After a grueling two months playing one-nighters around the world, Herbie Hancock ought to be exhausted, yet he can’t wait to get his hands on a piano.
So he seats himself at the 9-foot concert grand that dominates the living room of his Los Angeles home, and his fingers immediately–almost instinctively–begin wandering the keys.
With his right hand slowly caressing the quiet notes up high and the left hand answering softly down below, he’s not so much playing a tune as communing with himself, in harmony and rhythm. Lost in thought, he articulates no discernible melody or recognizable chord changes, yet the sound is pure Herbie: mysterious, lyrical, seductive.
For more than 40 years, Hancock, who has scheduled a week of Chicago performances next month at Orchestra Hall and other venues, has been beguiling audiences with precisely this disarming brand of piano jazz, a self-styled idiom that can veer from sublime sophistication to danceable accessibility at the drop of a sixteenth note. His knack for careering between complexity and simplicity, between art and entertainment, has won him nine Grammys, three gold and two platinum records, one Oscar and enough plaques to cover several walls of his home, a short stroll from the Sunset Strip.
Yet on this typically golden California day–the midday sun is flooding in through his picture window and glinting off the top of his ebony piano–Hancock despairs for the very jazz world that catapulted a talented kid from a tough Chicago neighborhood to unanticipated stardom.
He realizes that practically every institution that enabled his talent to blossom–nightclubs, record labels, radio stations, concert halls, schools–has been diminished, at least so far as jazz is concerned, during the long arc of his triumph. Somewhere along the way, jazz, the music that made him famous at age 23 and revered around the world ever since, got shoved into the margins of American culture.
All that remains are the remnants of what once was the jazz industry in America, and Hancock grieves for the next talented youngster who won’t transcend a rough-and-tumble childhood the way he did.
“It’s all about money now, how the radio stations and the record companies and everyone else can make money putting out the hits as fast as they can,” says Hancock, after stepping away from the piano and leading a visitor to his upstairs studio.
“When one company owns 65 percent of radio, when ‘smooth jazz’ is pushing out the core music, when musicians have to write tunes to fit the formats of the radio stations to get anyone to listen to them, that’s backward, and that’s dangerous. It’s bad for the artists, it’s bad for the listeners, it’s bad for humanity.”
Not the sentiments one might expect from an artist whose oft-joyous music–despite its famously kaleidoscopic changes in style and direction–always has been optimistic and life-affirming at its center.
But Hancock, who turns 64 next month, has not given up on jazz or even on its chances of surviving into its second century. He simply rages against the forces he sees as conspiring against the music that gave him everything and hopes that someone, somewhere, will hit upon a way to keep it alive in America.
Herbie Hancock does not need a bar graph to understand the way the music business in America is edging jazz into a kind of oblivion.
Outside of long-standing jazz capitals such as Chicago, New York, New Orleans and San Francisco, bona fide jazz clubs are scarce in the U.S., and musicians who can make a living playing this intricate but profoundly American music are an endangered species, at best.
Among the major record labels, only one–Blue Note–can be said to maintain a thriving roster of jazz recording artists. Even mighty Columbia Records, once the home of Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck, has decimated its roster of jazz musicians, with no less a figure than Wynton Marsalis recently ending a two-decade career there and switching to Blue Note. The vast majority of jazz musicians record for tiny independent labels that consider CD sales of 3,000 copies a hit and 6,000 copies a blockbuster.
Jazz record sales in America hover around 2 to 3 percent of total album sales, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, and the increasingly popular phenomenon of computer downloading stands to diminish even that.
The consolidation of radio-station ownership into a few conglomerates, with Clear Channel Radio dominating the market, has long favored easily digested, mass-appeal music, relegating jazz to the ghetto of public radio stations on FM and dreadful-sounding outlets on AM, both with slender audiences. Even in Chicago, revered around the world as a jazz nexus since at least the Roaring ’20s, not a single radio station offers the music around the clock, though WBEZ 91.5 FM and WDCB 90.9 FM program jazz during parts of the broadcast day.
