Apologies about the delay to your Sunday newsletter: following a severe storm this weekend, we are currently dealing with a power outage in South Kintyre, and I’m posting this from the library in Campbeltown. I’m hoping our electricity will be restored in good time for this week’s pattern release (which very much depends on our being online) but please do bear with us in the event of any delay.
Six creative lessons from Herbie Hancock
As someone whose creative impulses have, over the years, moved in many different directions, I really enjoy reading about the processes of other creative people. I think I’m most fascinated by the question of how work actually gets made, because all too often, I think, creativity is described in woo woo ways that can make it seem both conceptually distant and difficult to understand. In my experience, creativity is far less about waiting for any descending muse than it is about simply committing, really putting the hours in, and striving to make stuff happen. One of the best books I’ve read on this fascinating subject is the memoir that Herbie Hancock wrote with Lisa Dickey, entitled Possibilities (2014). Herbie is a superb musician, composer, arranger and producer whose career has moved in several different creative directions, many of which were groundbreaking and radical in their (or indeed any) time. As well as being deeply inspiring, Possibilities is a great, accessible read, and I highly recommend listening to it as audiobook: an experience which will allow you to hear Herbie’s words in his own (inimitable) voice, and take breaks to spend time with all the wonderful music he’s discussing. And for a truly in-the-round experience, why not knit yourself a Heid Hunter hat whilst hearing Herbie talk about the development of Head Hunters, and listening to that fabulous album? In the meantime, here are six creative lessons we can all take away from Herbie Hancock.
1. Keep learning (especially from your friends and mentors)
One of the most inspiring things about Herbie Hancock is his boundless curiosity, a quality which, through all stages of his life has enabled him to keep on learning, continually discovering new things about music and about himself. In the early chapters of Possibilities he writes warmly about the many different things he learns from his musical friends including Tony Williams (who, with continual study and long hours of practice regards music as a deeply serious business), Eric Dolphy (who expands the sonic boundaries of Jazz in the early 1960s with his avant garde approach) and Wayne Shorter (who always listens incredibly carefully, and responds to each musical moment with a playful, open heart). As a young musician in New York City in the early 1960s, Herbie is taken under the wing of Donald Byrd whose generous advice prompts several of the good decisions which underwrite Herbie’s future success. Donald encourages Herbie to hold his ground when signing his first record deal and insist on retaining control of his songwriting rights. The royalties Herbie receives from his 1962 hit, Watermelon Man, subsequently provide him with the financial security and confidence he needs to make the brave decisions which shape his later career. But it is Miles Davis who Herbie describes as his mentor, and from whose restless energy and fearless musical choices he learns so much as a young musician, starting out. Just one of Miles’ characteristic koan-like utterances will serve to make the point: Herbie, finding himself struggling with the “controlled freedom” of Miles’ second great quintet, recognises in himself a tendency towards overdone stylistic flourishes, and approaches Miles with the problem, confessing to him that “sometimes I just don’t know what to play.” “Then don’t play nothin’” Miles responds. Reflecting carefully on exactly how he might “play nothin’” enables Herbie to learn to really make room in his own music, rather than filling up the space with sound.
2. Ponder
Alongside Herbie’s freewheeling creativity sits a deeply analytical nature: a characteristic which, as a child inspired him to take clocks apart and construct his own amplifiers, and which by the mid 1960s, enables him to retain an impressive level of critical objectivity about his own experiences, even while tripping on LSD. Much like him, he writes Jazz has two different sides, “intuitive and cerebral” and he describes his own creative practice as a process of maintaining a fruitful balance between the two. As a child schooled in the Classical repertoire, Herbie was initially confounded by Jazz improvisation, until he began to break George Shearing’s phrasing down and rebuild it in much the same way he would a clock. And after becoming a professional musician, he frequently exploits his own natural tendencies towards critical distance, analysis, and pondering to enhance his creative process. One day, for example, Miles Davis came to him and muttered cryptically: “don’t play the butter notes.”
