Pop

The man who does everything

Herbie Hancock's smooth moves across a keyboard, and his willingness to experiment, have won him an audience that goes beyond jazz.

[AP photo: 2002]

Herbie Hancock performs at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland last year. “I play because I’m interested in the music being a catalyst and inspiration (for) people in the audience,” he says.

Mention Herbie Hancock to any group of jazz aficionados and most of the responses will sound pretty much the same.

He's a world-class pianist, deserving props as a member of Miles Davis' influential mid '60s quintet and V.S.O.P., and for his duos with pianist Chick Corea and saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Plus, he has composed Maiden Voyage, Dolphin Dance, The Sorcerer and other pieces dear to the hearts of jazz artists.

In recent years, Hancock has gained critical acclaim as co-leader of Directions in Music, a group with saxophonist Michael Brecker and trumpeter Roy Hargrove. The band's Live at Massey Hall CD was released last year.

General audiences, though, may be more likely to connect with the electric Herbie, the forward-thinking musician who played electric piano on Davis' 1969 jazz-fusion classic In a Silent Way, and wielded synthesizers on 1973's Head Hunters album, featuring the deeply funky tunes Chameleon and Watermelon Man. The latter album once reigned as the biggest-selling jazz recording of all time.

Hancock hit the pop charts in 1983 with Rockit, a scratching, grinding slab of electrorock that spawned a heavy-rotation video clip on MTV. The keyboardist also went the way of heavy electronic textures for 2001's Future 2 Future, a collaboration with producer Bill Laswell, drum 'n' bass specialist A Guy Called Gerald, R&B singer Chaka Khan and jazzers Shorter and Jack DeJohnette (drums).

So does the pianist feel most at home with unplugged music, or the plugged-in variety?

It's the former, says Hancock, slated to lead bassist Scott Colley and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington through a headlining set Sunday night at the Clearwater Jazz Holiday. The trio, in recent months, has worked as a quartet, with either vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson or saxophonist Gary Thomas.

"What I'm primarily interested in is acoustic music, rather than electric music," Hancock, 63, said recently by telephone. "It's been my base, first of all. That's how I began and how my career started. I've been playing acoustic piano since 1947, so I'm really familiar with that. Sonically, the acoustic piano is quite a magnificent instrument, in its construction, to make it sound the way it sounds. Synthesizers are not instruments in themselves. But the acoustic piano was always the acoustic piano.

"Maybe this is kind of a teenage era for electronic instruments," he added. "The (volume) gradations on synthesizers are not nearly as much as on the acoustic piano. When they can get to the point where you can control the nuances with your fingers on those instruments the way you can with an acoustic piano, then you've got something, you know."

Hancock long has been admired for his fluency in a wide variety of styles, and his willingness to try new creative routes.

He ventured into film music with his score for Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 Blow Up, hooked up with Gambian kora master Foday Musa Suso for 1986's live Jazz Africa album, dug into hip-hop for 1993's Dis is Da Drum and put his own spin on music by Kurt Cobain, Peter Gabriel, the Beatles and Prince, among others, on 1995's The New Standard. The pianist was seen and heard in the 1986 Bertrand Tavernier film Round Midnight and composed original music for the score.

That restlessness, a lesson learned, in part, from Davis, is an essential component of Hancock's musical philosophy.

"What I'm interested in doing is presenting people with something that they don't already have," he said. "To me, it's a waste of their time and my time to give them something that they're already familiar with. That's like standing still.

"I play because I'm interested in the music being a catalyst and inspiration (for) people in the audience. If they listen to the music and come away feeling something, feeling better about themselves, or feeling inspired, like they have been moved by something in the music to do something constructive themselves, then I think I've accomplished what I've liked to accomplish."