Hancock, who will perform at Bergen Performing Arts Center Feb. 9, loves his music as well as the human side of music-making.
Jazz legend Herbie Hancock believes music can unite people, even those who might not seem like natural pairings. Which is why he’s worked with dozens of musicians during his 50-plus year career.
Among his most recent collaborators: rappers Snoop Dogg and Common.
“Music is a platform for bringing people together and we really need that right now,” Hancock said in an interview with NJ Advance Media. “When I think about purpose, the grand purpose, especially today, it is to encourage a kind of togetherness and respect for people who are not like me, who are not like whatever groups I may belong to.”
For Hancock, who will take the stage at Bergen Performing Arts Center Feb. 9, it’s always been about innovation.
“As a music creator, collaboration is challenging but it’s so stimulating,” the 14-time Grammy winner said. “It helps you expand and you come up with stuff you never would have come up with by yourself.”
A child piano prodigy, Hancock was 22 when Blue Note Records released the first of his 41 studio albums, 1962’s “Takin’ Off.”
“Watermelon Man” is perhaps the album’s best known tracks, an homage to the street fruit vendors he heard calling for customers in his Chicago neighborhood. Paste magazine called the song “youthful and groovy, but the gritty and dissonant parts of the scene–the racism and poverty of early-50’s South Side–can still be heard, as well.”
That debut caught the attention of Miles Davis, who invited Hancock to join his Second Great Quintet and to try the electric piano.
In an article subtitled “How Miles Davis’s second quintet changed jazz,” The Guardian newspaper called the quintet’s method “‘time, no changes’ because of their emphasis on strong rhythmic grooves without the dictatorial patterns of song-form chords. At times they veered close to free-improvisation, but the pieces were as thrilling and hypnotically sensuous as anything the band’s open-minded leader had recorded before.”
Hancock continued to record with Davis and as a solo artist. In the 60s and 70s, he brought funk and rock into some of his compositions, Latin jazz rhythms and Afro-Caribbean beats into others. In the 1980s, he experimented with electronics and synthesizers. Even people who say they don’t know anything about jazz will probably recognize Hancock’s 1983 hit “Rockit.”
As he once found inspiration in others’ works, Hancock is now the one inspiring people. Recently the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz and the University of California -Los Angeles’ Institute of Jazz Performance were renamed in Hancock’s honor.
In his role promoting those institutions, Hancock wants to emphasize the “ethics of jazz,” a concept Hancock has long promoted. It puts an emphasis on the people, less on the business of music. Hancock, a practicing Buddhist for more than 40 years, said that includes the importance of listening, being open-minded and trusting one’s fellow musicians.
“It’s an emphasis on the humanistic attributes of jazz,” Hancock said. “When people are playing and improvising, they’re sharing ideas. They’re totally in the moment. They’re not being judgmental … That’s the foundation of the ethics of jazz. Those are the things we should be promoting.”
HERBIE HANCOCK
30 N. Van Brunt St., Englewood
Tickets: $ 59-129, available online at https://www.bergenpac.org/. Feb. 9
Natalie Pompilio is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. She can be reached at nataliepompilio@yahoo.com. Find her on Twitter @nataliepompilio. Find NJ.com/Entertainment on Facebook.