On purely artistic terms jazz remains remarkably robust, with gifted younger players such as reedist Ken Vandermark in Chicago, trumpeter Maurice Brown in New Orleans and pianist Matthew Shipp in New York brilliantly redefining the music on their own, fiercely personal terms. Yet the newcomers have succeeded in building audiences in spite of the crumbling jazz industry, not because of it.
“Some months, our business is half of what it used to be,” says Bob Koester, owner of the Jazz Record Mart, billed as the largest such store in the world, and Delmark Records, one of the most respected and enduring independent labels in the country. “At Delmark, we’re deleting titles we’d rather not, simply because people aren’t buying them.
“In some record stores, they’re giving jazz half the space they once did, which makes it harder to sell our recordings. And our sales on new product is terrible. Most of our recent releases sold between 656 and 2,148 copies.”
To get by, many jazz musicians sell their discs from the bandstand, play gigs for comparatively low fees and painstakingly book their own tours. They can make a living in music but enjoy nothing close to the rewards and vast audience that Hancock accrued after just a few years in the business.
Born in Chicago on April 12, 1940, Herbert Jeffrey Hancock grew up in various apartments between 45th Street and 62nd Street on the South Side, showing an interest in the piano at age 6 and receiving a $5 wreck of an instrument for his 7th birthday.
He began formal lessons a few months later, after his parents had saved up enough money to afford them, and his progress was so swift that by age 11 he had won a piano competition to play the first movement of a Mozart Piano Concerto in B-Flat Major with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. When CSO managers informed him that they didn’t want him to perform that concerto, the young pianist simply spent a few weeks mastering Mozart’s “Coronation” Concerto in D Major, playing it in a pair of short pants in his Orchestra Hall debut.
For all of Hancock’s talents, however, growing up in a South Side tenement was not easy. Though his father, who never finished high school, worked practically without pause, his income as owner of a small grocery store and later as a government meat inspector, was not sufficient to make ends meet without taking in roomers. So Hancock’s parents, Wayman and Winnie, vied for space in a small apartment with their three kids–Wayman Jr., Herbie and Jean–and a recurrent population of boarders.
“It wasn’t exactly the projects, but it was just barely a cut above that,” recalls Hancock, who witnessed stabbings in his neighborhood and routinely saw gang members, drug pushers and numbers peddlers working the block. At age 6, he was robbed at gunpoint on his newspaper-delivery route.
But he found escape in music, announcing in an article in a neighborhood newspaper, at the time of his CSO debut, that he intended to become a concert pianist.
“He practiced piano so much I used to tell him, ‘Please, Herbie, let the damn piano alone–go out and play with somebody,’ ” his father recalled in a 1997 Tribune interview (Wayman Hancock died in 2001, at age 90, and his widow, Winnie, lives in a Chicago-area nursing home).
With Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller blasting on the record player at home, nightclubs such as the Checkerboard Lounge and Theresa’s Lounge swinging along the 43d Street corridor nearby and jazz giants such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane playing the Regal Theatre down the block, Hancock discovered a music quite apart from Mozart’s concertos. But to Hancock the new sounds proved as mysterious as they were alluring, for he could not understand how these jazz geniuses invented so much glorious art– on the spot–without a note of music in front of them.
For a youngster who had been trained in Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, the thought of improvising an entire performance seemed incomprehensible at best, unachievable at worst. Yet once Hancock heard kids his age playing jazz at Hyde Park High School, which counted among its musical alumni the legendary Mel Torme, he leapt right in. Doubly blessed with a keen ear and an ability to learn at phenomenal speed, Hancock began imitating the recordings of pianist George Shearing, which he played over and over on the phonograph at home until he knew the solos note for note.
“It didn’t take long before he was known as the top musician in the school,” recalls his older brother, Wayman Hancock Jr., a retired salesman of computer supplies who lives in the Chicago area (their younger sister, Jean, died in the 1985 crash of Delta Flight 191 in Dallas).
“Herbie wrote music, he played all these different instruments, he formed a doo-wop group,” marvels Wayman, “and with all that, he still graduated school two years ahead of time.”