“I had no idea what he meant,” Herbie recalls, “but I knew that if he’d bothered to say it then it had to be important. So I started to mull it over.” Considering the associations of butter with excess fat, and in turn with harmonies that might tend towards the easy or obvious, Herbie arrives at the conclusion that the “butter notes” were a chord’s third and seventh: notes which most pianists would consider absolutely essential, however “buttery” they might sound. “When I took out the butter notes,” Herbie writes, “I’d just play one or two notes, or sometimes two notes right next to each other—seconds. I never played the third and the seventh so my chords left a lot open.” Herbie’s writes of his new fat-free sound as “minimalist and unusual”: it “opened up a whole new way of looking at music and the compositional element of improvisation.” Creativity is often described in antithetical relation to critical objectivity, but Herbie’s thoughtful response to Miles’ “butter notes” suggests how a capacity for critical analysis, reflection, and careful pondering can enhance the creative process.
3 Embrace (and transform) limitation
The removal of Miles’ “butter notes” imposed a drastic limitation on Herbie’s harmonies, effectively enabling him to transform his own musical approach. Possibilities abounds with many comparable examples of the transformative effect of limitation upon Herbie’s musical creativity. For example, while recording the Miles Smiles LP in 1967, Miles abruptly told Herbie to stop playing with his left hand. Herbie thought:
“What? I only had two hands, so to stop using one was a pretty drastic step. But Miles must have had his reasons, so I dropped my left hand to my side. . . . normally I used my left hand to impose a harmonic structure on the song, but one handed I couldn’t do that. And that opened up a lot of space . . . which was exactly what Miles was looking for.”
Playing one handed enables Herbie to reflect on the habits and routines which had become integral to his musicianship: habits and routines which were not enhancing, but rather holding back, his creativity.
“I hadn’t even realised it but I had been staying glued to more standard rhythmic and harmonic placement because my right hand had been leaning on my left. But now my right hand had all this free space to work with. It was a revelation.”
One-handed limitation jolts Herbie out of his creative complacency, and sends him in a new direction. Many decades later, he was to learn a very similar lesson about the transformative effects of limitation, but which concerned his other hand. While practising a classical piece for a concert in which he’d be performing with Lang Lang, he employed a classical piano tutor, who noticed that he’d become far too reliant on his dominant right hand. She tells Herbie to practice scales just with his left hand “to get used to paying attention to it.” “I had been playing piano for 65 years at this point,” Herbie recalls, “but you never stop learning, never stop improving, if you keep your mind open.
4. Keep an open mind
Jazz—an expansive musical genre that champions creative freedom—also has the dubious honour of attracting purists who enjoy policing spurious boundaries, determining what the music should or shouldn’t be. Herbie, who has never been remotely precious about musical tradition, is nonetheless able to recognise in his early 1960s self a very particular kind of snobbery, a Jazz-musician sniffiness about other popular genres. Herbie didn’t realise he’d begun to close himself off from different musical styles and sounds, but in 1968 he learned an important lesson about keeping an open mind. He had turned up for a Miles in the Sky recording session at Columbia’s 52nd Street studio, couldn’t see a piano, and asked Miles where it was. “Play that,” Miles said, gesturing towards the studio’s Fender Rhodes. Herbie was annoyed. “I thought you really want me to play this toy?” Even though he’d never tried a Rhodes, like many jazz pianists at this time Herbie thought the electric piano was a mere “gimmick,” upon which it would be impossible to produce “a rich, full sound.” But once he sat down and spent some time noodling around, he gradually began to change his mind. The Rhodes’ sound was very different and distinctive, he realised, while the flexibility of its electronic controls engendered new possibilities of response and connection with the other musicians in the band. “I learned something that day,” Herbie writes “and not just about the electric piano. I had formed a judgment based on the opinions of others rather than my own experience. I had locked the door for no reason at all.” Sitting down at the Fender Rhodes that day enabled Herbie to go on to “discover an unexpected love of electronic instruments that would change the way I made music.”
From that moment in 1968, Herbie strove to keep an open mind, embracing the new sounds, new instruments, and multiple genres, which were to subsequently carry him through more than fifty years of making brilliant, contemporary music. In an interview following the release of Future Shock (1983) he responded to the accusation that Jazz fans wouldn’t like his new electro-funk direction, by pointing out that respect for what has been should never close anyone off from loving what was to come. “People don’t have to give up anything,” he told the interviewer “by having an open attitude.”
