Everybody seems to wonder what age Herbie Hancock is. He seems to have been around forever. Watermelon Man was in the early 1960s, Headhunters was in 1973 and Rock It was 10 years after that. When he received the Academy Award for his score for Round Midnight, he still looked like a very young man and then there were all those years with Miles Davis. The truth is Herbie Hancock is 58. The secret is he started very young indeed.
In 1941 Hancock performed Mozart's D Major Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony. He was just 11 years-old and there seemed little doubt a career as a classical pianist lay ahead. The other possibility was life in electrical engineering, in which he majored for a year at Grinnell before switching, permanently, to music. The real decision, however, had perhaps already been made while still at high school where, every semester, the students staged a variety show. The young Hancock was astonished when a pianist classmate appeared on stage with a trio and they were playing jazz.
"Something about it felt very organised and he was doing it on my instrument. He was trying to emulate George Shearing and he suggested I get some of his records. So I went home and told my mother that I had to get some George Shearing records and my mother said, `You have some George Shearing records! Remember two years ago when I bought you some records for Christmas and you got angry because they weren't the records that you wanted? Well those records are George Shearing records!' I had never really paid any attention to jazz before that and I didn't particularly like it. It sounded a bit advanced and I thought maybe it was something for older people that you had to be at least 19 years-old to play it!"
Having listened to all those records he didn't know he had, Hancock began to explore the music further. He discovered many of the styles he would later incorporate into his own work and developed an approach to the music which demanded an open mind and great versatility. At this early stage however, Hancock was simply trying to uncover what was there.
"I started listening to Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson, Horace Silver and Dave Brubeck. A lot of the guys that were into jazz in my high school were listening to West Coast Jazz and I hadn't really heard people like Art Blakey. The only things of Horace's that I paid any attention to were the funky things. But once I heard what was called East Coast Jazz I immediately gravitated towards it and that really began to move my soul.
"It all had a magnetic effect on me. It was self-expression and because it was improvised it kind of pulled me into it in a way that classical music never did. I enjoyed classical music, but it was just there, it was something that I could do."
Hancock's study of jazz was marked by a certain sense of wonder and by an academic rigour he acquired as a student of classical piano. Apart from the personalities and styles he was hearing on record, he also had an ability to dissect exactly what he was hearing into its constituent parts.
As he had already noticed at the high-school concert, jazz was, for him, a music that seemed "organized".
"Once I started delving into it, with my natural curiosity and my natural analytical brain, I tried to kind of piece things together. First of all I noticed that there were certain phrases that I liked and I tried to copy them off the record. Then I began to notice that certain sections had certain similarities to other sections maybe some of the notes were the same in an improvised solo or maybe there was a similar kind of scale.
"Then I learned about chords. And so by asking a lot of questions and piecing things together, over a period of several years, I began to learn a lot about harmony and theory."
It is part of the received wisdom about jazz that it demands a facility beyond all understanding to the classical musician. Furthermore there is the belief that a classically trained musician simply cannot swing. There are of course many outstanding musicians who disprove this theory, but it is nevertheless a notion which, on occasion, has some truth in it and has often kept both worlds apart. Herbie Hancock's career however, has been marked by an extremely inclusive approach to music and his classical credentials have never been a concern, especially as a youngster.
"I was too young to know that classical musicians have this opinion that they can't play jazz or they can't improvise or that they wish they could do it but they can't. I was too young to be jaded by any of that and I just went after it. But I did begin to notice that there was a certain dynamic approach to jazz - that certain notes would have accents and others wouldn't. And then there were other notes that you almost couldn't hear, you call them ghost notes. But even then, when I discovered what the notes were, if I played them, it still didn't sound like the record. And so I tried to dig in deeper and find out what they were doing on the record that I wasn't doing. And that's when the idea of dynamics came up and the whole swing feel."
There was a brief stint with Coleman Hawkins but, at the age of 20, Hancock began his professional career proper when he moved to New York to work with Donald Byrd. Through Byrd's good offices he was soon signed to Blue Note Records and began work with many of the label's established performers. His first solo album Taking Off included the top 10 hit Watermelon Man, a much recorded and much sampled classic. By this stage he had played with many of the biggest names in jazz including Dexter Gordon and Freddie Hubbard who joined him on Taking Off. What Hancock didn't know, however, was that Miles Davis, perhaps the most important figure of all, had liked what he heard and wanted Herbie Hancock in his band.
Hancock was to spend five and a half years as part of The Miles Davis Quintet, a stunning outfit which included Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter and Ron Carter. It was 1963. Hancock was only 23.
"I was always frightened to some extent. I enjoyed playing but meeting the challenge was always somewhat intimidating. And to meet the standards of the group that I was playing with. There were times when I had my downs, like when my repertoire was limited, or when there were only certain tunes that I had learned, or if I wasn't familiar enough with tunes that had a non-standard form. A lot of people seem to think that jazz musicians are born playing jazz which is ridiculous. It needs a lot of hard work and either self-training or training by a teacher and there's a lot of discovery to be made. But we were just playing the music and trying to live up to the standards that our predecessors had set with Miles's band."
While playing with Miles, Hancock continued to record under his own name but it was only when he went entirely solo that a new phase in his career began. His interest in electronics had taken him into the world of the synthesiser and, impressed by the music of Sly Stone and James Brown, he began to experiment with funk and rock. There was no name for it then, but it was later to be called fusion. In 1973, somewhat disillusioned that what he had been doing seemed not to be commercially viable, he released an album called Headhunters which became the biggest-selling jazz record ever.
Hancock's pioneering spirit had been rewarded.
"Jazz has had its share of knocks from the popular public and, at times, it has gone underground and musicians have had to band together to survive.
`It's a natural process you share things that you learn. That's one of the greatest things about Miles. He had the courage to stand up for young musicians and encourage their development and meanwhile he's a big star in the jazz world, right at the top. When I first started playing with Miles I tried my best to do what I thought would be comfortable for Miles and that is to play like Wynton Kelly or Bill Evans. But he didn't want me to sound like them, he wanted me to sound like me."
Ten years later, he did it again. Having spent a few years playing with some of Miles's former sidemen, Hancock released Future Shock - a rhythm 'n' blues and dance hit full of computers, synths and all manner of electronics. It was both an experimental and a commercial success and the single Rock It won him a Grammy. Now in the 1990s, Hancock is still moving from one thing to the next. There is a brand new Headhunters album, his interest in electronic music and funky sounds is undiminished and yet his role as a pioneer in various strands of acoustic jazz and fusion is not neglected either. It is perhaps ironic that while many of the younger musicians are rehabilitating older and less fashionable forms of jazz, Herbie Hancock, an old timer despite his age, is still at the cutting edge and ready to embrace whatever new music might turn up next.
"I really respect the young musicians who have taken the time and energy and have the desire to really delve into the styles of the past to learn how to play stride piano or ragtime or boogie or swing, all the various styles from before what we call modern jazz. But I feel very comfortable with the fact that I never learned to play in Fat's Waller's style - even though he was both my parents' favourite musician. I didn't have any real personal interest in it other than from the standpoint of respect and realising that this was the foundation of the jazz I began to play. But I pretty much started with jazz in the 1950s, went back to the 1940s and then went further forward. I've chosen to explore the jazz that I grew up with and, later on, as jazz began to take on influences from other areas like rock 'n' roll and funk or hip-hop or whatever, if I felt any affinity for it, I'd quite naturally explore those areas too. But I don't think anybody has the right to decide what the proper path is. I think that's the choice of the musician."