By 16, the precocious teenager was majoring in electrical engineering at Grinnell College, a small liberal arts school in Iowa, but he couldn’t kid himself much longer: He was no more going to be an electrical engineer than he was going to ride a spaceship to the moon.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was in 1957, my second year at Grinnell, when I decided to put together a big band,” says Hancock, smiling at the memory. “Now this is at Grinnell, where I had these 16 musicians who didn’t really know how to play jazz. So I had to rehearse all the sections of the band myself and teach them how to phrase. And that was after I had to listen to all these Count Basie records and copy the parts to write up the charts.
“It trained my ear like crazy, but I never went to classes, so I was getting a D in one class and everything else I was flunking–the handwriting was on the wall,” he continues. “I saw what was driving me, what was pulling me like a magnet, where my real heart was, and as much as I liked science, jazz was the thing.”
After graduating from Grinnell as a music major in 1960, Hancock returned to his old summer job at the Chicago Post Office, but quickly launched one of the most stunning ascents in modern jazz history. By October, he was hired to accompany the regal tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, one of the pioneers of that instrument in jazz, in a Chicago nightclub. And that December, when the famed New York trumpeter Donald Byrd came to town and suddenly needed a sub for a pianist who had ducked out on him, Byrd decided to give Hancock an audition.
“I completely freaked out when I heard this kid,” remembers Byrd, 71, speaking from his New Jersey home. “He was already trying to get into new things, new sounds, new chords. I was amazed by how precocious he was, how much intelligence he had, how much integrity.
“In fact, when my original pianist, Duke Pearson, finally showed up for the gig, I said to him, ‘You left me, you abandoned the band–and I’m so happy that you did that I’m giving you a first-class airplane ticket back to New York. Now get the hell out of here.’ So Pearson went to New York and Herbie joined me on the road.”
Byrd was so smitten with Hancock’s talent that he invited the 20-year-old to live in his New York apartment, and by 1962 had set about getting Hancock a date to cut his own record on one of the most artistically dynamic labels in jazz, Blue Note.
Knowing that Blue Note would be reluctant to record an unknown artist, Byrd called Alfred Lion, the founder of the record label, and told him that Hancock had been drafted and wanted to make a record before going into the Army.
“That was the scheme,” laughs Hancock now. “And Lion said OK.”
Hancock’s aptly named debut, “Takin’ Off,” made history, and not only because Lion allowed Hancock to build the entire recording on original tunes, a strategy virtually unheard of in a music business that typically tries to introduce young artists with well-worn hits. Equally important, the recording opened with Hancock’s “Watermelon Man,” which soon would become one of the biggest hits of the decade and an enduring jazz classic.
With its funk-tinged rhythms, coyly lilting melody and unpretentious, down-home sensibility, the tune ascended the charts in the summer of ’62. The following year, when bandleader Mongo Santamaria recorded an Afro-Cuban version, “Watermelon Man” became nearly inescapable in urban America, cracking Billboard’s Top 10. Eventually, more than 200 artists recorded it.
“I was walking down the street, and all I would hear coming out of people’s windows was ‘Watermelon Man,'” remembers Hancock. “What a feeling — I was 23 years old.”
He says that when he wrote the song, he thought of his South Side neighborhood and a particular gentleman who would come by his building at 45th Street and South Park Way (now South King Drive).
“He’d sing, ‘Wateh-meh-LONE, wateh-meh-LONE,'” Hancock says. “And the melody came from the women calling out from the porches: ‘Hey, watermelon man,’ and from the watermelon man’s song.
“Now this is before James Brown sang, ‘I’m black and I’m proud,’ before the whole pride thing. So watermelon was one of those things that we were ashamed of. I didn’t know if I should call the tune ‘Watermelon Man,’ but I couldn’t be that kind of a coward. So I just said to myself, ‘There’s nothing wrong with a watermelon man,’ and I stood by it.”
