“I do listen to those musicians,” Hancock said
recently, savoring some morning downtime in his home’s tranquil garden
filled with African sculptures and sashaying felines. “But there’s more
than that. Actually, what I try to listen to is life.”
Life must be sounding pretty good to Hancock these
days, and not only because as a practicing Buddhist for 38 years he
cultivates personal equanimity like a well-tended flower bed.
On
passage that’s prompting splashy official and semi-official musical
tributes across the continent. And although he looks easily a decade
younger, he’s embracing the occasion.
Last month he was feted at Carnegie Hall. On
Hancock also is marking the launch of his eighth
decade with the release of his latest record, “The Imagine Project”
(issued on his personal label, Hancock Records), and an extensive
summer tour that will take him from
“I’ve got this window of all of this year and part of next year up ’til
The Bowl’s
with Hancock’s appointment last year as the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s
creative chair for jazz. In that post, previously held by vocalist
A lifelong self-identified “techie,” Hancock said
that, in addition to pushing the mix of guest jazz musicians at the
Bowl and Disney Hall, he’s hoping to incorporate more dance and
performance, as well as computer graphics and film clips, into jazz
presentations.
“The idea of employing visuals is two things,” he
said. “One of them is: other ways to attract an audience, other
pathways that they can use in order to get to the heart of the music.
And it’s also the 21st century. It’s not like 40 years ago, it would’ve
been just financially impossible to do. A blank CD costs, what,
Although the classically trained Hancock has
explored R&B, pop, rock and world beat, jazz remains the alpha and
omega of his career, “the springboard for any project that I do.” And
it’s a springboard with a very broad base. Although other jazz
orchestras and programs, such as Jazz at Lincoln Center, have attempted
to articulate a sort of classic jazz canon over the years, Hancock is
careful in avoiding drawing boundaries about what jazz is or isn’t.
“If you feel it’s necessary for you, in your own
mind, to define jazz, make sure that the definition is broad enough,”
he said. “I think you’re putting the death knell on jazz when you try
to narrow it. It’s not the nature of jazz to be narrow.”
In keeping with that expansive view, Hancock is
frank in acknowledging how jazz and jazz audiences have changed over
the years, and must continue to do so.
“The mainstream jazz audience, just like the
musicians that have come through or from the mainstream, including
myself, we’re getting older and older, right? And we’re dying off, you
know? It’s a natural process of life. But the audiences are getting
older and older too. And they’re dying off, right?”
Part of the genre’s regeneration, Hancock believes,
will come from outside the country where jazz was born. “Jazz is a gift
of America to the world, and it has affected people from all cultures.
That’s why the new flock of jazz musicians is not just coming from
America. They’re from all over the planet now.”
Reflecting that reality, his first-year’s
programming for the Phil is integrating such genre-stretching artists
as the reggae-pop-rock influenced
players and calls him “my brother from another mother,” is eager to see
what his friend will bring to the Bowl and Disney Hall over the next
two years.
“He can do it all,” Jones said. “He hasn’t talked to me about any plans, but Herbie will try anything he feels, man.”
executive, said that although the job’s “basic duties haven’t really
changed” since the position’s inception, each of the creative chairs
for jazz has brought specific new ideas and collaborators into the mix.
As one example, she cited a 2006 Bowl program in which
for the first time in public. That event, Borda said, “absolutely would
not have happened without
Borda also pointed to the performance of a piece by L.A. pianist
collaborative ventures from the artistically well-connected Hancock, as
is his friend Reeves.
“The beautiful thing about Herbie is he views music
without boundaries and he loves making music with everybody,” said
Reeves, who’ll be performing Wednesday at the Bowl in one of Hancock’s
programs that also will include
Few ventures in Hancock’s voluminous career demonstrate that more than “The Imagine Project,” which takes its title from
India.Arie, John Legend, the Chieftains, Los Lobos, the Brazilian
chanteuse Ceu and the Colombian rocker Juanes were among the all-star
project’s contributors.
“This record is like a call to arms, in many ways,”
Hancock said. “If we don’t want globalization to be what we don’t want,
why don’t we create the globalization we do want?”
Of course, coordinating recording sessions with a
group of artists separated by multiple time zones can be almost as
tricky as, say, getting the U.S. and
to concur on trade policy. Although he described the record-making
process as enjoyable overall, Hancock said that he and his team “ran
into some huge obstacles at the worst time” in getting the disc to hit
its production deadline.
“Things started falling apart, almost like
unraveling,” he said. “A lot of the people on my team are like flipping
out. And I’m really glad I practice Buddhism because I didn’t flip out.”
Hancock’s chilled-out outlook also derives from his
sense of connection to life’s mundane rhythms. He absorbed that ability
from one his foremost teachers,
“If you’re walking down the street with Miles, and
you get to a corner, and somebody else is walking and you both happen
to see this person, and they sort of make a misstep and they stumble,
Miles would say, ‘Play that!'”
Hancock, grinning, affected Davis’ raspy whisper. “I
mean, who else would think like that, you know? Like, ‘Do that
musically!’ Because that’s life.”
At least it is for those who, like Hancock, have the ears to hear it.
———
(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
Visit the Los Angeles Times on the Internet at http://www.latimes.com/
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
