February 2008 Interview: Herbie Hancock
Introduction
Hancock is a legendary jazz master, a musical genius, composer, pianist and one of the most influential artists of the past century. Embracing elements of rock, funk, soul, electronic music and Hip-Hop, Herbie knows no musical boundaries. He is an Academy Award winner, a 12 time Grammy Award winner and this year on the historic 50th anniversary of the Grammy Awards, Hancock beat out Amy Winehouse and Kanye West, to take home the award for best album of the year. Herbie Hancock is chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, where he has been a champion of music education for the past 20 years. I interviewed Herbie in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam during one of our tours there. Here is some of our conversation…
Pierce Freelon:
Tell me what inspired the Bebop to Hip-Hop Program, tell me a little bit about it.
Herbie Hancock:
The concept of the relationship between Jazz as an improvised music and Hip-Hop, that has improvisational overtones in itself with various aspects of rap and the rhythmic foundation that they both share. To me there’s an obvious overlap that’s worthy of being explored. Also, if you consider that Hip-Hop is basically a brand new music, well it’s more than music it’s a movement - a brand new kind of movement, and Jazz having been around now for more than 100 years. And Hip-Hop being the voice of young people - one of the voices of young people, anyway - and Jazz having an audience that’s pretty varied, it seemed to me obvious that it would be an interesting direction to explore, not only the relationship, but explore the developing of music between Jazz and Hip-Hop. So I can’t really point my finger at a particular person that is the originator of the idea. It’s an idea that was in the back of my mind, something that has been kind of floating around. Also, Frank, Tom Carter (the president of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz) mentioned his name before, with Pepsi… what’s Frank’s last name? Cooper! Frank Cooper with Pepsi. He is very much interested in this kind of Jazz/Hip-Hop relationship. He thought that it would be something that Pepsi would be interested in supporting. So we used the LA unified school district in Los Angeles as a test case to introduce the idea, and to get some activity started. I was there when it was first introduced and there were some students there, and there was a DJ that actually was a teacher, she came down from San Francisco and we just created some stuff on the fly. Some of the students did some of their own compositions because some of the students were studying jazz and there were some kids doing some rhyming and we had more of an improvised workshop that we did at that time, as kind of a show of faith that this was something worth pursuing. And I didn’t even really hear, I wasn’t around to be involved with the development of the program but about maybe 6 months after that, there was another event that they had at this school and I went down there and they put on a show. They had a big band and costumes and they composed music that employed not only Jazz improvisation, big band arrangements and people rhyming but they also had dancers and everything. It was mind blowing, you know. They had different steps that they were doing and I hadn’t even envisioned all of that. I hadn’t even thought about the visual aspect, that wasn’t even on my mind. But they jumped into that and started developing a whole show. It was very very impressive. Then I was invited up to do one of my pieces with them. I can’t remember if it was Watermelon Man, or Cantaloupe Island, or whether it was Rockit, maybe I just don’t remember what it was. But I interacted with the kids and everybody seemed to really get off on the performance. So that was kind of a show of force of what this stage of the development of the program was really about. Recently, Tom and I went back to Pepsi, to their head office in New York and met with Frank Cooper and the CEO of Pepsi and she was very impressed with what we were doing and the concept of the whole direction of Bebop to Hip-Hop and she wants to expand on what we’ve been doing, make it a larger effort in more cities, but this is the ground floor of it, really. It’s pretty exciting.
PF:
What is the significance of music as an educational tool?
HH:
One fact I wanted to bring up. Traditional thinking is that the arts, including music, are very nice. It’s good for developing musicians and an appreciation for music. What is not generally known is that - and we have statistics to prove (this) - that people who have been given some training in Jazz - Perhaps because.. I’m sure because it’s an improvised music, it’s a means for students to express themselves, to create from themselves. The students that have been in our programs, even students who are not training to be musicians but are just learning about Jazz. Somehow inherit in the music is something that really encourages their sense of self-esteem and hope because we find that the students that come from our programs - their grade point averages in science and math and language have gone from like, D average to C average. C to B, sometimes C to A or B to A. They make that radical jump in grade point average. And I remember one statistic that we had where at the beginning of our program we asked some students which ones wanted to go to college, which ones expected to go to college. I don’t know the exact figure, but it was really low. I think this statistic comes from LA. I think there were only 10% or 15% of them were entertaining the idea of going to college. When they finished our program, 90% of them wanted to go to college and most of those actually did go to college. It changed everything.
PF:
Wow, that’s empowering.
HH:
It’s empowering, right exactly. You wouldn’t think that study of music could do that but it affects the sense of their own humanity and their own sense of self-worth. There’s nothing more powerful than that. It’s not just facts, you know? Not just statistical learning. Not just something that you can learn by route out of a book. It’s something that really affects their inner self. And it means that all the other pursuits - business people say they got to learn reading, writing and arithmetic- it makes their grades and all of those other averages go right up. So because of that, it makes no sense when I see that music is being cut form the schools. It’s really very shortsighted thinking, creating that kind of atmosphere. Creating that, taking away from the support of music in the schools. It’s a real drag.