To a lesser artist, “Watermelon Man” might have afforded a quickly fleeting 15 minutes of fame, but to Hancock it was just the first step in what would be an extraordinary, decades-long artistic evolution. His potential rings out from every track of “Takin’ Off,” but specifically in the exquisite warmth of his tone, borne of years of classical training, the easy fluidity of his technique and the harmonic invention that drives his still youthful pianism.
Moreover, he was able to hold his own against the top-notch Blue Note artists who had agreed to join him for his debut as leader, including the veteran tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon and the phenomenal young trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. With Billy Higgins playing drums and Butch Warren on bass, Hancock was forging a diverse range of musical talent into a genuinely cohesive unit, signaling his development from prodigy to artist.
Though conventional wisdom has given much of the credit for the freshness of Hancock’s early playing to Chris Anderson, a pianist with whom Hancock briefly had studied in Chicago during the summer of 1961, Anderson knows better. “He already sounded like that when he came to me,” says Anderson, 78, a visionary musician who played with Charlie Parker and long has lived in obscurity in New York.
“Herbie had his own style developing for a long time, before he even recorded for Blue Note. I heard him early in Chicago and I don’t think you can give anyone else credit for that.
“In fact, when he first came to me, I was surprised at how much alike we both sounded. And he had studied music a lot more than I had.”
Like Anderson, Hancock had been developing an impressively sophisticated harmonic language that flowered at Blue Note. The ingenuity of his arrangements on “Inventions and Dimensions” (1963), the lyric beauty of tunes such as “Oliloqui Valley” and “Cantaloupe Island” on the masterpiece “Empyrean Isles” (1964) and the utter originality of compositions such as “The Eye of the Hurricane” and the title track on the great “Maiden Voyage” (1965) established Hancock as one of the most promising young pianist-composers of the era.
But for all the breakthroughs of Hancock’s Blue Note albums, the greater revolution came with his work in Miles Davis’ second great quintet. Davis, who throughout his career had shown an uncanny ability to hire players on the precipice of greatness, brought Hancock on board in 1963. With bassist Ron Carter and the prodigious drummer Tony Williams powering what would become the most honored rhythm section of the decade, and with the innovative reedist-composer Wayne Shorter joining Davis on the front line, the band opened up previously unimagined possibilities for jazz improvisation.
During their 5 1/2 years of recording and performing together, they also brought extraordinary vitality to a jazz world already reeling from the effects of emerging, teen-oriented rock ‘n’ roll. Though a music as sophisticated and rhythmically unpredictable as these Davis sets never was going to challenge the Beatles for record sales or celebrity, it proved that there was still plenty of invention and potential left in an art form born at the dawn of the 20th Century–eons ago, by the standards of perpetually changing American popular taste.
owhere is the explosive character of this band more palpable than in live sessions recorded at Chicago’s pint-sized, long-deceased Plugged Nickel jazz club, at 1321 N. Wells St., on Dec. 22 and 23, 1965. A truncated recording of these fabled Plugged Nickel dates didn’t come out until 1982, and the complete sessions were not released until 1995. But in retrospect this music shows Davis and friends torching the long-accepted rules for jazz improvisation.
No longer were the players observing 32-bar choruses or politely waiting for one another to solo, nor were they even observing the melodic contours and harmonic underpinnings of the standards they were performing. In fact, they were veering so far from the template of tunes such as “My Funny Valentine” and “If I Were a Bell” that the originals often were rendered unrecognizable, the sheer fluidity of the group improvisation and the freedom of the instrumental dialogues far upstaging the tunes themselves.
If this music stunned audiences, it forever changed Hancock, up-ending everything he thought he knew about jazz.
“What happened was that, by 1965, everyone in Miles’ band got so comfortable playing together that we knew all the signals, we knew what to expect from each other, we knew that when a certain guy did this, he would follow it with that, and it became boring,” says Hancock. “Well, not really boring, but almost boring. But at least we knew that we had to do something to break out of that.”
He recalls that it was drummer Williams who came up with an idea. “He said, ‘Look, on this next gig at the Plugged Nickel, I’m not going to play the things that you expect. I ain’t going to do that.’ And I said, ‘I’m going to do the same thing. I’m not going to play anything that leads to what you expect it to lead to.’ And we decided to call it ‘anti-music.’
