Herbie Hancock Receives two 2008 Grammys: Looking back at his San Francisco Performance at the Masonic, November 11^th, 2007  

by Steven Mayers
posted February 16, 2008 @ 7:33am PST

In a ceremony that usually snubs the jazz and classical worlds, the Grammys, Herbie Hancock was awarded the “Best Album” and “Best Contemporary Jazz Album” awards last Sunday for his 2007 album, The River: The Joni Letters, beating out Amy Winehouse, Kanye West, and the Foo Fighters. Although this is a big win for the jazz world, it would be idealistic to say that this marks a renaissance of jazz in this memory-deprived nation; Hancock already had ten Grammys and an Oscar and is known throughout the pop world more than most jazz musicians. But, as Mark Stryker puts it in the Detroit Free Press, “It’s better than a poke in the eye!” It was his first Grammy for an album, and the first jazz album to win a Best Album Grammy since Stan Getz and João Gilberto’s 1964 Getz and Gilberto. Accepting the award in Los Angeles on Sunday, Hancock said, "I'd like to thank the Academy for courageously breaking the mold this time, in doing so, honoring the giants upon whose shoulders I stand, some of whom like Miles Davis, John Coltrane ... unquestionably deserved the award in the past. But this is a new day, that proves that the impossible can be made possible."

November 11^th, 2007: Just returning from a run of shows in Japan with members of Miles Davis’ “Second Great Quintet,” Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnnette, Herbie Hancock brings to the Masonic – along with his Fender Rhodes, ARP Odyssey and Minimoog – Benin-born guitarist Lionel Loueke, bassist Nathan East, and drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, as well as Gonzalo Rubalcaba, who warmed up the audience with a inimitable solo piano performance. 

The theatre filled up as throngs of fans jogged in from the rain, and after a lifeless introduction by Bill Holtzinger, the president of the Masonic Auditorium, Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba took the stage. Rubalcaba’s opening set of solo piano brought together various styles of piano, from Afro-Cuban to Stride, from bolero to lullaby, into one flowing, paced piece with soft and nostalgic sections of searching improvisation.  Bringing in melodic and harmonic variations, he, as he puts it, “mess[es] with genres, harmonic codes,” weaves together sounds in a surreal, floating world, mirroring Chopin or Debussy in his use of silence and space, into what he calls “cocina criolla” [Creole cuisine], and in doing so, creates a living American dreamscape. Rubalcaba played mostly selections from his latest album, Solo (2006), familiar melodies like “Here’s That Rainy Day,” blending in with Latin sections and sections of extended improvisation.

Gonzalo Rubalcaba's track listing: Rezo (Praise Be!); Quasar; Silencio (Silence); Improv #1; Canción para Dormir en el Sillon (Lullaby); Improv #2; Canción de Cuna del Niño Negro (Lullaby for a Black Child); Faro (Beacon); Improv #3; Sueña de Muñecas (Dream of the Dolls); Improv #4; Prólogo (Prologue to a Fantasy); Here's That Rainy Day; Nightfall; Besame Mucho.

Herbie Hancock’s rhythm section takes the stage – Lionel Loueke, Benin-born guitarist and vocalist; bassist Nathan East, and drummer Vinnie Colaiuta – followed by the man himself. After the crowd dies down, Hancock takes his place at the piano, and the East and Colaiuta begin to vamp on a Hip-Hop beat in a ¾ time signature. Hancock begins to improvise in a minor key, ruminating over the rhythm with his unmistakably warm touch, and finally breaking into the melody of Wayne Shorter’s composition, “Footprints.”  Using the beat to bring in new melodic variations on the familiar melody, Hancock’s solo is lively and funky, starting on the piano and then moving onto the Minimoog, taking off from a space reminiscent of his early ‘60’s sound with Miles and Shorter and diving into his 1970’s Headhunters sound, crisp, electric and syncopated. East and Coauita form a perfect rhythm, both rock-solid and constantly adapting to the rhythmic varieties of Hancock and Loueke. 

 Hancock announces “Watermelon Man with 17’s,” explaining that they are going to add a new break into the classic tune based on a 17-beat rhythm that Loueke had come up with. Playing his Gibson ES-175, Loueke combines a full-bodied jazz sound with West-African polyrhythm. The next song, introduced as “Soup of the Day,” is an open-ended improvisation lead by Loueke, who plays a complex rhythm on the second string while scatting, and letting the rest of the band take off on top of his rhythm. Look out for Loueke’s 2008 release on Blue Note Records.

Hancock then announces the 18-year-old singer, Sonya Kitchell, to the stage and announces that the next few songs will pay homage to Joni Mitchell. Hancock’s latest album, River: The Joni Letters, is a tribute to Mitchell, whose work Hancock has long admired, and features compositions by Leonard Cohen, Tina Turner, Wayne Shorter, Norah Jones and Mitchell herself. They begin with Mitchell’s piece, “All I Want,” from her 1971 album, Blue: “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling.  Looking for something, what can it be?  Oh I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some.”  With a lower and breathier voice than Michell, Kitchell – mere coincidence or “Miss Fortune with a rose?” – preserves the flowing dynamism of the melodies but definitely a celebration of Mitchell rather than a recreation, working symbiotically with Hancock’s arrangements and interpretations.  

Longtime friends and musical companions, the two very different musicians collaborated on Mitchell’s projects, Mingus (1979), Both Sides Now (2000), Travelogue (2002), and on Hancock’s 1998 recording, Gershwin’s World.  Working with Mitchell’s music on this latest project, Hancock had an epiphany: he, who like many jazz instrumentalists had really never focused on lyrics, began to listen to the words, and began to shape his interpretation of the music around his reaction to the words. 

