Herbie Hancock: All That’s Jazz!

I think I was supposed to play jazz,” says Herbie Hancock. Hancock is one of the most noted jazz musicians of all time. He was born in Chicago in 1940, and it became apparent early on that he was a child piano prodigy. Herbie performed a Mozart piano concert with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age 11, then started playing jazz in high school and later double-majored in music and electrical engineering at Grinnell College. His fascination with musical gadgets led him to become one of the first jazz pianists to work with electronic keyboards. And his landmark albums blurred the boundaries of music, effortlessly mixing jazz with funk, soul, rhythm and the blues, forever changing the face of jazz. As Miles Davis once said, “Herbie was the step after Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, and I haven’t heard anybody yet who has come after him.”

The documentary above — Herbie Hancock: All That’s Jazz — was produced for KCET’s signature news series “SoCal Connected.” It retraces the most important steps in Hancock’s career and shows us his home, the office where his award-winning music is composed and his private rituals. Very few people know that Herbie is a very religious person – he has been a practicing Buddhist for over forty years.

Bonus material:

By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.

 

Dave Brubeck Gets an Uplifting Musical Surprise from a Young Violinist in Moscow (1997)

December 2, 1997. Exactly ten years after his first visit to Moscow, jazz legend Dave Brubeck returned to perform before the faculty and students of the Moscow Conservatory. During his concert, an audience member asked him to improvise on the old Russian sea shanty “Ej, Uhnem.” About two minutes into the improvisation, a young violinist rose from his seat and started to play along. You just have to love Dave’s surprised look at 2:09.

This young man turned out to be a student at the conservatory. His name is Denis Kolobov and he is now a violinist of international renown. Denis must have mustered up all of his courage to cut into the performance of one of the great jazz pianists. But the day before, French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli had died in Paris and Denis decided to honor Grappelli’s memory in this way. What a great idea!

By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.

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