Background and career
Herbert Jeffrey Hancock (born April 12, 1940) is an American jazz musician, bandleader, and composer. He started his career with trumpeter Donald Byrd's group. Hancock soon joined the Miles Davis Quintet, where he helped to redefine the role of a jazz rhythm section and was one of the primary architects of the post-bop sound. In the 1970s, he experimented with jazz fusion, funk, and electro styles using a wide array of synthesizers and electronics. It was during this time that he released one of his best-known and most influential albums, Head Hunters. Hancock's best-known compositions include "Cantaloupe Island", "Watermelon Man", "Maiden Voyage", and "Chameleon", all of which are jazz standards. During the 1980s, he had a hit single with the electronic instrumental "Rockit", a collaboration with bassist/producer Bill Laswell. Hancock has won an Academy Award and 14 Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year for his 2007 album River: The Joni Letters, a tribute to his friend Joni Mitchell. In 2024, Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph ranked Hancock as the greatest keyboard player of all time. In 2025, he received the Polar Music Prize. Since 2012, Hancock has served as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he teaches at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. He is also the chairman of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz (known as the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz until 2019).
Hancock was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Winnie Belle (née Griffin), a secretary, and Wayman Edward Hancock, a meat inspector for the government. His parents named him after the singer and actor Herb Jeffries. Hancock attended Hyde Park High School in Chicago. He began playing the piano at the age of seven, and his talent was recognized early on. Like many jazz pianists, Herbie took classical piano lessons. Considered to be a child prodigy, he played the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 26 in D Major, K. 537 (Coronation) at a young people's concert on February 5, 1952, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (led by CSO assistant conductor George Schick) at the age of 11. During his teenage years, Herbie Hancock did not have a jazz teacher. He developed his ear and sense of harmony by listening to Hard Bop by Art Blakey's the Jazz Messengers, Birth of the Cool by Miles Davis, and the recordings of jazz pianists, including George Shearing, Erroll Garner, Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson. Hancock was also influenced by records of the vocal group the Hi-Lo's. In his words:
By the time I actually heard the Hi-Lo's, I started picking that stuff out; my ear was happening. I could hear stuff and that's when I really learned some much farther-out voicings – like the harmonies I used on Speak Like a Child – just being able to do that. I really got that from Clare Fischer's arrangements for the Hi-Lo's. Clare Fischer was a major influence on my harmonic concept... he and Bill Evans, and Ravel and Gil Evans, finally. You know, that's where it came from. In 1960, Hancock heard Chris Anderson play just once and begged him to accept him as a student. Hancock often mentions Anderson as his harmonic guru. Hancock graduated from Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, in 1960, with degrees in electrical engineering and music. Hancock then moved back to Chicago, and began working with Donald Byrd and Coleman Hawkins. During this time, he also took courses at Roosevelt University. Grinnell also awarded him an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree in 1972. Byrd was attending the Manhattan School of Music in New York at the time and suggested that Hancock study composition with Vittorio Giannini (which he did for a short time in 1960). The pianist quickly earned a reputation, and played subsequent sessions with Oliver Nelson and Phil Woods. Hancock recorded his first solo album, Takin' Off, for Blue Note Records in 1962. "Watermelon Man" (from Takin' Off) was to provide Mongo Santamaría with a hit single, but more importantly for Hancock, Takin' Off caught the attention of Miles Davis, who was at that time assembling a new band. Hancock was introduced to Davis by the young drummer Tony Williams, a member of the new band.
Hancock received considerable attention when, in May 1963, he joined Davis's Second Great Quintet. Davis personally sought out Hancock, whom he saw as one of the most promising talents in jazz. The rhythm section that Davis organized was young but effective, comprising bassist Ron Carter, 17-year-old drummer Tony Williams, and Hancock on piano. After George Coleman and Sam Rivers each took a turn at the saxophone spot, the quintet gelled with Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone. This quintet is often regarded as one of the finest jazz ensembles yet. While in Davis's band, Hancock also found time to record dozens of sessions for the Blue Note label, both under his own name and as a sideman with other musicians such as Wayne Shorter, Williams, Grant Green, Bobby Hutcherson, Rivers, Byrd, Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, and Eric Dolphy. Hancock also recorded several lesser known but still critically acclaimed albums with larger ensembles – My Point of View (1963), Speak Like a Child (1968) and The Prisoner (1969), albums that featured flugelhorn, alto flute and bass trombone in addition to the traditional jazz instrumentation. 1963's Inventions and Dimensions was an album of almost entirely improvised music, teaming Hancock with bassist Paul Chambers and two Latin percussionists, Willie Bobo and Osvaldo "Chihuahua" Martinez. During that period, Hancock also composed the score to Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blowup (1966), the first of many film soundtracks he recorded in his career. As well as feature film soundtracks, Hancock recorded a number of musical themes used on American television commercials for such well-known products as Pillsbury's Space Food Sticks, Standard Oil, Tab diet cola, and Virginia Slims cigarettes. Hancock also wrote, arranged and conducted a spy type theme for a series of F. William Free commercials for Silva Thins cigarettes. Hancock liked it so much he wished to record it as a song but the ad agency would not let him. He rewrote the harmony, tempo and tone and recorded the piece as the track "He Who Lives in Fear" from his The Prisoner album of 1969. Davis had begun incorporating elements of rock and popular music into his recordings by the end of Hancock's tenure with the band. Despite some initial reluctance, Hancock began doubling on electric keyboards, including the Fender Rhodes electric piano at Davis's insistence. Hancock adapted quickly to the new instruments, which proved to be important in his future artistic endeavors. In the summer of 1968, after being dismissed from Davis' band under the pretext that he had returned late from a honeymoon in Brazil, Hancock formed his own sextet. Despite his departure from the band—which was disbanded soon after—Hancock continued to appear on Davis’ records for the next few years. His appearances included In a Silent Way, A Tribute to Jack Johnson, and On the Corner.