“Miles was cool with that, so we walk into the Plugged Nickel the first day, and what do we see? A bunch of tape recorders. “And Tony looked at everyone and said, ‘Oh, no, it’s the worst time.’ Because we knew that these people, this audience, were just going to be guinea pigs for a rebirth, a painful rebirth of this band. And they were going to have to suffer through that, for the good of all.”
There was more pleasure than pain to be had, however, for the “Plugged Nickel” sessions not only opened up a new era in ensemble improvisation but proved to Hancock that he could adjust–on the spot–to practically any musical ideas swirling around him.
Davis, in particular, was in awe of Hancock’s development during these years, noting in his memoirs: “A lot of times I would let Herbie play no chords at all, just solo in the middle register and [let] the bass anchor that . . . because Herbie knew he could do that. See, Herbie was the step after Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, and I haven’t heard anybody yet who has come after him.”
The band thrived because “there was no jousting over who’s got the power,” says Shorter from his Florida home, taking a brief pause from a still intense schedule of international touring. “It was not that kind of competition going on.
“We never entertained any fear of risk. We didn’t worry about whether we went a little too far. We felt we never went far enough.”
By the time the group disbanded in 1968–because, according to Davis’ memoirs, most of the players wanted to go in different musical directions–Hancock had been transformed.
“I used to have this kind of tunnel vision about jazz, but Miles totally opened me up,” says Hancock. “When we’d be hanging, I’d notice that Miles would have all these albums strewn about the room and lying on his bed. He’d have James Brown and Jimi Hendrix and flamenco guitarists and the classical pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. So when I saw that Miles, who to me was the epitome of cool, was open to all that different music, I realized that it was cool for me to be open to it too.”
The rush of new ideas inexorably led to Hancock’s fundamental rethinking of his art, and when he released his breakthrough electric album “Head Hunters,” in 1972, he instantly became one of the biggest pop stars of the day, his fame rivaling that of Davis himself. The LP took its place as the biggest-selling album by a jazz artist up to that date, and though it still makes some purists scoff, its nearly symphonic tapestry of electric keyboards and synthesizers, electric bass and arsenal of ancient and modern percussion instruments made it one of the defining funk releases of the ’70s.
Though critics began blasting away at Hancock’s “selling out” of the jazz tradition, he tuned out the din, anchored by his embrace of Buddhism and what he considers his constant need to search for new sounds.
“I was being open, when the critics were being closed,” asserts Hancock. “I believed in what I was doing, I was still improvising, I was still challenging myself, and I was still learning. So that’s their problem, not mine.
“I mean, if they didn’t like what I was doing, that’s one thing. But what I picked up most of the time was that they didn’t like the fact that I was doing it. Now who are they to tell me what I was supposed to be doing? I’m the one who decides that, not [critic] Leonard Feather.
“Some articles would say, ‘Well, he’s doing it because he wants to sell records.’ That wasn’t why I was doing it. I was doing it because it was a part of me that I wanted to explore.
“Look–it’s black music, it’s part of my background, give me a break. I’m black. This is our stuff. “
In truth, the tension between Hancock and the self-appointed guardians of jazz convention said more about the plight of the music during the fusion-driven 1970s than it did about Hancock’s art or his journey. For although much, if not most, of the jazz-pop ventures of the period justly have been forgotten, Hancock’s efforts generally were a cut above.
By this time, the business of jazz was in serious trouble. All around them, jazz devotees saw clubs folding, record labels dropping jazz artists and radio stations changing their formats to youth-oriented rock. The situation became so dire that jazz players across the country began presenting their music in churches, school auditoriums, lofts and anyplace else that would have them. They formed organizations such as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago and the Black Artists’ Group in St. Louis, which attempted to pick up where the clubs and the record companies left off.
