Hancock fell in love with improvisation in high school when he was introduced to some George Shearing records. It was not racism that prevented Hancock from being a concert pianist, as it prevented the classical careers of other black performers of his generation and before. As a child, he thought he would be a concert pianist, the dream of performing classical music being rather common among many young, well-trained jazz musicians both now and of an earlier time.
For Hancock, this was a majestic accomplishment in what has been an extraordinary career.Īs Hancock explains in Possibilities, his relationship with jazz, the art form that brought him to the attention of the public and established his reputation as a first-class musician, has always been problematical. Hancock did something not even the great jazz composer Duke Ellington, who wrote a few film scores himself including, most famously, the score for Otto Preminger’s 1959 courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Murder, was able to do. Hollywood had long loved the gunfighter and now with awarding the film scoring Oscar to a jazz film, it was, finally, recognition and redemption for jazz: As Hancock wrote in his autobiography when he learned he had been nominated for the award, “… I knew how much that Oscar would mean to jazz players, who often feel like the redheaded stepchildren of American music …” What made this Oscar all the more significant was that it was not given to a professional film scorer who had written a jazz soundtrack but rather to a reputable jazz musician who had written only a handful of film scores while pursuing his main career as a performing musician, not as a composer. Hancock underscored the film’s presentation of the tragic jazz musician in his acceptance speech which emphasized the jazz musician’s lonely sacrifice for his art. All of this mythmaking was couched in tragedy: the misunderstood, socially isolated gunfighter and the suffering, pain-wracked jazz musician, also a misunderstood isolator. As an image, the hip, subversive, argot-spewing jazz musician, like the rapacious, vengeful, cold-blooded gunfighter, was the birth of the American cool.
The jazz musician was, like, the gunslinger, one of the last signs of an American masculine swagger born of the frontier (in jazzspeak, “the territories”) and the transgressive mystique of border crossings (in jazzspeak, “fusion”). After all, the film itself was about a dying jazz musician, perhaps in his way as mythical as the dying gunfighter in Don Siegel’s 1976 film, The Shootist. When pianist Herbie Hancock won an Oscar for the original film score of the 1986 film, Round Midnight, it was if popular culture was bestowing a feverish kiss on the cool brow of a dying art form, jazz.
Herbie Hancock with Lisa Dickey (Viking, 2014) 344 pages with index and photos
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