THE INSPIRATION SERIES
Herbie
Hancock
Still interested.
By Rob Urban
Three ways in
Herbie Hancock’s mother had already bought the records.
In his NEA interview with A. B. Spellman, Hancock recalls seeing a schoolmate improvise at the piano. Here was someone his own age doing something he wanted to learn. He began playing with the boy, who recommended George Shearing. When Hancock took that recommendation home, his mother reminded him that she had given him Shearing records two years earlier. They were waiting in the cabinet.
I love the small comedy of that discovery. A record can sit within reach until an encounter makes it audible. His mother had offered something; another young musician helped him become ready for it.
That is a lovely beginning for a career in which listening keeps changing the available choices. Hancock’s piano never stopped being interesting. Neither did the possibilities on the other side of the electrical outlet.
The watch and the piano.
The same interview supplies another useful detail. At Grinnell, Hancock studied pre-engineering before changing his major to composition. As a child, he had liked taking watches and other objects apart. Electronic instruments eventually gave those interests somewhere to meet.
It is tempting to organize a life into a sequence of replacements: classical pianist becomes jazz pianist, acoustic musician becomes electronic explorer. Hancock’s work is more interesting when the earlier interests stay in the picture.
A new instrument changes what a hand can ask of a sound. A synthesizer can sustain or shape a tone in ways a piano cannot. The piano has its own rich language of attack, decay and touch. Moving between them can enlarge a musician’s attention to what each does especially well.
What I admire is the active interest behind those choices. Equipment enters a musical relationship. Someone still has to listen, decide and respond. Having more possibilities can mean having more interesting decisions to make.
HEAD HUNTERS / 1973
Attention can begin
in the feet.
For Head Hunters in 1973, Hancock gathered Bennie Maupin, Paul Jackson, Harvey Mason and Bill Summers. The album’s notes describe a desire for a more grounded, danceable sound after the Mwandishi period. His admiration for Sly Stone helped him imagine that direction.
There is a particularly good instrumental detail in those notes: no guitarist. Hancock heard a possibility in the Clavinet’s plucked character and played it rhythmically to fill that part of the arrangement. A timbre helped suggest the shape of a band.
Listen to “Chameleon” for how repetition creates room. Once a recurring figure has established itself, the ear can start noticing changes around it. A small rhythmic adjustment becomes more vivid because there is something familiar against which to hear it.
That is one of the pleasures of a strong groove. You can feel oriented and surprised at the same time. The music gives the body somewhere to settle while the attention keeps finding things to do.
The band’s names belong in that experience. Jackson’s bass, Mason’s drums, Summers’s percussion and Maupin’s reeds participate in the sound’s character. The musicians are making relationships, with Hancock inside them. A list of instruments cannot tell us what those relationships will feel like.
The result invites several kinds of listening. Follow an individual part, then let your attention widen to the group. Or begin by enjoying the movement and notice which detail draws you closer. There is no entrance exam.
A turntable has a voice.
A decade later, Future Shock brought Hancock together with Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn of Material. Grand Mixer D.ST’s turntable work became central to “Rockit.” The album notes describe basic tracks made in New York and Hancock recording synthesizer parts at his Los Angeles home studio.
Those locations are a useful reminder that musical conversation can happen through production as well as through people facing one another on a stage. A recorded part arrives with choices already inside it. The next musician hears those choices and finds a response.
“Rockit” makes the turntable’s rhythmic voice difficult to overlook. Scratching has shape, timing and physical gesture. Naming D.ST helps a listener recognize an individual contribution within a sound that can otherwise be discussed vaguely as technology.
That specificity makes Hancock’s openness more compelling to me. He was working with people who knew things, heard things and did things that changed the project. The encounter gave his own experience another situation in which to operate.
The video, directed by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, gave the music a striking visual life too. For a listener arriving through television, this could be a first encounter with Hancock. Someone else might have arrived through a piano record or the Miles Davis quintet. The different doorways are part of the pleasure of his catalog: the next discovery can rearrange what you thought you knew.
RIVER: THE JONI LETTERS / 2007
The words inside
the instrumental.
The preparation for River: The Joni Letters offers a quieter kind of surprise. Hancock and co-producer Larry Klein spent months reading Joni Mitchell’s lyrics and music before recording. The 2007 announcement describes words guiding the musical approach, including instrumental performances in which those words would not be sung.
That is an intriguing form of care. The lyric can influence pacing and emphasis even when it remains unheard. A musician can be responding to a thought the listener knows, remembers partially or has yet to discover.
The record includes Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, Vinnie Colaiuta and Lionel Loueke, with guest voices including Mitchell, Tina Turner, Norah Jones and Leonard Cohen. Cohen recites “The Jungle Line” with Hancock accompanying him. The voice places language directly in the foreground; the piano has to find its relationship to that particular way of speaking.
I like what the project asks us to notice about interpretation. Respect can involve time spent with the material before making a sound. It can also involve giving a familiar song enough space to reveal something in a different form.
There is a fruitful connection with Ella Fitzgerald’s Songbooks. In each case, a performer’s attention becomes a way into another writer’s work. The listener receives both the composition and the care someone has taken with it.
Something else
worth hearing.
For the NEA’s 2017 profile, Terence Blanchard described Hancock as teaching through his example. It is an apt observation about a musician whose continued interest in other people’s contributions is audible across so many settings.
A younger player can bring something worth hearing. So can a collaborator with a different instrument, a producer, a singer or a composer whose words deserve a longer look. Experience gives Hancock a great deal to contribute to those meetings. It also gives him more ways to recognize what someone else is contributing.
That is the quality I return to when I put these records beside one another. The changes are substantial: groove, electronics, sung language, spoken language, piano. The attentive person within the changes is easier to hear once the novelty of the equipment has settled.
Start wherever something catches your ear. “Chameleon” is a fine beginning. So is “Rockit,” or a song from River. Then follow a collaborator’s name, compare another recording, or return to a passage that seems to have more in it.
There may already be a record waiting in your cabinet. Herbie Hancock makes a persuasive case for giving it another chance.
Listening notes
Did Herbie Hancock study engineering?
He told the NEA that he began at Grinnell as a pre-engineering major and changed to composition after his second year. He specifically corrected the suggestion that it was a double major.
Who made Head Hunters with Hancock?
The 1973 album’s band included Bennie Maupin, Paul Jackson, Harvey Mason and Bill Summers alongside Hancock.
Who contributed the scratching on Rockit?
Grand Mixer D.ST contributed the turntable work. The Future Shock project also involved Material’s Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn.
Sources: Hancock’s NEA interview, official album notes, the River announcement and the NEA’s 2017 portrait, linked above. Checked September 2026. Listening reflections and interpretation are Rob Urban’s.