Still, the demise of such storied Chicago rooms as the Blue Note and the London House in the Loop, the Crown Propeller Lounge and Rhumboogie Club on the South Side and the Plugged Nickel and High Note on the North Side took its toll. As their world faded from the marketplace, jazz lovers found themselves powerless to do a great deal about it.
But Hancock continued to invent, bringing turntable-scratching and synthesized, techno-blast rhythms into the mix with his “Future Shock” album (1983) and its hit dance single, “Rockit”; combining electric keyboards with Foday Musa Suso’s vocal chants and an Afro-Cuban rhythm section on “Jazz Africa” (1986); and returning to acoustic work with recordings such as his sublime — though decidedly unconventional –duets with Shorter on “1+1” (1997).
Along the way, there were disappointments as well, most notoriously the disco-driven “Feets, Don’t Fail Me Now” (1979), with its relentlessly hammering backbeats and strangely lugubrious vocals.
But even Hancock’s critics had to acknowledge that the man was willing to try anything once, and his small role playing a jazz pianist in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 film “‘Round Midnight” won him not only another measure of visibility but an Oscar for his haunting, elegiac score.
Looking back on it, the critical and popular success of “‘Round Midnight,” probably the greatest jazz feature film ever made, raised the curtain for what seemed a promising new era in acoustic jazz. It was in the mid-’80s, after all, that trumpeter Wynton Marsalis burst onto the scene, getting a running start by playing in Hancock’s V.S.O.P. band.
Marsalis’ massive success helped launch a bevy of similarly gifted artists, among them trumpeter Nicholas Payton, pianist Marcus Roberts, drummer Herlin Riley and saxophonist Wess Anderson.
But the jazz bubble of the ’90s was to burst right along with the stock market. Although a new generation of players began attracting young people back to the music, most eventually lost their major-label recording contracts when the big record companies slashed their jazz departments to cut costs. If the new millennium has demonstrated anything about the business of music, it has been the lionization of increasingly bland, retro performers such as Norah Jones and Diana Krall, whose unadventurous warblings pull down huge profits, leaving the real jazz musicians virtually locked out of the cultural mainstream in America.
“To me, jazz, in order to be jazz, it must evolve,” says Hancock. “It’s part of its nature. And when you don’t have the evolution of music, then it’s not going to have the spirit of jazz anymore. Those people in the past played the music that they created. At best, we can only be second best at trying to emulate what they did. And I don’t see young people being encouraged to find their own voice.”
He says he’s also disappointed in what has happened in radio: “[It’s] not broadcasting anymore–it’s narrow-casting. I see people getting their music from the Internet, which means that people can go directly to what they want to hear. So how do they get exposed to music they don’t know they want to hear, the way you used to on radio?
“[It] keeps people confined within their own little worlds. It’s like being in jail.”
As night falls in Los Angeles, Hancock still is riffing on music in America, bemoaning the demise of a jazz culture that once enabled charismatic players such as Davis to reach a wide audience without necessarily diluting their art. Yet Hancock’s own travels in music proceed apace, as the perpetually ringing phone attests.
The celebrated producer Phil Ramone is calling to see if Hancock can participate in a tribute concert to Sting; a TV producer wants to make an appointment to talk about a new TV animation program featuring Hancock’s voiceovers; and all manner of agents, bookers and managers are pleading for a bit of his time.
Meanwhile, Hancock’s longtime assistant, Melinda Murphy, and his daughter, Jessica Hancock, work the phones, while his wife of 35 years, Gigi, pops into his studio occasionally to remind him that guests will be arriving soon.
No matter how the business of jazz develops–or recedes–in coming years, there’s no question that Hancock will be out there swinging.
“I don’t think you’re going to see Herbie becoming a victim of the status quo,” says Shorter. “You won’t see him dwelling on the past or being unable to let go of something from before.”
Indeed, Hancock, who says he has been approached to write his memoirs, has declined because “I’ve got a few more pages to turn before I do that.
“You know, when I perform, I see all these young people in the audience,” says Hancock, who exudes a sense of youthfulness not uncommon among the most enduring jazz musicians. “And I’m not talking about 20 percent of them that are young–I’m talking about half or more that are young people.
