Herbie Hancock
Herbie Hancock
Herbert Jeffrey "Herbie" Hancockis an American pianist, keyboardist, bandleader, composer and actor. Starting his career with Donald Byrd, he shortly thereafter joined the Miles Davis Quintet where Hancock helped to redefine the role of a jazz rhythm section and was one of the primary architects of the post-bop sound. He was one of the first jazz musicians to embrace synthesizers and funk music. Hancock's music is often melodic and accessible; he has had many songs "cross over" and achieved success...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPianist
Date of Birth12 April 1940
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
You don't know what that's going to sound like; you just do it because the urge is there.
So my parents, particularly my mother, she noticed that I seemed to be interested, so on my seventh birthday my parents got me a piano.
Americans are taught that white people did everything, but that is changing. American history and our dealings with other cultures are a constant conflict of understanding.
Actually, African Americans I think are completely now all mixed.
Technology has made so much information available but what the technological community has not done is to make any attempt for us to figure out how we're going to assimilate all this information.
It might have been somewhat derivative otherwise, and I'm not the kind of person who's satisfied with being derivative.
Nowadays people jog and listen to music. Work out and listen to music. They've got these headphones on all the time. It's just the normal scene.
Then I would watch him improvise, and I would be fascinated by what he was doing.
I knew of jazz, but I didn't like it. I always thought only older people liked jazz - you know, you had to be 19 or 20.
I hope to still be making records, but still traveling and touring, I don't know to the extent that I am now, because it's pretty wearing on your physical energy.
I'm involved in the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, and I work with students with that, and I also help try to raise funds for that.
Another convention is that the drummer and bass player are timekeepers, but there's no reason they have to be bound to that.
It hit me like a ton of bricks, and I had to almost hide my face, because tears were welling up in my eyes. Just the thought of playing with Bird, wow!
So in other words, we were constantly challenged to grow, and that's what a master does.