hotel there. She said, “Where’s my ticket?”
But I had food poisoning in Brazil and the doctor said my liver was swollen and I had to stay a couple more weeks. I was supposed to play with Miles, but I stayed another week, because I didn’t want to risk my life. When I came back, I had already been replaced by Chick Korea. Later, I learned that Miles knew that I, drummer Tony Williams and saxophonist Wayne Shorter all had our own record contracts and had talked about leaving his band. He realized that if he moved Chick to the group, he wouldn’t have to start from scratch when Tony and Wayne left.
But I was in love with that band – we had an amazing time and there’s nothing like accompanying Miles Davis. What he did was always genius. And Wayne Shorter, too. I didn’t know how it would ever turn out. But moving on opened up a whole new aspect of my career that I hadn’t explored before.
You formed your own advanced and challenging unit, the Mwandishi group, with fusions of jazz, funk and early synthesizers that were later recognized by writer Kodwo Eshun as masterpieces of Afrofuturism.
The band Mwandishi played in New York, 1976, with Hancock on keyboards. Photography: Tom Copi / Getty Images
Dr. Martin Luther King’s work for civil rights had been a turning point for many of us in this country, and our friend James “Mtume” Heath, who was the son of Jimmy Heath and a musician himself, kept asking. I know when I and the musicians I worked with would join “the movement”. He gave us all Swahili names: my name, Mwandishi, means “writer”. We wore dashikis and talismans and other things that identified with the homeland, the homeland of humanity.
Musically, the Mwandishi band was always exploring new territories. We were always trying to find new ways to explore our “space music”. We were interested in all of this: we joined the avant-garde, even though my manager David Rubinson knew I was looking for ways to get this music to the average person, not just the avant-garde enthusiasts. David said, “There are these new instruments that are starting to be used on rock records called synthesizers,” and he put me in touch with a guy named Dr. Patrick Gleeson, who had a studio nearby. I asked Patrick to record an introduction to one of the songs on our next album, Crossings. And what he recorded surprised me, so I hired him immediately. It would carry an ARP 2600 on the road, but in the studio it had a large Moog modular synthesizer. They were huge in those days.
Was your next group, the Headhunters, another attempt to win over the average listener?
For the last year and a half of Mwandishi I was listening a lot to Sly Stone and James Brown, and I loved it. I’m from Chicago, which is a city of blues and R&B, so that’s part of my personal roots. I had done the space things, now I wanted something from Earth. So in 1973 I started the Headhunters.
Your 1983 album Future Shock and their revolutionary single, Rockit, marked your first foray into the world of hip-hop.
The teenage son of my beloved Maria Lucien, Krishna, was a percussionist and told me I should look for this record, Malcolm McLaren’s Buffalo Gals. He said, “Maybe you’ll find an interesting sound.” My assistant, Tony Mylon, was always looking for underground stuff, and he met Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn, two musicians who produced other people’s records, in addition to making their own. [as Material]. I said, “I want to do something with the scraper!” Rockit was the first thing we worked on, and I decided, “Let’s do the whole record with these guys.” Rockit grew so big that he opened it all up. The rap was just starting to happen, and then the whole scene exploded. And here we are today.
People have been claiming that jazz is dead for decades and have said that the records you worked on, like Davis’s On the Corner killed it. Is he dead? Where do you see the future of music?
The thing is, jazz is so open that it’s a little hard to kill it. An individual can kill their own career: if you limit it to a sound or an era, it’s hard to beat the audience you started with, and they get older as you get older. For me, this is not exciting. I want to be open enough to attract an audience of any age. That’s why I work a lot with younger people. They are the future, and I am always looking forward. When I was young, musicians from previous generations helped and encouraged me a lot, and showed me mistakes in my thinking about the structure of a song. I’m at that point in my life where it’s time to pass the baton to younger musicians. But I’m not ready to leave yet.
Herbie Hancock performs at the Glastonbury Festival Pyramid …