Herbie Hancock doesn’t get the respect he deserves. For years I thought he was lame — the jazz musician who wrote that weird proto-rap song and composed the kind of music they play in places like Starbucks. In part, I was correct in my assessment. Hancock has the curse of the prolific, which means that there is going to be some real questionable material spread out among the classics, which doesn’t always help with a musician’s legacy. But in so many ways that I didn’t realize when I held that opinion, I was dead wrong.
Hancock played with Miles Davis in the 1960s as part of his Second Great Quintet, and will always be associated with Davis in some way. One was a mentor to the other, but their careers also mirrored each other in fascinating ways — each moved into more free-form, experimental music in the late-’60s and ’70s, which was met with puzzled reactions from jazz diehards. Davis was kicking holes in the wall and then turning his back on his fans when they looked through, while Hancock was doing similar but less aggressive work. Hancock was traveling into space while Davis was digging his heels into the pavement, and both moved back into more listener-friendly territory later in their careers. Their middle, difficult periods were chalked up to growing pains.
But recently, perfectly coinciding with a pretty deep personal listening exploration I was undertaking into his most far-out material over the years (prompted by a great book called “You’ll Know When You Get There” by Bob Gluck), Hancock’s adventurous side has started popping up on the cultural radar again. In October he appeared on the new album from electronic wizard Flying Lotus, playing keyboard and helping compose two of the tracks, and now he has a memoir titled “Possibilities” (released October 23 by Viking), where he looks back on his career with an amazing amount of clarity and poise.
The most interesting parts of the memoir for me — understandably, given my recent listening habits — were in Hancock’s post-Miles period in the early 1970s. Still buzzing off the freedom Davis allowed in his band — he would tell members to avoid “butter notes,” to their confusion — Hancock started perusing whatever fresh musical path was laid down in front of him. For a brief period of time, that was the Mwandishi Band, a sextet that featured Buster Williams, Bennie Maupin, and others. They all adopted Swahili names, and began digging back into their cultural roots and applying it to music that was increasingly flowing outside of any traditional structure. Hancock describes in his book the feeling of playing those early shows with the group:
“As we got deeper into the music we became one big, pulsating creature — all of those guys somehow became me, and I became all of them. It was as if we were inside each other, in a way I had never felt before and have never felt since. It was a deeply spiritual experience.”
Later, the group would add synthesizers, which provided the transition into the next phase of Hancock’s career, the funkier Headhunters group. Everything began sounding more and more strange, less jazz and more modern but still spacey (on the cover of their live album “Flood,” an illustration shows them literally exploring an uncharted planet). And this was by a group of guys who were not heavy into drugs. They became vegetarians, did yoga, and adopted Buddhist chanting — and weirdly, they became more famous.
The end of the Headhunters period in the book, when Hancock truly becomes a mainstream figure (in the ’80s he would win Grammys and Oscars), is where the book begins to dip. He was a true innovator, and it’s interesting to hear his stories about his obsessions with technology and experiments with all the different gadgets and computers that were just then coming on the market. But his growing reliance on Buddhism, which he credits with helping him through many of the crises of his life, becomes a narrative crutch in the book. It seems that any time Hancock has a problem, he just chants and it solves itself.
But Hancock is so understanding of his own faults, and so gracious of the support of others, that the voice on the page develops with ease. It’s hard not to like the guy who is telling you his story, a man who is at peace and continues to be truly invested in musical exploration in a way too few have ever been. He’s comfortable talking clearly about the technical side of music while also understanding that a big part of why people read a musician’s memoir is for the dirt, moving freely through all these different modes in “Possibilities.” The title begins to take on a double meaning — all the choices made in the past, good and bad, and all the musical possibilities of the future still left unexplored.
