Herbie Hancock keeps searching for the unexpected — in life and in music.
There’s something eternally youthful about pianist Herbie Hancock, who has spent his long career doing what enterprising young artists love to do: search for new ideas in sound.
Jazz, pop, fusion, techno, funk, world music — everything Hancock hears eventually makes its way into his art in one form or another, to the exasperation of purists and the delight of anyone with ears wide open.
So perhaps it should come as no surprise that Hancock, at 77, continues to pursue the unexpected.
Hancock’s unorthodox methodology and the lessons he believes it holds beyond music will be embedded in his next recording, which he’s now formulating, he says. Some of his quartet’s repertoire on a current tour will be incorporated into the album, but the project — whose title Hancock does not yet wish to divulge — will be more sprawling in personnel and idiom, with recording sessions that will embrace vocals, rap and, as always with him, the outer reaches of technology.
Even within the parameters of the quartet, however, “We’re mixing tradition with more avant-garde sounds because the technology is there to be able to produce various kinds of sounds and use them as musical statements. Also influences from other cultures.
“I mean, a piece I did a long time ago was kind of constructed like that: ‘Come Running to Me,’ ” adds Hancock, referring to a track from his late 1970s album “Sunlight.”
“It doesn’t have an A-A-B-A form at all, so it kind of really fits in with what we’re doing now.”
As Hancock suggests, his stylistically freewheeling approach holds a broader message about the value of openness, experimentation and risk-taking in everyday life. And Hancock has applied those lessons to himself, nowhere more than in his 2014 memoir, the aptly named “Possibilities” (written with Lisa Dickey).
In these pages, Hancock was fearless in revealing how he felt at crucial junctures in his life. He wrote movingly, for example, of the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was about the same age as Hancock as each was growing up in Chicago.
“Jet magazine published a full-page close-up photo of Emmett Till’s swollen, destroyed face, and although my parents tried to shield us from seeing it, curiosity got the better of me,” wrote Hancock.
“When I picked up the magazine and flipped to the photo, fear and horror shot right through me. No matter how much control I thought I had over my emotions, nothing could have prepared me for seeing the cruelly disfigured face of a boy my age, from my own neighborhood, who’d been brutally murdered for nothing at all. I had nightmares for weeks afterward.”
And Hancock shocked his fans by writing forthrightly of a late-in-life crack cocaine habit he developed and conquered.
He does not regret having divulged so much.
“People were congratulating me on my candor, so I was encouraged by that, in revealing aspects of my life that nobody knew,” says Hancock.
“But also, many people said that the book either helped them or helped somebody that they knew. They read the book and bought it for somebody else who had problems with addiction, and it helped them.”