It isn’t so easy to just switch back to classical music after a lifetime of jazz, funk, hip-hop, and every other kind of improvisation, so my first thought was It would take me a year to prepare for this—and that was speaking conservatively. I told Ken I’d think about it, but in the end, of course, I couldn’t refuse. So in the weeks leading up to the show I was not only spending hours chanting; I was also spending hours at the piano, trying somehow to get back the classical chops I’d last had nearly fifty years earlier.
On the night of the Grammy Awards, Lang Lang and I played our duet, and everything just felt relaxed. I was completely confident and played the piece better than I’d ever done it in rehearsals. It was a blast to be up there with Lang Lang, who has a playfulness to his style that’s really energizing. Then, once our duet was finished, I went back to my seat in the front row for the rest of the show.
Album of the Year is announced at the very end of the show, and my friend Quincy Jones walked up to the microphone with the rapper Usher to present the award. And then a really strange thing happened. Although I had been chanting for so long, trying to knock down the barrier of doubt and believe that I would actually win, at that moment everything just fell away, and my mind went blank. So when Quincy opened the envelope and said, “River: The Joni Letters. Herbie Hancock!” I just about went into shock.
I really couldn’t believe what was happening. Larry Klein was sitting right behind me, and we looked at each other and then hugged. I couldn’t speak, but Larry said, “I guess we won!”
I said to him, “Come on, let’s go take this thing!”
We walked to the stage, and once I got up there I just stood silently for a moment and looked around with a big grin on my face. Finally I was able to blurt, “What a beautiful day this is in Los Angeles!” And then I proceeded to drop my speech as I was trying to pull it out of my jacket pocket. Quincy bent over behind me to pick it up as I kept rummaging around in my jacket, completely unaware that it had fallen to the floor.
I started my speech by thanking the person who’d made the record possible:
Joni Mitchell. Joni Mitchell. Joni Mitchell, thank you so much. You know, it’s been forty-three years since the first and only time that a jazz artist got the Album of the Year award. And I’d like to thank the Academy for courageously breaking the mold this time. And in doing so, honoring the giants upon whose shoulders I stand—some of whom, like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, unquestionably deserved this award in the past.
But this is a new day that proves that the impossible can be made possible. Yes, we can!—to coin a phrase.
The audience laughed, recognizing the allusion to then-candidate Barack Obama’s presidential campaign slogan. I went on:
My thanks, of course, to Joni Mitchell—her music and her words. And without the vision of Larry Klein, the producer, this could never have happened. I want to thank my mother and father. I want to thank my wife, Gigi, Jessica, my daughter, Melinda Murphy, all the musicians, Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, Vinnie Colaiuta, Lionel Loueke, Tina Turner, Corinne Bailey Rae, Norah Jones, Luciana Souza, Leonard Cohen, Sonya Kitchell, Helik Hadar, Dahlia Ambach Caplin, everyone at Verve . . .
Thank you so much. Thank you! Thank you!
It’s still hard to believe that the impossible became possible, but it did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
One night Larry Klein and I decided to watch a PBS documentary called Journey of Man. It’s a fascinating two-hour examination of the culture and genetics of human beings all over the globe, but there was one part that stunned me: New research suggested that every human on the planet was descended from one African man who lived sixty thousand years ago.
Hearing that, I got very emotional. Life is about connection, and the idea of all humans sharing a common ancestor is one of the most meaningful connections imaginable. However different we might be from each other in terms of languages, skin color, religion, or customs, we are all one family. Watching the documentary gave me hope—and it also gave me an idea.
It was late 2008 when Larry and I watched Journey of Man, and the big news at the time was the economic crisis that had begun a few months earlier. Giant financial institutions were failing, causing an economic meltdown not only in the United States but around the world. That year “globalization” was on people’s minds, but not in a good way. It called to mind the collapse of many interdependent economies.
I wanted to reclaim the word “globalization,” to recapture the positive elements of being interconnected with other human beings all over the world. If humanity is to survive, we have to reap the benefits of being interconnected. We have to work together, to help each other find answers to the tremendous problems affecting the planet today, from economic inequity to global warming.
In jazz every member of the band works with every other member to create something beautiful. There’s no judgment and no competition, just a collaborative effort that ideally lifts everybody’s performance. I found myself wondering, What if the planet were run like a jazz collective? What if we could find a way to harness globalization for the common good, rather than just suffering from its ill effects?
The most visible platform I have right now as a human being is music. So I decided to make a record speaking to this issue—a record that would be truly global in scope and encourage people all over the world to come together. When you take people from different cultures, who speak different languages, and unite them to make music, you get something that no one group could have achieved by itself. That’s the true essence of globalization, and that’s what I wanted to convey with this record.