5. Just do the work (to make things happen)
Sometimes, every creative person hits a rut out of which it is difficult to emerge, a dark space, in which you seem to be flailing about, struggling to discover or express new ideas. At such times, simply getting on with things and working can be extremely freeing, and I’ve found this to be especially true when the work that you are doing doesn’t seem to be necessarily creative in itself. I think that the best way to deal with what’s called writers block is to sit down and write (about anything), just as the best way to banish the loss of one’s knitting mojo is to pick up your needles, and whip up something fun and simple. There’s not a single point in Herbie Hancock’s musical life in which when he ever seems to be coasting, or lying fallow, but there are definitely moments when he feels that he is struggling creatively, and doesn’t know quite which way to go. Alongside his work as a musician, Herbie has worked quite widely as a composer: for films (such as Round Midnight (1986) for whose wonderful soundtrack he won the Oscar)for TV shows, and for commercials.
Several of Herbie’s great tunes began from times when he found himself just doing the work of writing advertising jingles. The spare and mysterious He Who Lives in Fear from Herbie’s 1969 Martin Luther King memorial album, The Prisoner, for example, has its unexpected origin in a cigarette commercial, while one of Herbie’s most beautiful and recognisable pieces began life in an ad for Yardley perfume. For the Yardley jingle, Herbie found that he was working right up to the wire with a dreamy, drifting chord progression that stubbornly refused to be resolved. Frustrated by his lack of progress, Herbie finally turned in for the night, but was told by his wife, Gigi, to get back out of bed and keep on working. Sitting alone at his piano in the early hours, Herbie eventually cracked the puzzle, discovering that the tune’s “first two chords should also be its last two chords. So what would normally be the ending chord—the cadence—would actually be cycling back to the opening. The song would be structured like a spiral. I loved that spiral structure.” This spiral song, which began life as an advertising jingle that Herbie had to get on with and complete in the middle of the night, is what became Maiden Voyage.
6. Never stop exploring
From the innovative statements of Miles Davis’ second great quintet, through to the spacious arrangements of the Gil Evans-inspired Speak Like a Child (1968); from the Afro-futurist intergalactic palette of Mwandishi (1971) to Head Hunter’s fabulously grounded, and earthy 1970s fusion; from his 1980s experiments with disco, hip-hop, and electro funk through his creative re-imaginings of the African-American musical experience in The New Standard (1996) and Gershwin’s World (1998); from the inclusive spirit of Possibilities (2005) to the gorgeous open soundscapes of the Grammy-award-winning River: The Joni Letters (2007), Herbie Hancock has always been an astoundingly energetic, extraordinarily creative musician who has never stopped exploring. “Human beings start out with a youthful spirit that lends itself to exploration,” Herbie writes, “but over time we lose that. We find our comfort zone, and we don’t want to leave it. Change means subjecting yourself to challenge, self-scrutiny, self-criticism and disappointment, so its hard to embrace, especially if you like where you are.” Even when he really liked where he was, Herbie Hancock has always refused to stand still, resolving in the mid 1990s that every record he made had to be “absolutely different from any I’d done before.” Reflecting on the continual forward-moving momentum of his long career, he quotes Duke Ellington’s famous response when asked about his favourite composition, which was always “the next one.” The many radical musical choices and changes Herbie Hancock has made over the years have often been the cause of friction or dismissal by critics and record companies, but he has always trusted his listeners to come with him to the next place, to discover new musical destinations, new colours and new sounds. As one of Jazz’s most important elder statesmen, Herbie has worked as a UNESCO goodwill ambassador and continues to bring forward talented young musicians through his work with the Hancock Institute of Jazz. Herbie’s extraordinary work and tireless spirit provide an inspiring example to never stop exploring, whatever our time of life, or creative field.
If you are unfamiliar with Herbie’s work, my iTunes playlist covers all eras of his career, from the early 1960s to the 2010s. Enjoy these great sounds, and I will hopefully (connectivity permitting) see you on Friday with a brand new pattern release from Rip it Up (and Start Again)
will hopefully (connectivity permitting) see you on Friday with a brand new pattern release from Rip it Up (and Start Again)
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