Biography (read more)
Herbert Jeffrey Hancock was born on 12 April 1940 in Chicago, the son of a secretary and a government meat inspector, and began playing the piano at seven. At eleven he played the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 26 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at a young people’s concert on 5 February 1952. He had no jazz teacher as a teenager and built his harmonic ear on records — Art Blakey, Miles Davis, George Shearing, Bill Evans, the vocal group the Hi-Lo’s and Clare Fischer’s arrangements for them — and in 1960 talked the pianist Chris Anderson into taking him on after hearing him once. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1960 with degrees in electrical engineering and music, returned to Chicago to work with Donald Byrd and Coleman Hawkins, and joined Miles Davis’s second great quintet in May 1963.
With Ron Carter and the seventeen-year-old Tony Williams he reshaped what a jazz rhythm section could do, and was one of the architects of the post-bop language; alongside the Davis band he recorded steadily for Blue Note, both under his own name and as a sideman. He left in 1968, and after the Mwandishi sextet records of 1971–73 turned to funk and electronics on Head Hunters. “Cantaloupe Island”, “Watermelon Man”, “Maiden Voyage” and “Chameleon” became standards, and the 1983 instrumental “Rockit” a hit single. He has won an Academy Award and fourteen Grammys, including Album of the Year for River: The Joni Letters in 2007, received the Polar Music Prize in 2025, and has taught at UCLA since 2012 while chairing the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz.
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