Not long after watching Journey of Man, I was talking to my friend Ken Hertz, who’s also my attorney, about that idea. “Why don’t you use John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ as the centerpiece?” Ken asked. As soon as he said it, I knew it was the perfect choice. Lennon was very proactive on peace issues, and the lyrics in “Imagine” really captured perfectly what I was trying to accomplish. I titled the album The Imagine Project. Larry Klein seemed as excited about it as I was, and he agreed to come on board as the producer.
Now that I had the basic concept, I started taking apart the clock once again. At this point in the twenty-first century the music that has been most “global” is American music, which is played and performed everywhere. However, I noticed that American artists tend to make records for America—meaning the songs are almost always in English, and the cultural sensibilities are American—and then the rest of world either jumps on board or not. To me, this was classic twentieth-century thinking, rooted in the past. How could we make a twenty-first-century record with truly global sensibilities?
For one thing, I wanted to acknowledge that America is the largest immigrant country, with roots in every other country on the planet. We’re always hearing about immigrants supposedly overrunning our borders and taking our jobs, but almost everybody in America is an immigrant. Our ancestors are from everywhere, and almost all of us came to this land later, so I wanted to explore those global roots, to bring back an awareness and a reconnection to them.
I started with the basics: The songs would be in multiple languages, not just English, and those languages wouldn’t just be European, either, but from all over the world. I also wanted to record artists in their home environments, on their own turf, so the music would truly have the flavor and feeling of the places where it originated. Finally, I didn’t want the record to be a “world beat” record, because those tend to get marginalized. I wanted talented stars on the record, people whose commitment to the project would create awareness of it, and I wanted it to be something they could feel proud of.
As the record started taking shape I realized this was going to be the most ambitious, far-reaching album I had ever done. We ultimately ended up with songs in seven different languages, with artists from eleven different countries, and no two tracks sounding remotely alike. Pulling all tha
t together sometimes felt impossible . . . which is exactly why I was driven to do it.
In February of 2009 I traveled to India for the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s trip there in 1959. King had gone to India to study the nonviolence teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, and now, fifty years later, his son Martin Luther King III was leading a U.S. State Department−sponsored delegation to celebrate his father’s legacy.
Officially I was joining the delegation in my capacity as the chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, a nonprofit founded in 1986 to promote jazz music education. The institute has done incredible work, providing education programs and scholarships for music students, and putting on the annual International Jazz Competition since 1987. I’d been working with the institute for years, teaching classes, judging competitions, and working on programming. The Thelonious Monk Institute does more than any other organization to promote and support jazz both in America and internationally, so I was happy to expand my work there when I was named chairman in 2003.
Our musical delegation to India included Chaka Khan, singer-songwriter Dee Dee Bridgewater, pianist George Duke, and a number of young people who were studying jazz through the institute. We were scheduled to perform concerts in four cities in India, including Mumbai and New Delhi, and to work with Indian music students at the Ravi Shankar Institute. But I was also looking forward to our one day off in Mumbai, which meant I’d be able to go into a studio with Chaka to record a song for The Imagine Project.
Larry Klein had written a piece called “The Song Goes On,” based on a Rainer Maria Rilke poem. He had the poem translated into Hindi, and we brought those lyrics to the studio. I had asked an Indian vocalist named K. S. Chithra if she’d be willing to sing on the piece, and she joined Chaka, sitarist Anoushka Shankar (daughter of Ravi Shankar), and me in the studio. We recorded Chaka singing the song in English and Chithra singing it in Hindi, with the two of them trading vocals back and forth. It was the perfect start for our global project, and later we would overdub Wayne Shorter playing soprano saxophone to round out the international flavor.
Larry and I had talked a lot about the kinds of songs and artists we wanted, and he did amazing work pulling them together. This was a huge, complicated task, as we had musicians from places like Mali, Ireland, Australia, India, and the Congo. We even had a nomadic Tuareg troupe from the Saharan desert, a group called Tinariwen, which we teamed with the Latino rock band Los Lobos and the Somali-born rapper K’naan to do Bob Marley’s “Exodus.” And because I had loved Lisa Hannigan’s rendition of “Don’t Explain” on Possibilities so much, I asked her to sing in English and Irish on The Imagine Project; we teamed her with Malian kora player Toumani Diabate, the Irish band the Chieftains, and Lionel Loueke to record “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” These were radical groupings of musicians and styles, and Larry deserves much of the credit for making them happen.
Not surprisingly, with all these moving parts and so many miles separating the participants, we started running into problems. Sometimes artists would commit to recording and then back out, having said yes to too many things. Others sent us their recordings late or mistakenly recorded the wrong thing. K’naan was in Japan but promised to send us his overdub for “Exodus.” Larry and I told him we needed it within twenty-four hours, and he actually got it to us in time—but then it turned out he’d done an overdub for the wrong place in the song! I called him in Japan to ask if he could stop whatever he was doing and record another overdub for us. He hadn’t planned to go back into the studio, but I was so frantic that he agreed to do it, and he sent us a perfect recording just in the nick of time.
