The Complete Herbie

“Chamber music” generally means listening, it means give and take, it means everyone takes turns accompanying everyone else. In his musical world, which spills well beyond the jazz community that holds him dearest, Herbie Hancock is unanimously considered one of the great team players.

Drummer Billy Hart, who played in what some consider Hancock’s most fully realized ensemble as a leader, the Mwandishi sextet, told me: “Of anybody I ever played with, Herbie Hancock is the best example of someone willing to surrender himself to the full band to create a successful composition. . . . He seemed to be playing not just with whatever I had just played, but he was reading my mind and anticipating what I would play next. He guided me like a witch doctor into the better form of whatever I wanted to play next.

“Everybody else in the sextet felt that way, too, that Herbie could read everyone’s mind and support the next event before that event even happened. Herbie deserved that Swahili name, Mwandishi, meaning ‘composer.’ It wasn’t just that he wrote the tunes, it was that Herbie enabled the whole sextet to coalesce into spontaneous, evening-length composition.”

Early on, Hancock could be heard in his role as catalyst on a famous recording by Miles Davis. My Funny Valentine was recorded at a live concert in 1964 with Hancock, tenor saxophonist George Coleman, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams. The LP opens with the title tune, a familiar ballad by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. A generation earlier, on the 1956 Miles Davis album Cookin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet, pianist Red Garland had set up Davis with a piano introduction that beautifully and safely lands in the opening key, C minor.

The 1956 track is a gorgeous reading, but Davis was never one to stay in the same place; he encouraged his sidemen to experiment. In 1964, Hancock also set up Davis. They remain somewhat close to C minor at first, but when Carter comes in for the second “A” section around the one- minute mark, Hancock defies all tradition and plays a D-flat Phrygian chord (rather than the indicated C minor). The emotion at once becomes yet more veiled and mysterious. Davis responds instantly, validating Hancock’s outré suggestion with a poignant D-flat from his trumpet. The ensemble takes a deep breath and commences miraculous chamber playing for the duration of the LP.

Not every superstar is willing to give up secrets, but in his 2014 memoir Possibilities, Hancock was ready to explain his early history and eager to thank his teachers. The base was mastery of European classical piano. Hancock began taking lessons when he was seven years old. At 11, he played the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 18 in B-flat major, K. 456 for a youth competition held by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He won the competition, and then played the first movement of Mozart’s “Coronation Concerto” onstage with the Symphony in early 1952.

After conquering the pure European idiom as a prodigy, Hancock moved onto jazz, first learning colorful harmony and theory from George Shearing records, and then emulating more advanced jazz phrasing soaked up from Erroll Garner and Oscar Peterson. In college, Hancock would begin exploring music for larger ensembles. In 1957, he transcribed an eve- ning’s worth of Count Basie big band charts and made the amateur student players at Grinnell College in Iowa learn the book. “I started section rehearsals for each instrument in the band,” he wrote. “What I discovered was that while everybody could play the notes, only two people knew anything about jazz phrasing. I didn’t want to go through all this trouble to put on a mediocre concert, so I personally conducted every section rehearsal—the saxophone players, the trombone players, the trumpet players. And because nobody knew how to solo, I had to write those parts out, too.”

In addition to doing his homework, Hancock has a preternatural ability to salt and sugar the recipe for the correct blend. If the starting point is simple, Hancock adds spice. If the starting point is complex, Hancock trims off the fat. Two of my own favorite Hancock trio performances are of themes from Ron Carter— one of his key associates, and the most recorded bassist in history. “First Trip” (on Hancock’s 1968 album Speak Like a Child) and “Einbahnstrasse” (on Carter’s Uptown Conversation, from 1969) are both charming, basic melodies that sit just barely the right side of trivial. Hancock goes on a rampage with both, finding all sorts of unexpected experimental harmonies and rhythms within these slight frames (Carter told me “Hancock was on fire!” on “Einbahnstrasse”). This is Hancock at his most virtuosic and wildly complex.

However, even something as instantly accessible as Hancock’s 1983 hit “Rockit” has an esoteric side. The little blues tune (which is just about the only thing in “Rockit” you could write down with European notation) goes at tempo and then at half-speed, i.e., twice as slow. A European-styled composer would call this technique “augmentation.” As far as I know, “Rockit” is the only dance hit in history that uses augmentation. “Rockit” also has another of those Hancock fingerprints—an Impressionistic, dissonant chord, a half-step above the harmony, that floats in and out of the sonic texture.