In his words, “Joni, she's a poet. And her songs really emanate fresh from the words, you know –  that's the core place that she comes from. I knew I'd have to have the lyrics be the driving force for my record, too. So we spent a lot of time discussing the words to Joni's songs.... In a lot of cases, her words are descriptive of a particular place where some activity was taking place, and even certain characters. We'd discuss that, and get almost a visual idea of what the lyrics were about. If anything, it was more like the way you'd approach doing a soundtrack, kind of a cinematic approach.”

Mitchell explains in a recent interview with Jazz Times, “Herbie and I have the same problem from two different approaches. He was going too far into pop and I was going too far into jazz. They accused him of commercialism, and they accused me of obscurity.” She continues, “Some people still think I’m trying to be jazz and not making it. My music is a little different from jazz. Jazz has got its own laws.”

Mitchell has just released Shine, her first album in almost a decade, which is, as always, poetic and free-flowing, even adapting pieces of Kipling’s poem, “If,’ and Tennessee William’s play, The Night of the Iguana. In her words, “I was steeped in swing and like swing still.  I liked Miles, not so much Coltrane. I liked the warmth of Johnny Hodges, and I indulged on that on Shine. No one uses that sax sound with that vibrato anymore because it’s corny, but it can be hip again if it has heart.”

Back to the Masonic: the band finishes up with some Hancock classic, “Cantaloupe Island,” and brings Gonzalo Rubalcaba up during the encore to solo on “Chameleon.” 

The Escalation of Herbie

Herbert Jeffery Hancock was born on April 12^th, 1940, in Chicago. Four years after he began to study the piano at seven, Hancock performed the first movement of a Mozart concerto with the Chicago Symphony. Without the guidance of a jazz piano teacher, he spent his teen years listening to pianists Oscar Peterson and George Shearing, whose music he transcribed by himself, and later became fascinated by pianists McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, and Wynton Kelly. In 1961, trumpeter Donald Byrd hired the young Hancock, and he was signed onto Blue Note Records the following year, for which Hancock would record seven albums as a bandleader and collaborate with Grant Green, Bobby Hutcherson, Sam Rivers, Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard.

Handpicked by Miles Davis for his “Second Great Quintet” in 1963, with Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums, and with Sam Rivers, George Coleman, and then Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Hancock’s sound was foundational in the band, which is considered one of the top jazz ensembles in the history of jazz, its rhythm section breaking into uncharted seas of rhythmic flexibility and originality in melodic and choral arrangements. After releasing Seven Steps to Heaven with the quintet in 1963, Hancock would play on twelve more Miles Davis albums in the next twelve years including Miles Smiles (1966), Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968), In a Silent Way (1969), and On the Corner (1972), Maiden Voyage (1965)

Hancock’s fascinations for creating music with electronic instruments – including the Fender Rhodes, the ARP Odyssey, the Minimoog, and the Apple computer – lead him to form Mwandishi (Swahili for “writer”), a sextet made up of Hancock, drummer Billy Hart and bassist Buster Williams, and a trio of exploratory horn players: Eddie Henderson (trumpet), Julian Priester (trombone), and multireedist Bennie Maupin. From 1971 to 1973, Hancock produced three albums that would be known as the Mwandishi albums including Fat Albert Rotunda with Warner Brothers Records. In the mid ‘70’s, moving from the “airy” sounds of the Mwandishi to the more “earthy” and funky sounds of The Headhunters, featuring Maupin, bassist Paul Jackson, percussionist Bill Summers, and drummer Harvey Mason.

From 1978-1982, Hancock collaborated with artists such as Tony Williams and Jaco Pastorius, and began to build the sound that would culminate in the Grammy-winning instrumental single "Rockit" from the album Future Shock, with Bill Laswell, which typified his ‘80’s mainstream sound.  And since then, Hancock has continued to constantly push his music into new directions, collaborating with everyone from Carlos Santana, Paul Simon and Christina Aguilera, to John Scofield, Jack DeJohnette and Michael Brecker. From his early entrance into the jazz scene and his work with the young Miles to his ever-changing series of developments, certain elements remains constant in Hancock’s music: his sound round, reserved, acoustic roundness, flowing, economic, lyrical. When asked by Wired News about his double major in music and engineering in college, Hancock responded, “I think there's a relationship: math. Particularly with jazz, but not necessarily only with jazz -- with classical music, too. There's also a sense of exploration that's involved with science and with music that links them together.”

From early in his career, Hancock has practiced Nichiren Buddhism, and chants its mantra Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, daily including before performances. He gives his gratitude to bassist Buster Williams for introducing him to the philosophy in the early ‘70’s after Williams played a particularly “beautiful” introduction at a gig in Seattle, and Hancock sensed a sort of spiritual inspiration.  Hancock recalls,

“I was kind of startled when he talked about Nam-myoho-renge-kyo being the law of the universe. The idea of cause and effect, which is what Nam-myoho-renge-kyo is about, made sense to me. I’m a guy that’s always been attracted to science—and cause and effect is what science is about.  [Williams] said, ‘Oh, you don’t have to believe it. It’s a law. So, if you just do it, it’ll--you’ll see the effect in your life. It doesn’t depend on you having to believe it first.’

Youtube Videos

Check out this video of Herbie Hancock with Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams!

Maiden Voyage at Monterey Jazz Festival with Freddie Hubbard and Joe Henderson

Chameleon live with Headhunters in Chicago in 1974

Rockit music video.