Hancock left Blue Note in 1969, signing with Warner Bros. Records. In 1969, Hancock composed the soundtrack for Bill Cosby's animated prime-time television special Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert. Music from the soundtrack was later included on Fat Albert Rotunda (1969), an R&B-inspired album with strong jazz overtones. One of the jazzier songs on the record, the moody ballad "Tell Me a Bedtime Story", was later re-worked as a more electronic sounding song for the Quincy Jones album Sounds...and Stuff Like That!! (1978). Hancock became fascinated with electronic musical instruments. Together with the profound influence of Davis's Bitches Brew (1970), this fascination culminated in a series of albums in which electronic instruments were coupled with acoustic instruments. Hancock's first ventures into electronic music started with a sextet comprising Hancock, bassist Buster Williams and drummer Billy Hart, and a trio of horn players: Eddie Henderson (trumpet), Julian Priester (trombone), and multireedist Bennie Maupin. Patrick Gleeson was eventually added to the mix to play and program the synthesizers. The sextet, later a septet with the addition of Gleeson, made three albums under Hancock's name: Mwandishi (1971), Crossings (1972) (both on Warner Bros. Records), and Sextant (1973) (released on Columbia Records); two more, Realization and Inside Out, were recorded under Henderson's name with essentially the same personnel. The music exhibited strong improvisational aspect beyond the confines of jazz mainstream and showed influence from the electronic music of contemporary classical composers. Hancock's three records released in 1971–73 later became known as the "Mwandishi" albums, so-called after a Swahili name Hancock sometimes used during this era ("Mwandishi" is Swahili for "writer"). The first two, including Fat Albert Rotunda, were made available on the two-CD set Mwandishi: the Complete Warner Bros. Recordings, released in 1994. "Hornets" was later revised on the 2001 album Future2Future as "Virtual Hornets". Among the instruments Hancock and Gleeson used were Fender Rhodes piano, ARP Odyssey, ARP 2600, ARP Pro Soloist Synthesizer, a Mellotron and the Moog synthesizer III.
Hancock formed the Headhunters, keeping only Maupin from the sextet and adding bassist Paul Jackson, percussionist Bill Summers, and drummer Harvey Mason. The album Head Hunters (1973) was a hit, crossing over to pop audiences but criticized within his jazz audience. Stephen Erlewine, in a retrospective summary for AllMusic, said, "Head Hunters still sounds fresh and vital three decades after its initial release, and its genre-bending proved vastly influential on not only jazz, but funk, soul, and hip-hop." Brian Case and Stan Britt dismissed the album as uninteresting in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz in 1978. Drummer Mason was replaced by Mike Clark, and the band released a second album, Thrust, in 1974. (A live album from a Japan performance, consisting of compositions from those first two Head Hunters releases was released in 1975 as Flood). This was almost as well received as its predecessor, if not attaining the same level of commercial success. The Headhunters made another successful album called Survival of the Fittest in 1975 without Hancock, while Hancock himself started to make even more commercial albums, often featuring members of the band, but no longer billed as the Headhunters. The Headhunters reunited with Hancock in 1998 for Return of the Headhunters, and a version of the band (featuring Clark) continues to play and record. In 1973, Hancock was commissioned to compose the soundtrack for the controversial film The Spook Who Sat by the Door, based on the novel of the same name by Sam Greenlee, who had grown up in the same neighborhood of Chicago as Hancock. In the following year, Hancock composed the soundtrack to the first Death Wish film. One of his songs, "Joanna's Theme", was re-recorded in 1997 on his duet album with Shorter, 1+1. Hancock's next jazz-funk albums of the 1970s were Man-Child (1975) and Secrets (1976), which point toward the more commercial direction Hancock would take over the next decade. These albums feature the members of the Headhunters band, but also a variety of other musicians in important roles.