It seemed as if every time I turned around another obstacle was thrown in our way—but that’s how I knew I was doing the right thing. In my Buddhist practice I had learned that whenever you’re undertaking an action for the greater good, opposing forces will surely arise. Meeting resistance when you’re moving forward is similar to how a car moving forward meets resistance from the wind. The fact that you can feel that resistance tells you that you’re moving, so even though these obstacles were frustrating, I never stopped believing that we would overcome them.
Larry and I were working like crazy, but it became obvious that we were going to miss our deadline for getting the record to the mastering engineer. This date had been set long ago, and I knew it would cost a hell of a lot more money if we missed it—and because we were releasing this on my own label, Hancock Records, I’d be the one paying those extra fees. Whenever I wasn’t working on the record, I was chanting, focusing all my energy on somehow getting this thing finished without either going broke or giving myself a heart attack. But as it turned out, I had completely miscalculated what the extra cost would be, and it ended up being much less than I had feared.
Then, just as we were pulling together all the recordings and overdubs, Dave Matthews called me to say he really didn’t like the song he’d done for the album. We had recorded him up in the Bay Area when he had a concert there, and he’d created a really cool tune, with a nice rhythm that morphed throughout, finally coming back to the original groove after my piano solo. I really liked the song, and we had already edited and mixed it, so it was ready to go. But now, at the eleventh hour, Dave said, “I want to do a different one.”
What!? “Dave,” I said, “your song is great! Don’t worry about it, this one is perfect for the record.” But he insisted, and he ended up doing a gorgeous version of a psychedelic Beatles song called “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and incredibly enough, he happened to be in L.A. at the time, so I was able to come record with him, too.
I went down to the studio, and the song felt so amorphous that I had a hard time figuring out how to play. I tried the acoustic piano, but it didn’t fit. Then I tried the Fender Rhodes, but that didn’t sound right either. Then I happened to notice an old beat-up piano that wasn’t even on legs anymore but just lying right on the floor. Now, that looked interesting. I walked over and started playing around on it, hitting the strings with a spoon and doing some things on the mixing console to modify the sound. I worked out a kind of melody on it, but it didn’t sound at all like what I would have played on a regular piano—which was perfect, of course. There was nothing else on the record that sounded like what we did that day, so the song added a whole new dimension.
Even though we turned the record in late, the mastering engineer loved it, and he spent a lot of time after hours pitching in to make the finished product great. So, in the end, every problem we had encountered was solved by finding an even better solution. Actual Proof!
I put a lot into that record, and I think the message of connection is something that people need to hear. But the really cool thing is, the message came through not only in the songs themselves but in the way the record was actually made. The Imagine Project is a testament to facing the impossible and making it possible, which is the message not only of my music but of my life.
More than forty years after I started practicing Buddhism, I still chant every day. Yet, when I think back to those early days, as I listened to fellow Buddhists talk about what they were chanting for—cars, a spouse, a house—I see those desires differently than I did back then. These things aren’t the root of happiness, because even if you have a spouse you may eventually want to divorce, and even if you have money you may want more. People tend to look outside themselves for things to complete them. But what Buddhism has taught me is that we must look inside ourselves for that happiness. The transformation that Buddhism offers is an internal transformation, one that will awaken you to things you never dreamed of before.
What Buddhism awakened in me was the desire to apply my humanism and humanistic vision toward the goal of world peace—not just through my music but through every means at my disposal. It’s true that as we get older we get wiser, so I can’t say exactly what I would have been like at this point in my life without Buddhism, but I do believe that Buddhism has led me in d
irections I probably wouldn’t have followed. I probably would have continued to focus obsessively on music, as I did when I was younger, rather than shifting that focus to the larger issues facing the world.
In 2011 I was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, something that probably wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for my Buddhist practice. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has a mission of developing peace in the world, promoting dialogue among all people to achieve human rights, respect for the sanctity of human life, and the alleviation of poverty. These are all issues that I’ve become especially attuned to through my practice, so I was excited to have the chance to work on them through this organization.
One of the first things I proposed to UNESCO was International Jazz Day, a day of collaborative concerts staged throughout the world, with musicians and artists from various cultures working together; the first celebration was held in 2012. But my UNESCO activities involve more than music: I hope to host symposiums with thinkers, scholars, and artists—creative people with ideas. I just want to play a part, whatever part I can, in helping to rid ourselves of the kind of ignorance that separates people, causes misunderstandings, and creates conflict.
The transformation I’ve experienced—and continue to experience—through my Buddhist beliefs is the reason I’m not sitting down in a studio every day focused only on making music. I never would have considered myself an educator, but now I am, even teaching classes at Harvard University in early 2014 as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. I have a new relationship with young people, who are the future, a relationship that has been enhanced by my practice. It’s a continual process, a continual battle within myself for self-improvement and self-realization.
Herbie Hancock Page 33