Hancock sees ‘Possibilities’ in collaboration
Herbie Hancock likes to surprise us.
Remember when the postbop stalwart went funk/soul/ jazz on “Head Hunters” in 1973? Remember when he went hip-hop/jazz with the 1983 dance-club instrumental smash “Rockit,” with its freaky futuristic video? Remember when he got Tina Turner, Norah Jones, Wayne Shorter and others to interpret Joni Mitchell songs in 2007 and won an album-ofthe-year Grammy for it?
Well, the jazz keyboard giant has another surprise in the works: a new album that’s hard to describe.
“There are a lot of different people from different cultures, different genres, different generations,” said the 77-year-old. “I like the idea of expressing music that is designed to show what can happen creatively when we’re working together and the beauty of bringing humanity together.”
The lineup of collaborators is diverse and deep: enduring rapper Snoop Dogg, “Happy” hitmaker Pharrell Williams, hip, versatile bassist Thundercat, tabla master Zakir Hussain and younger jazz stars Robert Glasper, Jamire Williams and Kamasi Washington.
“We’re playing some of the pieces we’re working on in our live show,” said Hancock, who plays Boston’s Orpheum on Oct. 5.
When he’s onstage, Hancock tries not to think but to play.
“The music is like one living being and we’re all like fingers playing this imaginary, many-faceted instrument,” he explained from his Los Angeles office recently. “You’re so focused on being connected to the rise and fall of the music, even the spaces between the notes, the harmonies, the rhythm. Even though that sounds like an intellectual pursuit, the process is more about doing and not so much about thinking.”
The turns and twists in Hancock’s long career — he started as a child prodigy playing a Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age 11 — have produced some surprises that weren’t musical. Such as when he acknowledged his crack addiction in his 2014 memoir, “Possibilities.”
“Both my wife and daughter encouraged me to write about it in the book,” he said. “I’d been trying to shove that out of my mind like a dark period I wanted to bury. I realized that never works. It’s like being in denial.
“Some people have told me they were helped by the book. So I feel good about revealing the truth about what happened in my life as an addict. And I won. I beat it.”
Hancock can get all philosophical, which he did during a series of six lectures at Harvard University in 2014. He was appointed to the Norton professorship of poetry, an award that had previously gone to the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky and John Cage.
“I was talking about the ethics of jazz that are in harmony with being a human being,” Hancock said. “In jazz, we don’t judge what each of us plays. We try to make everything work. No matter what anyone plays, we try to make it be part of the music. That’s being nonjudgmental. We share ideas, we’re not competing with each other. It’s really healthy and it’s giving and extremely rewarding.
“There’s a tendency for artists to feel special because you have a gift,” he continued. “So sometimes they put themselves on a pedestal or the audience puts them on a pedestal. The truth is, the most difficult art to master is the art of living. And everyone has to deal with that.”
The ever-busy Hancock is a professor at UCLA and creative chair for jazz for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But he doesn’t practice piano every day.
“I chant every day. Twice a day. I’m a Buddhist. My life isn’t just music.”