Jazz & Me - Part 4 - Herbie Hancock

I was listening to Herbie Hancock a full two decades before I knew who he was or what jazz was.

Herbie in 1983 wrote the chart-topping hit Rockit that was one of the first radio singles to use turntable scratching. When I was eight years old, Top 40 radio stations were so into this song that I probably heard it four or five times a day. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized the song came from a piano prodigy who by his early 20s had composed some of the most ground-breaking jazz that the genre had seen. 

By the time I was in college, hip-hop artists were remaking his early hits like Cantaloupe Island.

 Herbie’s musical career is so far reaching – stretching from his time as a dedicated sideman with Miles Davis in his early 1960s post-bop years to collaborations with folk singer Joni Mitchell – that a considerable portion of it is not hugely interesting to me. But Herbie’s solo career of the 1960s has a magnetic appeal that has left me wanting to dig through every album and really listen to every song.

The sound I most associate with Herbie is what I hear on albums like the 1964 Empyrean Isles, with songs like One Finger Snap, with its catchy and complex melody over top of a few chords held for long stretches. 

Or the enigmatic Oliloqui Valley, with its rumbling bassy intro and dark melody, its long modal-style stretches of single chords, and its sudden jump to a completely different set up harmonies.

This music to me sounds to me as if the harmonies and melodies are constantly hovering without landing, or perhaps constantly implying something without actually saying it. I like to congratulate myself for independently reaching a conclusion that Herbie himself reached while writing what would become an immensely popular jazz standard called Maiden Voyage, from the 1965 album of the same name.

Herbie in his memoir Possibilities says the song was originally a TV jingle commissioned by an ad agency that wanted something that would be readily identified as jazz by self-assumed sophisticates but not something too experimental that would turn those folks off. 

I wrote the first chord, then the second, then the third . . . and then I got stuck. I couldn’t figure out where to go next. I kept playing the first three chords over and over, then trying out different chords for the resolving fourth, but no matter what I tried, nothing seemed to work. Where does the song go from here? I finally gave up and decided to sleep on it.

His wife Gigi, however, wasn’t having any of it. He had to have it finished by the next morning, so she ordered him to get back out of bed and get the job done.

So I went back to the piano, frustrated and tired. At that moment something in my head told me to stop trying so hard and just listen to what the song was telling me. I played those first chords again—and suddenly I got it! The first two chords should also be the last two chords. So what would normally be the ending chord—the cadence—would actually be cycling back around to the opening. The song would be structured like a spiral. This seemed like a simple solution, but at the time you never heard jazz tunes where the chord structure didn’t land anywhere but just kept spiraling.

Herbie now describes this as his “go-to” song, and one that has special significance to him.

And of course it’s also kind of a dedication to Gigi, since she’s the one who made me get my ass out of bed and finish it.

Amen.

Music theory would describe this type of musical structure as “quartal harmony,” which was used extensively by 19^th century French composer Claude Debussy and 20^th century Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.

Much like my fascination with McCoy Tyner’s Gregorian-like drones, I’m drawn to Herbie’s exploration of extended soloing over a single chord that is stretched out for several minutes. You can hear this in songs like Riot, The Egg or King Cobra, or Three Bags Full. I think my favorite illustration of this is from a song called A Quick Sketch, a delightfully cheeky name for a 16-minute tune. The 1982 recording included a young and brash New Orleans trumpet player named Wynton Marsalis.

The song is a showcase for how musicians can use the simplest of harmonic structures to build tension and create mood. The first two minutes of the song rest on Herbie playing the same low bass note on the piano; the trumpet and drums come in and out at different times and create varying layers of dynamics and intensity. (I repeatedly tried and failed to edit this song. No excerpting did it justice. Just listen to it)

Herbie would later stumble over an inherent pitfall of this style of music: when taken to an extreme, it can indeed get dull. As noted by writers Gary Giddins and Scott Deveaux in the voluminous book entitled simply Jazz:

But not every album worked. Hancock’s efforts in the late 1970s were marred by excessive repetition, as Hancock conceded: “We thought it would be hypnotic rather than monotonous.”

The concepts of drone-like chanting would for Herbie extend beyond music into his personal and spiritual life. He along with saxophonist Wayne Shorter became devotees of Nichiren Buddhism. Herbie says it was this meditative chanting that allowed him to discover that he had been a “jazz snob” all his life and needed to make music that the average person would be able to relate to. That set Herbie on the path that would lead him to write songs like Rockit, giving me an unwitting introduction in my grade-school years to a musician that I would come to develop so much admiration for.

I’ve honed in on Herbie’s work from his first solo album Takin’ Off in 1962 until his politically-inspired 1968 album The Prisoner, which brings experimentation and creepy-sounding innovation without straying too far out of the bounds of what still sounds to me like jazz. After this, he began a project called Mwandishi, which is sufficiently avant garde in experimentation that I’m still making it part of my musical comfort zone.

The more I learn about Herbie, the more he seems like a great guy. The sort of person I would genuinely want to sit down to have a few beers with, which is not something I could say of all the musicians I admire. The brutal honesty of his memoir really hammered this home for me. Particularly his acknowledgement that about 15 years ago he struggled for several months with crack addiction, something he had managed to keep quiet but decided to reveal anyway as part of a Buddhism-inspired effort to turn the page on it. Below is a segment in which he describes how Miles Davis helped him to change his understanding of what it means to make a mistake. His approach to music has pushed me to think about what I can learn about myself and about life from music.

Albums of the era:

  

Takin’ Off, 1962	Maiden Voyage, 1965
My Point of View, 1963	Speak like A Child, 1968
Inventions and Dimensions, 1963 Empyrean Isles, 1964	The Prisoner, 1969

Sideman performances of the era

                                   

            Hub-Tones, Freddy Hubbard, 1962

            It’s Time, Jackie Mclean, 1964

            Component, Bobbie Hutcherson, 1965