12/19/2023 0 Comments Herbie and gigi hancock![]() ![]() Later, I found out that Miles knew that myself, drummer Tony Williams and saxophonist Wayne Shorter all had record contracts of our own and had talked about leaving his band. When I got back, he’d already replaced me with Chick Corea. I was supposed to be playing with Miles, but I stayed another week, because I didn’t want to endanger my life. She said: “Where’s my ticket?”īut I got food poisoning in Brazil, and the doctor said my liver was swollen and I had to stay a couple more weeks. I told my wife, we can either have a big wedding in New York and invite all our freeloading friends to give us presents we don’t want, or we can get first-class tickets to Rio de Janeiro and spend our honeymoon at the top hotel there. How did your tenure with Davis come to an end? But I knew computers were going to be important in music, and I encouraged every musician I met to learn how they worked. It was an Apple II Plus, and it had 48k of RAM, and you had to store the programs on a cassette. As a matter of fact, I got my first computer in 1979, which was really early in the game. I was thrilled, because I was an electrical engineering major in college, and had some understanding of electronics. Miles encouraged you to play electronic instruments in the later stages of your time with him. It’s like playing baseball: he was the homerun king, ready to strike any ball and send it over the stands. I got the audience.” He loved being challenged, being stimulated, being thrown a curveball. He said: “I want you to try new things, brand new stuff.” And I told him, some of it’s maybe not going to work, so what about the audience then? He said: “Don’t worry about it. He said : “I don’t pay you to just play to get applause.” He told us he paid us to experiment on stage. You had to be on your game with Miles, but it was so inspiring, working with him. I had to be serious, right? Because the level of musicianship was so high. I couldn’t walk around saying: “Hey, look at me, I’m playing with Miles Davis.” No, no. Joining Miles and having Watermelon Man become a hit at the same time, I felt as if I was on top of the world. Miles Davis on stage with Hancock in Berlin, 1964. Miles Davis then enlisted you for his Second Great Quintet. Within five days of Mongo’s version getting released, Xavier Cugat cut a version, and so did Trini López, and there were five different recordings of it in Jamaica alone. One of them was Watermelon Man, which Mongo Santamaria covered and made a huge hit. Donald said: “We’re gonna tell them you’re being drafted and you want to make a record before you go to Korea,” and Blue Note said yes, which was a surprise, and meant I needed to write some material – and quick! I wrote three tunes one night, and three more the next. But they were still reluctant to record someone brand new like me. Donald said: “Herbie, it’s time for you to make your own record.” Blue Note had a reputation for signing the so-called “young guns” of the era such as Freddie Hubbard and Wayne Shorter, these 20-year-olds leading the next wave in jazz. I was playing in the band of Donald Byrd, who discovered me and brought me from Chicago to New York. I was 22 years old, and I felt lucky that Blue Note was even interested in making my record. In your Harvard lectures on the ethics of jazz, you said that while you were making your first album, 1962’s Takin’ Off, you had “ a subconscious feeling that it would be my last record”. I have a school, the Herbie Hancock Institute – it used to be the Thelonious Monk Institute – and Terrace was one of our students, as was Kamasi. Some of them, their fathers or mothers were jazz musicians, and they’ve inherited that feel, while some of them learned it from studying. I’m looking to these guys for ideas, because this is their century, and I’m from the last century. This new album has taken a long time, and it’s still not ready, but Terrace Martin is producing it, and Thundercat, Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington are gonna be on it, as is Kendrick Lamar. Yeah – my last album! No, let me rephrase that – the last album I was working on. It has been a dozen years since your previous album The Imagine Project. Photograph: Daniel DeSlover/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock Hancock performing in Tennessee, US, in June 2022. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |