Improvising on the Beat

In Jazzman Herbie Hancock's Beverly Hills house, a brand-new $2,800 Arp 2600 three-oscillator synthesizer sits right next to his Butsudan altar. "There are no miracles in Buddhism, but chanting has never failed," says Herbie. "You can do it if you have a problem, or if you want something to happen or not happen. It's you you are chanting to. It's just like adding fire to yourself." Hancock began chanting two years ago. As a convert to the Buddhist sect known in the U.S. as Nichiren Shoshu of America, he would light a candle twice a day, ignite incense, uncover a vial of water, strike a bell and begin his low, rhythmical prayer. Hancock has chanted for his band, for a new agent, for a wider audience, for higher fees. It took little more than a year, but it all finally came to pass.

Today at 34, Hancock heads the most sought-after jazz combo in the U.S. No more warming up the audience for the headliners at all-too-infrequent concert dates. With two Carnegie Hall appearances at this week's Newport Jazz Festival in New York, Hancock kicks off a major headlining tour that will include concerts in such diverse locales as Fort Lauderdale, Cincinnati and Tokyo. For his current record company, Columbia, he turned out an LP album, Head Hunters, which as of last week had sold 700,000 copies. That is more than many a hot rock act sells these days--more than any other album by a jazz performer has ever sold.

It is not as though Herbie sprang from nowhere. As composer and keyboard man with Miles Davis from 1963 to 1968, Hancock long ago made his mark in the jazz community. When he stepped out on his own, it was to make a series of innovative LPs for Blue Note and Warner Bros, that combined an almost impressionist sense of harmony, fleet melodic lines and sprinting tempos.

But something was wrong. "The idea came into my head that I was a musical snob," Hancock says. He noted with growing wonderment that the music of such black performers as Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder was not only commercial but getting better all the time. "I decided that it was now time to try some funky stuff myself and get me some cats who could play that kind of music." Translation: embracing the big beat, Hancock opted for jazz rock.

Jazz rock is merely the handy rubric. The music itself is one of the most exuberant, rich and versatile brands of pop to come along since the heyday of Dylan and the Beatles. From the flowering of boogie-woogie and swing in the 1930s to the advent of bebop and then cool in the 1940s, jazz has lived and gained new ground through hybridization.

The eclectic lineup at this week's Newport Jazz Festival is emphatic proof of the new unity among jazz, rock, the blues, soul, even the pop song. A single event at the Roseland Ballroom, for example, will offer both the sophisticated big-band arrangements of Harry James and the Latin style of Tito Puente. At Carnegie Hall, Pianist Keith Jarrett will spin forth some of the most elegant, technically proficient, classically tinted jazz since Art Tatum. On another night, Vibraharpist Lionel Hampton and Pianist Teddy Wilson will mix it up with Drummer Buddy Rich and Bassist Milt Hinton in what should be a vital remembrance of the swing era.

Even in so broad a musical spectrum--part nostalgia, part status quo, part innovation--the jazz rockers are a stylish group apart. That is due as much as anything to the fact that most of them--Pianists Hancock and Chick Corea, Guitarist John McLaughlin, Saxophonist Wayne Shorter, Drummer Billy Cobham--are graduates of the Miles Davis band, where the movement got off the ground back in 1970 with Davis' first all-out fusion of jazz and rock, the double LP album Bitches Brew.

Yet what a varied bunch they are. Corea's group, Return to Forever, favors high, light, sugary sonorities and palpitating Latin rhythms. The six-man combo Weather Report, with Shorter on sax, plays with the sweep and sonic power of a full symphony orchestra. Cobham manages to mass his colors with a big-band kind of majesty yet retain the kind of rollicking spontaneity that a Stan Kenton, say, never was able to achieve. Larry Coryell, whose new band, The Eleventh House, plays a tight, virtuosic blend of traditional white rock and jazz, never attended the Davis conservatory, but as if to compensate, made a clever LP (Spaces) three years ago with Davis Alumni McLaughlin, Corea and Cobham as his partners.

What Hancock and the others retain from jazz is improvisation. From rock they have taken the steady, pervasive beat, and especially electronic instrumentation. In his 1971 album Mwandishi (Swahili for composer), Hancock made his first extensive use of electronic sounds with such instruments or devices as electric bass, electric piano, echoplex and phase shifter. Head Hunters finds him, in addition, employing the Arp Soloist synthesizer (for melody) and the Arp Odyssey synthesizer (melody and color). As if to justify his expenditures, Hancock says: "There is only so much you do with a keyboard."

First Taste. Thoughts like that never entered Hancock's head when he was growing up on Chicago's South Side in the 1940s. Because his best friend had one, Herbie asked for and got a piano at age seven. By age eleven, he was good enough to play the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 26 in D with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In high school he got his first taste of jazz listening to the records of George Shearing and Oscar Peterson and trying to duplicate their sounds. At Iowa's Grinnell College he began arranging and composing, even gave a concert with a 17-piece band, but left after four years without completing his degree requirements. (Grinnell made up for that two years ago by awarding him an honorary doctorate.) Back in Chicago, Hancock lived with his parents and played as many gigs as he could. Then in 1960 he hooked up with the visiting Donald Byrd and went to New York with him. In 1963 Hancock made his first success as a composer with Watermelon Man. Byrd eventually took Hancock around to play some ballads for Miles Davis. Recalls Hancock: "We didn't meet again until much later, when he telephoned to say he needed a piano player. He said, 'I want to hear you play,' and dropped the phone into the cradle. Click. I didn't even have his address." Hancock found it, soon was a member of Davis' band, and was on his way.

Last week Hancock was putting the finishing touches on a new album. Royalties from Head Hunters are heading toward the $200,000 mark, and have enabled him to double salaries in his band. When not on the road, Herbie and his German wife Gigi live serenely, avoiding the Hollywood party scene. One of the few disappointments in his life occurred only two weekends ago after a concert in Phoenix. When his road manager's rented station wagon would not start, Hancock tried to chant the engine into life. No luck. He finally got it going with jumper cables.

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