Herbie Hancock
In Tokyo for charity concerts, the piano legend says the worst is over for jazz

Hancock jams with shamisen player Agatsuma

What does jazz great Herbie Hancock have in his two iPods? “The fact of the matter is, almost nothing,” Hancock says a laugh as he settles into a sofa at sponsor Amway’s headquarters in Shibuya. Music by collaborators Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, Sting and some audio books are among the selections to be found on his iPod, but Hancock, who spoke with Metropolis before the first of two benefit concerts for an Amway charity in Tokyo last month, is not embarrassed to admit that he has little use for the iconic music listening device.

“I can’t think of anything [in my iPod] that would shock someone. What might shock them more is that I don’t listen to anything that much. I get tired of listening to music. I know other artists feel the same way. If we have to, say, take a limo to the airport, and the driver assumes that the musician in the car wants to hear music, they’ll turn on the radio. Many times we artists ask them to turn it off because we’re always working on projects and would rather have silence.”

Over the course of the interview, Hancock takes an expansive view of music, and in particular of jazz. This should come as no surprise. After bursting onto the scene as a prodigy in the ’60s with songs like “Watermelon Man” and going on to do pioneering work with trumpeter Miles Davis, Hancock quickly proved himself a maverick, recording one of the world’s first electro albums, Headhunters, in 1973.

He bears this out in concert later that evening, shifting easily from early standards such as his classic, contemplative “Maiden Voyage” to the driving electro-funk of his oft-sampled Headhunters era, and newer, pop-oriented material from his recent album Possibilities, which featured vocalists including John Mayer and Sting. He even brings out opening act, Japanese shamisen virtuoso Agatsuma, for a surprisingly effective jam session on the bluesy “Watermelon Man.”

Yet Hancock, 66, recalling the time when Davis first asked him to play an electric piano, says that he was once as narrow-minded as the critics who accused him of betrayal when he released Headhunters. “One day I walked into the recording studio and didn’t see a piano. I asked Miles what he wanted me to play, and he said, ‘Play that,’ and pointed to a Fender Rhodes in the corner. I said, ‘OK,’ but inside I was thinking, I got to play this toy? So I pulled it over and turned it on and played a chord, and it sounded pretty nice!

“I learned a good lesson, which is to form your own opinion based on your own experience. The same thing applies to when I did the Headhunters album. I got a lot of flack, particularly from jazz critics. The truth is, they never really bothered to listen to what I was playing or how the tunes were constructed, how it was improvised. They immediately rejected it because they didn’t hear dig-diga-dig-diga-dig from the drums. They were listening for something they wanted to hear. Well, it ain’t their record—it was my record! That’s what kills music and that’s what can kill jazz: being closed minded.”

Which leads to the inevitable question: Almost a century after its birth and long since its heyday, is jazz healthy? “I think the worst is over,” offers Hancock, a practitioner of the Soka Gakkai sect of Buddhism, which has its roots in Japan. “I’m seeing younger people coming out of the woodwork in support of jazz. It’s just evolving. With some clever and new means to expose jazz to the public, I look forward to a brighter future for jazz in America.”

With some of the most interesting jazz now being made outside of its American homeland in places like northern Europe, what are the defining elements that will keep it ‘jazz’? “That it’s open and inclusive; that it’s secure enough; that it has within its character the ability not only to lend itself to other genres but to borrow from other genres too,” Hancock ventures.

“What we call the blues grew out of a life situation,” he expands. “The blues wasn’t something that was constructed out of thin air. It was an expression of a life situation, but that life situation need not be expressed only in that way to call it jazz, or to call it blues. In other words, it doesn’t have to have the black, ethnic American character to have a semblance of blues. There’s lifeblood that is at the heart of jazz, and it has more to do with the human spirit than it has to do with a particular ethnic group. But because of the strength of those roots, it will always be somehow inherent in the best of jazz expression.”

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