Being there, doing that: Herbie Hancock

erbie Hancock uses his hands and feet when he talks. When he says the word guitar, his hands strum an imaginary Fender. When he says record, his finger makes a needle and spins. Meanwhile he paces, gravitating back toward the piano keyboard again and again, though he doesn't touch it. He walks partway around the big Steinway grand. Lightly strokes its raised lid. Sits on the bench. Home base.

They call this a lecture, but it's more like free association, an aural tease. Hancock, after all, is no academic. He's a jazz pianist--perhaps the archetypal jazz pianist. His publicity trumpets him as "a true icon of modern music." At Duke for two days this fall to offer his own brand of lecture, concert, and public master class, he brushes past swarms of True Believers who descend upon him whenever he emerges on campus from a campus doorway.

Bebop, hard bop, free jazz, modal jazz, fusion, funk, R&B--he's done it all, and some of it he helped invent. In fifty-some years on stage, he's gigged with all the cats from Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk to Wynton Marsalis and Kathleen Battle. A natural tinkerer, he introduced electronic keyboards and other radical innovations to the jazz mainstream, driving techies crazy at each step by asking the questions they dreaded in the early days: Hey, can this synthesizer thing sample a sound? Could it be portable? Can you make it record and play back? Why not a polyphonic synthesizer so I could play more than one note? The official Herbie Hancock website features a huge section on technology--"immersive mixing," "multi-angle surround sound"--and plentiful links to vendors.

Ambassadors of Swing

And so perhaps it's only natural that Hancock's visit to campus be co-hosted by the Pratt School of Engineering (along with the Institute of the Arts, the Onstage Committee of the Duke University Union, and the music department). It is engineering dean Kristina Johnson who introduces him at this lecture, held in Reynolds Auditorium on the afternoon of his second day at Duke. She mentions his eight Grammys, his Academy Award, his role in popularizing electronic instruments, and what she calls "the intimate relationship between music and electrical engineering." (The school's namesake, Edmund T. Pratt Jr. B.S.E.E. '47, was, after all, a jazz trumpet player.)

Because Hancock's official bio says he double-majored in music and electrical engineering, Johnson gives The Master a quick engineering test on the formula for resonance, intended to set up a complimentary metaphor--but he blows it, hastening to explain that he was only in a pre-engineering program, and just for a couple of years before deciding on a music-composition major. "Once an E.E., always an E.E.," the dean says brightly, and hands him a Duke cap.

Who is this guy, really? Gone are the bright floral shirts of yesteryear, gone the Afro and the hip goatee that were his signature look in the Sixties. From a distance, with his close-cropped hair and restrained, good-natured demeanor, you think for a second he might be somebody's uncle, the kind of gent who would drive a nice, clean, eight-cylinder Olds and always change the oil on schedule. Yet there's a Puckish gleam in his eye, a carefully controlled perpetual motion in those restless hands. This is not your father's Oldsmobile.

He tells the lecture audience about working on the 1966 soundtrack for Blowup with director Michelangelo Antonioni, one of many mentors. "He knew who all the cats were," Hancock says. "After dinner one night, he said, 'There's no such thing as art: There's only this painting, that film, this music.' It made sense." Hancock leans on the piano again, as though it might vouch for him. "'I just put events together,' Antonioni told me. 'However people interpret it is right.'" Hancock pauses. "My music is the same way."

The truth is that before you get to hear Herbert Jeffrey Hancock whole, before you can really listen with what E. E. Cummings called the "ears of your ears," you have to get past Herbie the Superstar. You've got to recognize that this icon is an iconoclast.

Iconoclasts are nothing if not confident. Responding to a disparaging question about "electronica"--music like techno and trip-hop--he explains, "I don't look at a genre and judge it. I listen to a piece. I don't evaluate things according to whether they 'have soul.' If you decide you want to do music that sounds cold, that's a reflection of our world--it's not good or bad."

In the forefront of world culture, technology, business, and music," exults Hancock's bio. While he's lecturing, his cell phone rings, and this wizard on the forefront of world culture and technology bungles the call, hanging up while trying to answer. Evidently used to this, his daughter calls back. It's her birthday, and soon Hancock has the whole audience singing "Happy Birthday" into his mobile phone. The man sees no difference between improvising on stage and improvising in life.

Despite the hoopla about his cutting-edge work with electronic keyboards, synthesizers, sound sampling, and more, technology clearly delights Hancock as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.

He remembers when Miles Davis, with whom he famously played in the Sixties, got him to try the Fender electric piano for the first time: "I could turn up the volume so I could be just as loud as the drummer!" he chortles. After all these years, you still sense his childlike delight in machines, even purely mechanical ones like the Steinway in front of him.

"When you hit this key, there's an incredible series of cause and effect before you hear a sound," he says. "Even though you're so far removed from what's happening, you can have an emotional impact...." He touches a key tenderly, and holds it. "I've been playing since I was seven," he says finally, "and now I'm sixty-three, and it's been a long journey. Synthesizers are really still in their infancy; I can express myself better on this."