![]() Through the ebb and flow of the remaining 90 minutes of Future-2-Future Live, Hancock improvises through his entire timeline, bouncing off the ensemble to navigate seamlessly through electronic and acoustic environments with a holistic sensibility that he has not displayed on previous recordings. Carrington’s sampled chant is a break chorus that paves the way for trumpeter Wallace Roney, who bobs and weaves through the rhythm with long combinations that sum up the harmonic material, not stopping until Hancock returns to the Korg with a declarative chord that winds up the piece. Hancock shifts, sits at the acoustic piano, states the melody of “Kebero,” and launches a pithy, majestic solo, constantly developing the theme and sustaining a complex rhythmic dialogue with his drummer, deploying a precisely calibrated array of attacks to treat the piano simultaneously as both an orchestral harmonic instrument and a drum. Wisdom is the key to understanding the age, creating the time.”Ĭoncluding the invocation, from a text by his spiritual guide, Daiseku Ikeda, Hancock sustains the tone poem, setting up a Carrington chant, which is sampled polyphonically and to which she creates a complementary drumbeat on her electronic pads. By contrast, wisdom captivates people’s hearts and has the power to open a new age. While knowledge may provide a useful point of reference, it cannot become a force to guide the future. “It is…” - he smiles, and sweeps his left hand across the keyboard - “…technology.” He pauses, cues an oscillating wash of sound, and continues, stretching out the words: “Wisdom is the future. “Simply put, knowledge is the past,” he says in a calm, deliberate voice. Then Hancock takes the microphone in his right hand. ![]() Disk interpolates whispery swatches of color, keyboardist Darrell Diaz plucks soft chords, drummer Teri Lyne Carrington elicits rubato, bell-like beats from her cymbals. Against a backdrop of swirling rave images, bassist Matthew Garrison bows complementary tones, D.J. Hancock bows, addresses a Korg Karma Roland MK-80 keyboard plugged into an Apple PowerBook computer, and triggers a series of ascending and descending swoops of varying duration. The opening sequence of Herbie Hancock’s new DVD, Future-2-Future, Live, follows Hancock, elegantly casual in a custom-tailored black suit, as he enters stage left at the Los Angeles Knitting Factory. I would say that’s a badge of honor for jazz.” Jazz musicians have the flexibility to be able to move around freely in other genres. For the occasion, I’m posting the “director’s cut” of a DownBeat cover piece I had the opportunity to write about HH in 2003, and the proceedings of an interview he did with me on the occasion of the publication of Breaking The Rules for the Barnes & Noble Review ‘zine, in which he states: “Jazz is really a foundational music. 1 issue of Billboard.Readers of this blog need no introduction to Herbie Hancock, who turns 77 today. I looked at my daughter and sobbed, wondering how I had gotten to this place but thankful that it was finally going to end. I had been struggling with this habit, and this secret, for so long. This was an intervention, and I was so embarrassed, but there was another feeling creeping in, too: relief. ![]() “I’m so sorry,” I said, to Gigi and everybody else in the room. “I made some calls, and here are the numbers for some rehab places. “If you continue this way, you are going to have to move out.” I just looked at her, my heart aching. “Herbie, I’m not going to watch you die,” she said. It all just came crashing down on me in that moment, and I burst into tears. And I felt so sorry, so terribly sorry, for having disappointed these people whom I loved and who loved me. These were the people I cared about most in the world, the people I felt most embarrassed to see in the state I was in. I opened the door and saw Gigi, Jessica and two of our dear friends sitting there. When I got home, I heard Gigi call to me. I called a taxi and hurried out of the building, scared but finally coming down from my high. ![]()
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