Herbie Hancock Analysis

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You do not need a vast knowledge in jazz music for the name Herbie Hancock to sound familiar to you. Having had an amazing career over the course of more than half a century, Hancock has become known as a remarkable jazz pianist, an innovative composer and an explorer of original musical forms. Hancock has had an enormous influence on both electric and acoustic jazz and more recently on hip-hop and R&B. His career is not only acclaimed by numerous jazz music enthusiasts, but also by the music industry, as Hancock has won fourteen Grammy awards along the way.
The autobiography intrigued me with the very first sentences in the opening paragraph: “I’m onstage at a concert hall in Stockholm, Sweden, in the mid 1960s playing piano with the Miles Davis Quintet. We’re on tour, and this show is really heating up. The band is tight—we’re all in sync, all on the same wavelength. The music is flowing, we’re connecting with the audience, and everything feels magical, like we’re weaving a spell.” This sounds like the perfect beginning of an amazing journey through Hancock’s life and career. It made me expect to read a typical …show more content…

In the beginning of the book, he said that he had a fondness for all things Avant Garde, from Stravinsky to Jerry Garcia, which made me appreciate him a lot. This open-mindedness that he preaches was probably the reason why Hancock was so interested in technology and mechanical gadgets. To go along with this pursuit of new musical forms that Hancock embarked on, was this passion of his for technology, a passion that probably played a role in taking him from a pivotal role in Miles Davis’ second great quintet in the 1960s to his Afro-centric Mwandishi band of the early 1970s, from the funk explorations of his Headhunters outfit and the Davis-inspired music of the V.S.O.P ensemble of the 70s to subsequent experiments in 1980s techno, 21st century pop and film

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