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| Herbie Hancock
'What's music supposed to be about anyway? Is it a means for a musician to masturbate, or is it for people to listen to? A lot of times, other people turn me on to new people that are doing stuff, so I don't consider myself a spokesman for everything that's going on in jazz. A roadie had some difficulties downloading a certain file. I was able to fix it myself. Although my parents were playing jazz for me when I was a kid, I didn't pay much attention until I saw someone my age improvising, playing jazz.. 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. And I just practiced on it and practiced on it. I found a lot of little things about details, about accents and how much of an accent to make. Another thing that I noticed is a lot of people in the hip hop scene have a great respect for jazz and have incorporated by sampling some elements that come from jazz. As far as actually writing scripts or stories... now scenarios, most people have ideas for scenarios that could be the basis for a film. As the 1960s began, jazz music was still at an apex, with hard bop groups led by the likes of Miles Davis and John Coltrane remaining a force on the musical landscape. Being a musician is what I do, but it's not what I am. But I cant name a specific synthesizer that is my favorite. But I have to be careful not to let the world dazzle me so much that I forget that I'm a husband and a father. But I'm not so focused on intensity from that kind of testosterone level that a lot of jazz is on. But I'm talking about responsibility, a sense of responsibility. Developing software to help human beings develop more of a sense of responsibility. Kids need that. Adults need it too. More self worth. More self-respect. But if I'm banging my head against a wall because I can't come up with any ideas, that's not so much fun. But once Miles would start to play on top of these things we were doing, all of a sudden, it was as though he would go to the core of it. By contrast, wisdom captivates people's hearts and has the power to open a new age. Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission that goes far beyond just making music for the sake of music. Even during the major avant-garde period of jazz in the late '60s and early '70s, the songs usually had melodies, some harmonic starting-off point, or something to unify a particular piece in the beginning. From '70 to '73 I'd had a sextet, but the band was not self-supporting and I couldn't afford it, so I broke it up. And then I didn't know what kind of music I wanted to do, because I was just fed up to here with it. It wasn't fulfilling anymore. He just blew me away and what it taught me was that Miles didn't hear it as a mistake. I always hope that as a performer I'm able to come out with something that not only makes people feel inspired but even beyond that, I always hope that what happens on the stage makes people feel like they can do it. I am still a jazz musician and not a pop star in terms of money and so I have to take care of my family first, then my extended family and my country. I decided years ago that I wasn't interested in being a virtuoso of the piano. I don't go back to anything, I just add. Just like when you eat a meal, it you eat one thing all the time it gets kind of boring. I don't look at music from the standpoint of being a musician; I look at it from the standpoint of being a human being. I feel a lot more secure about the directions I take, than I might have, had I not practiced Buddhism. I had just come out of college, and I figured that I would probably be in Chicago for the next couple of years, and then maybe, I 'd get a chance to go to New York and hang out with the big boys. I mean, nobody has a statement on their record. I remember my very first recording. It was on a wire recorder, as the tape recording was only just out but too expensive. I think a lot of young people being brought up in this scene feel a sense of ruthlessness. There's nothing to plant them deeply down in the soil somehow so they can bend and sway from there. I think there's a great beauty to having problems. That's one of the ways we learn. I took a different view of what it was I had been doing before and started to come to some realizations about the way I looked at life. I want to have a purpose. I was making a hierarchy out of music, and it's ridiculous. I would be all over the piano, but Miles would play a few notes that would just wipe out all that fancy stuff I was playing. I'd rather be a doer than a listener. I'm a human being all the time, even when I sleep. But I'm not a musician when I sleep, and I'm not a musician when I eat, unless I'm paying attention to music or talking about music. I'm aware that a lot of what is happening in jazz has not had a very dynamic change in a long time. I've been a religious, spiritual person for a long time. I've had a lot of music in my own head. If people are pleased that there is a popular acceptance of anything that came from me, I'm thrilled, you know, and flattered. 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! It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself. It was interesting putting this record together, because I was putting it together with musicians who claim that I was a big influence on the music they're making now. It's a statement of our position, which is that we are not making this record in order to honor technology; we're not slaves to that, we don't want to be slaves to that. It's not the style that motivates me, as much as an attitude of openness that I have when I go into a project. It's primitive now, but when you get to the point where you could see someone's face on your screen while you perform with them, that's a step in the right direction. Jazz is a music that is open enough to borrow from any other form of music, and has the strength to influence any other form of music. Jazz is a music that translates the moment into a sense of inspiration for not only the musicians but for the listeners. Jazz is purely about just the music, whereas any of the areas of rock n' roll, because it's a popular area, has in many cases show involved. Most people think that classical music is a higher form than jazz only because it is from Europe, and we were taught in schools only about Western European history. My approach to music doesn't come from me being a certain type of musician, or a musician at all. It comes from me being a human being. Nobody told me I was a child prodigy. Not just in jazz, I think in politics too. Men have gotten to the point where we're not doing a good job anymore. It remains to be seen whether we really did a good job in the past. Now we see that we have to pay attention to the environment. We have to protect it. It's become a real issue and a lot of people are still looking at it from a 20th century standpoint. On a human level, the garbage man is just as important as the teacher or a rock star or a president, because you have to have them. The world would have been dead a long time ago without garbage men. Other highlights? When I started practicing Buddhism 21 years ago. Marrying the woman I married 26 years ago; my wife is quite a woman. The birth of my daughter. Joining Miles Davis' band. People put you on a pedestal when you become famous, in their eyes, or if they really respect your work, they might put you on a pedestal, but I didn't get that as a kid. Recently I've been listening to Mahler; it's beautiful stuff. I just saw a performance of Mahler's Eighth Symphony on television, and it was awesome. The music was so gorgeous I wasn't just crying tears, I was sobbing. Since time is a continuum, the moment is always different, so the music is always different. So in other words, we were constantly challenged to grow, and that's what a master does. 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. So to answer your question more directly, I think it's very important, in order not to have a boring life, to continue to have a sense of exploration, and the courage to take risks, in order to utilize and expand your sense of creativity. So, he taught me how to play a simple riff and I somehow found a couple of other notes to play, then I learned how to watch his left hand and I learned where the notes were. Sometimes you can practice something but what you wind up playing when you're out doing a gig is not what you practiced. What you learn is not necessarily what you practice. Still, when I finally left Miles in '68 and got my own band, it was a logical step; because anybody that left Miles always had their own band. Technology has developed to a whole other level and there's the scientist part of me that loves that stuff. That's when I began to understand what a chord is. So I learned theory to find a shorter method to take things off a record. The arts can help establish stronger relationships between countries and cultures, in a way that is difficult to achieve by our political ambassadors. The concept of improvisation is an idea that's very close to my heart, but I can manifest that in a lot of different genres. It really comes from a jazz sensibility. The fact that young hip-hop artists are searching for the jazz roots of their music acknowledges the greatness of roots, helps a person get a sense of being grounded, of being attached, of coming from somewhere. There are a lot of records coming out, in every field of music, not just jazz. There are some other things I'm looking for in the future. I'm getting ready to put together something, to open up a new avenue for myself, having to do with a symphony orchestra. There was a radio station in Chicago, there was a guy named Al Benson, and he pretty much dominated black radio in the '50s. We decided it would be interesting to approach the music as a group solo. We live on a planet that now must face, hopefully, a form of globalization inclusive of a vision to make the world a better place for the many -not just a select few -and I believe that the arts are in the forefront of that dream. We realize that there doesn't seem to be a lot of people looking into new ways of reexamining the conventions that we've grown to accept in the music. We were listening to a lot of different people, but we were listening to a lot of real innovators, and we were full of ideas. We've been looking at machines for so long, I really wish the technology community would look at human beings first for a change, let's balance the thing out. Well, I was becoming more of a jazz snob, in thinking that jazz was a higher kind of music, and that R&B was, yes, for the body and more commercial. Well, I'm hoping that the narrow categories of music are forced to develop activities that reflect a broader variety of music, so that people get exposed to more variety that they certainly are now. What I always wonder is, why is it that whenever I make a record they think that whatever that thing is on that record, that's the only thing I do? When I did Future 2 Future, it occurred to me, that I hadn't really done anything in electric music in a while. When I do concerts, because I've been in the business for a long time and certain pieces of music have become associated with me, I do some pieces from the past. When I sense a more conservative and limiting attitude coming from musicians, than my impression is that they're really moving away from the true spirit of jazz. When I was a kid, I used to sit up in bed, put my elbows on the windowsill and look out at the stars and wonder. About space, eternity, the concept of God and creation. When I was a kid, I won a contest and played a Mozart concerto with the Chicago Symphony, and I've written some movie scores, and I've been listening to orchestral music for years. When you try to define a purity as being something that's closed and limited, you're not talking about the music that I play called jazz. While knowledge may provide useful point of reference, it cannot become a force to guide the future. Wisdom is on a higher plane, and as human beings, it's part of our 'being-ness' to have the capacity to manifest wisdom through creativity. You can practice to learn a technique, but I'm more interested in conceiving of something in the moment. |
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