Word: hancocks
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...though Herbie sprang from nowhere. As composer and keyboard man with Miles Davis from 1963 to 1968, Hancock long ago made his mark in the jazz community. When he stepped out on his own, it was to make a series of innovative LPs for Blue Note and Warner Bros, that combined an almost impressionist sense of harmony, fleet melodic lines and sprinting tempos...
...something was wrong. "The idea came into my head that I was a musical snob," Hancock says. He noted with growing wonderment that the music of such black performers as Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder was not only commercial but getting better all the time. "I decided that it was now time to try some funky stuff myself and get me some cats who could play that kind of music." Translation: embracing the big beat, Hancock opted for jazz rock...
Even in so broad a musical spectrum-part nostalgia, part status quo, part innovation-the jazz rockers are a stylish group apart. That is due as much as anything to the fact that most of them-Pianists Hancock and Chick Corea, Guitarist John McLaughlin, Saxophonist Wayne Shorter, Drummer Billy Cobham-are graduates of the Miles Davis band, where the movement got off the ground back in 1970 with Davis' first all-out fusion of jazz and rock, the double LP album Bitches Brew...
...What Hancock and the others retain from jazz is improvisation. From rock they have taken the steady, pervasive beat, and especially electronic instrumentation. In his 1971 album Mwandishi (Swahili for composer), Hancock made his first extensive use of electronic sounds with such instruments or devices as electric bass, electric piano, echoplex and phase shifter. Head Hunters finds him, in addition, employing the Arp Soloist synthesizer (for melody) and the Arp Odyssey synthesizer (melody and color). As if to justify his expenditures, Hancock says: "There is only so much you do with a keyboard...
First Taste. Thoughts like that never entered Hancock's head when he was growing up on Chicago's South Side in the 1940s. Because his best friend had one, Herbie asked for and got a piano at age seven. By age eleven, he was good enough to play the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 26 in D with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In high school he got his first taste of jazz listening to the records of George Shearing and Oscar Peterson and trying to duplicate their sounds. At Iowa's Grinnell College...