“So if they’re coming to hear music from a 64-year-old guy, that tells me there’s an audience out there, but they’re clearly not being served by radio or the recording scene or the rest of it.
“After the old guys like me are gone, who’s going to play for the kids next?”
Herbie Hancock in Chicago
In one of his most high-profile Chicago engagements in recent memory, Hancock will be in residence for a week, playing two dates in Orchestra Hall and making additional appearances in smaller settings, still to be announced. Following are the particulars on the dates that have been set:
8 p.m. April 9, Orchestra Hall in Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave. Herbie Hancock Quartet with Wayne Shorter. Hancock reunites with Shorter, his partner in Miles Davis’ second great quintet, in the 1960s, and on their “1 + 1” recording and concerts of the late 1990s.
8 p.m. April 16, Orchestra Hall in Symphony Center. Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette. This new trio teams Hancock with the comparably versatile bassist Holland and drummer DeJohnette, who’s also a former Chicagoan.
For details on these and other Hancock appearances during this residency, phone 312-294-3000 or visit www.cso.org.
Big talent, nowhere to go
Because the shrinking jazz industry can’t promote potential stars the way it used to, some of the finest artists remain little-known to the general public, including:
Laurence Hobgood. If there were any justice in the world of music, this brilliant Chicago pianist would have had a major record deal years ago.
Maurice Brown. The young virtuoso trumpeter, who divides his time between New Orleans and Chicago, has been developing at a phenomenal rate in the last three years.
Chris Potter. Hard-core jazz listeners know that the New York saxophonist has become one of the most accomplished and adventurous improvisers in the business.
Dana Hall. The viscerally exciting, intellectually formidable Chicago drummer can power both big bands and small combos with a remarkable combination of energy and control.
Maria Schneider. A student of the great Bob Brookmeyer, Schneider has emerged as one of the most skillful, large-ensemble composer/conductors in jazz.
Brienn Perry. In another time, the mighty Chicago singer would have been embraced as the heir to the tradition of Billy Eckstine and Johnny Hartman.
Renee Rosnes. As her recent Blue Note recording with the Danish Radio Big Band attests, Rosnes is a double threat as pianist and composer of large-form compositions.
Jon Weber. Is there a jazz pianist anywhere with as fluid a technique and as encyclopedic a knowledge of American jazz and pop as this Chicago master?
Luciana Souza. The profound Brazilian singer takes the music light years beyond Astrud Gilberto.
Ernest Dawkins. Though he has been touring the world for decades, the Chicago reedist has yet to receive proper acclaim for his extraordinarily effective large-ensemble compositions.
–H.R.
Reich picks Herbie’s best
1. Takin’ Off [1962]
Hancock’s stunning debut shows the early sophistication of his pianism and bandleading.
2. My Point of View [1963]
The luster of the ensemble playing and inventiveness of Hancock’s piano work prove that his debut was no fluke.
3. Inventions and Dimensions [1963]
Elegant Latin rhythms mix with exceptional contributions from Willie Bobo and Osvaldo “Chihuahua” Martinez.
4. Empyrean Isles [1964]
Displays Hancock’s stylistic range, from the soaring lyricism of “Oliloqui Valley” to the bold experimentation of “The Egg.”
5. Maiden Voyage [1965]
One of Hancock’s most popular from the era, this album alludes to both the musical depth and tuneful accessibility of his work.
6. Miles Davis: The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel [1965]
This seven-CD set represents a breakthrough in ensemble improv, with Hancock on piano.
7. Speak Like A Child (1968)
Hancock’s arrangements convey a high degree of delicacy and subtlety.
8. Sextant [1972]
This last recording by Hancock’s “Mwandishi” band dips into gloriously strange electronic eruptions.
9. Head Hunters [1973]
This ’70s commercial smash not only launched the hit single “Chameleon” but gave needed credibility to the fusion idiom.
10. 1 + 1 [1997]
Hancock and Wayne Shorter, kindred spirits since they met in 1963, unfurl sublime duets.
