Herbie Hancock, the possibilities of grace / At Franck Médioni's request*2024-12-01
Herbie Hancock changed the course of my life, in three stages: the first when I first heard him, the second when I first saw him live, the third when I first met him.
***
So it was in the early 1980s, at the end of my high school years, in the heart of Paris’ fifth arrondissement, still well marked by its student past. Jazz music had already taken a serious hold of me, my grandfather had hooked me on to its classical age, and a few providentially selective friendships had opened me up to his post-war modernity, one like the others having thus introduced me to a universe of strong emotions, competing more or less harmoniously with the zeitgeist. For me, at that time, everything was about Duke, Armstrong, Django, Erroll Garner, Bird, Dizzy, Monk, Bud, Brubeck, Blakey, Coltrane...
... and then there was Miles' second quintet, which came like an explosion in this universe.
How much has been said and written about this dazzling orchestra, led by a star whose genius lay in revealing the genius of others? A musical page was opening up for me, with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter as its main names; above all, it had the appearance of a small personal Copernican revolution in piano work, which would keep me going more or less permanently over the years to come, both here and across the Atlantic.
Discovering him in concert, precisely alongside Wayne Shorter, one evening in the early 1990s at the Grand Rex (Paris), was something of a second revelation. Unfortunately, amplification techniques, particularly for rhythm sections, had still not calmed down from the excesses of the 1980s... Whatever, the tandem radiated a force I had never heard before. So was it possible to occupy sonic space like that, with a kind of natural energy nourished by the depths of a breathtaking knowledge as much as by the joy of being there, and obviously of being at all. Fascinated at every turn, I let myself be carried away by a piano set whose every nook and cranny I felt I recognized.
Finally meeting him at an improbable Paris masterclass in 1994, I emerged in a few hours from the rather schizophrenic experience of the young executive tormented by a level of uncertainty probably slightly higher than that of his immediate environment. So, after regularly hanging out where the music was happening in Paris, sometimes shyly jamming as the occasion demanded, and having landed only a meagre number of gigs, I found myself playing in front of the man who touched me most in the world...
A little later, as we dined together, I could hear him dreamily telling me about the versatility of Paul Jackson's bass lines, or how he'd still wanted Butterfly to evolve on his forthcoming album Dis Is Da Drum, with the feeling of a new alignment of planets screaming at me to try another life experience. You just had to want it, you had to really want it.
***
Compared with the authority of Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett, it seemed to me that, with a few rare exceptions, the Paris of the early '90s had relatively little of Herbie's magic, unlike New York, where virtually everyone wanted to play like him. Admittedly, the man was already an icon - Watermelon Man, his stint with Miles, the Headhunters... and Rock It and Autour de Minuit of course! A world star, to be sure.
But above all for me... what a genius pianist!
If I were to venture a little bit of analysis, I'd insist first and foremost on that exceptional rhythmic placement. Whether the writing is dense or suggestive, whether the playing around him is intense or calm, every one of his interventions bears the mark of an extraordinary casualness coupled with an absolute aptness, fanning swing with as much vitality as finesse.
The context is certainly favourable: the 1960s were pushing for interaction within rhythmic sections, and the emergence of Tony Williams' unprecedented power and subtlety enabled him to showcase initiatives that were unknown to any pianist at the time. Under Herbie's fingers, whatever the phrase, whatever the chord, whatever the silence, the feeling of obviousness is such that you'll soon be moaning with delight.
Then, there's his harmonic world, and the countless audacities he displays in his writing and playing. The Blues at first, of course, so firmly anchored in his music that he seems to knead every conceivable nook and cranny. Then his choice of voicings comes to mind, embracing a zeitgeist that others sum up in the catchphrase "In and Out", and exploring a number of twisting effects with a kind of permanent playfulness: here a chord substituted for another, often on the rebound of Ron Carter's initiatives, another exceptional partner so expert in substitution; there a poly-harmonic effect borrowing as much from certain approaches in contemporary music as from others in free-music, opening up a kind of detached conception of vertical constraint or form...
Last but not least, there's his extraordinary spirit of melodic freedom, driven by a virtuosity born of his perfect classical education, and leading him to explore countless paths, each one likely to be extended at the risk of any kind of rhythmic-harmonic friction. A kind of insatiable curiosity that takes him out of the frame at will, only to land on his feet a few bars later with feline suppleness. Perfectly hooked with the band at all times.
Unmistakable, always in the right place, systematically magnifying the sound of the bands he leads or that call upon him, with a kind of permanent creative counterpoint, always serving the essential purpose… Could there be a more beautiful art of attention?
An attention which, as we all know, extends to the point of happily embracing everything that technology has to offer music. Ten years after his debut, virtually all the new electric keyboard lutheries of his generation find in him a kind of luxury ambassador, carrying a message that never loses the thread of shared emotion. Wherever the idea comes from, whatever the instrument on which he executes it, it's as skilful as it is fresh, as structured as it is open... and it grooves so much - no less!
***
At every stage of his career, and in view of his entire body of work, Herbie Hancock is for me the embodiment of exceptional artistic grace. And his choice of Nicheren Buddhism at the dawn of the 1970s, his few steps as an actor in the 1980s, his various institutional missions since the 1990s, or his latest elective affinities with a few select youtubers, are all further perspectives he offers of himself, like a multi-dimensional painting, to be perpetually rediscovered.
Both deeply rooted and a visceral explorer of new possibilities, he touches aesthetes and novices alike with an eternally generous smile, bequeathing to us an invaluable vision of music, to which his discourse on the subject ultimately bears witness: "One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people."
/ May 2024
* For the collective work under his direction Les mots de la musique (Fayard - 2024)