April 12, 1940 (Chicago, Illinois)
The standard line on Herbie Hancock is versatility, and it is true and slightly useless. Post-bop, modal jazz, funk, electro, hip hop, film scores, a Joni Mitchell record; fourteen Grammys and an Oscar. Stated as a list it sounds like restlessness, or worse, like a man chasing whatever was selling.
It is neither, and he has told us what it actually is, in a story about a mistake.
The wrong chord
Some time in the 1960s, on stage with the Miles Davis quintet, in the middle of one of Davis’s solos, Hancock played a chord that was simply and audibly wrong. His own account:
I played this chord that was so wrong I thought I had just destroyed everything, and reduced that great night to rubble. Miles took a breath, and he played some notes. And he made my chord right.
He has said it took him years to work out what had happened. The explanation he arrived at is the most quoted thing he has ever said, and it is worth quoting in full because the short version gets sentimentalised into something limp:
I judged what I had played. Miles didn’t. Miles just accepted it as something new that happened.
That is not the greetings-card version, the one that shortens to a slogan about wrong notes. What he describes is a difference in where attention goes: he judged, Davis did not, and Davis had already turned the event into material while Hancock was still assessing it.
The rest of this is our reading rather than his, and worth flagging as such. The useful lesson for a player looks less like permissiveness and more like latency: the cost of evaluating your own last bar is the bar you spend not listening. And it is tempting to run that forward into the career — a musician who treats the unexpected as material rather than as failure is a plausible candidate for making a funk record and then an electro record. Tempting, and an inference. Hancock has not, as far as we can find, drawn that line himself.
(Retellings put this concert in Stockholm, in Stuttgart, and nowhere in particular. Hancock’s own tellings do not consistently name the city, so neither do we.)
Chicago, and a very well-prepared start
Herbie Hancock was born in Chicago on 12 April 1940 and was a serious classical child pianist: he played a Mozart concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at eleven. There were, as he has pointed out, no jazz teachers on the South Side when he wanted one, so the jazz was self-taught from records.
He came up through Donald Byrd’s group at the start of the 1960s, and made his debut as a leader for Blue Note in 1962 with Takin’ Off, which carried “Watermelon Man” — a hit almost immediately in Mongo Santamaría’s cover version, which meant Hancock had a songwriting income at twenty-two. That detail matters more than it sounds. Financial independence early is part of why he could keep taking risks later.
In 1963 Miles Davis hired him.
There is one more thing worth knowing about how he got there, because it explains the technical range. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1960 with degrees in music AND electrical engineering. The man who would later put a turntablist on a jazz record and build a career out of synthesisers did not pick that up as a fashion in the 1980s. He had the engineering half of it before he had the record deal.
The second great quintet
Hancock joined Davis in 1963. The lineup everyone means — Shorter, Hancock, Carter and Williams — settled once Wayne Shorter took the saxophone chair in 1964, after George Coleman and Sam Rivers had each had a turn, and it held until 1968. That band is the most influential small group in modern jazz after Parker’s, and what it did is easy to state and hard to do: it kept the forms of standards and bebop while making almost everything inside them negotiable. The time floats. The harmony is implied rather than stated. Nobody is holding the structure down, because everybody is.
Hancock’s job in that band was the hardest chair. A pianist comping behind Davis in 1965 has to supply enough harmony to orient the soloist and little enough to leave the harmony open, and has to change what that balance is from bar to bar. What he developed there — leaving chords out, voicing so ambiguously that two different tonal readings stay available, entering late on purpose — is the foundation of modern comping.
The records to hear from that band are E.S.P., Nefertiti and Sorcerer, and he turns up later on In a Silent Way, at the point where Davis walks out of acoustic jazz entirely. Under his own name in the same years he made Empyrean Isles in 1964 and Maiden Voyage in 1965, which are the records to study.
What is actually happening in the hands
Start with the four chords of “Maiden Voyage”, because they teach a whole harmonic world. The tune is built from minor seventh chords with a bass note a fourth above the chord’s root: A minor seven over D, C minor seven over F, and B flat minor seven over E flat. The fourth is where the fake books get into trouble. It is usually printed as A flat minor seven over D flat, but that spelling is disputed: Hancock’s recording has an E natural in it, which A flat minor cannot supply, and which points to a C sharp minor chord instead. If you have played it out of a Real Book and it never quite sounded right, that is why.
The single most important thing to notice is what is NOT in them. Take the first: D, A, C, E, G. There is no F, so there is no third — the chord does not tell you whether it is major or minor. That is not a gap, it is the point.
The label that fits it most naturally is a suspended dominant, D9 sus 4: root D, suspended fourth G, fifth A, flat seventh C, ninth E. Ted Gioia and Jerry Coker both describe the progression as suspended chords, and Hancock’s own liner notes run along the same line. You will also see it written as a D minor ninth with the G standing in for the missing F, which is a legitimate reading and the one most fake books imply. Both descriptions are of the same five notes; neither resolves, which is where the floating quality comes from.
Read horizontally, it is quartal. Take the same pitches and reorder them: E, A, D, G, C. Four stacked perfect fourths. This is the same family as the So What voicing, and it is why the whole record sounds spacious rather than merely pretty. Fourths do not tell you where the tonic is.
Hancock’s own voicings on the record lean hard on that fourth-based reading, and that is the practical takeaway: on a static minor chord, stack fourths rather than thirds and the harmony stops pointing anywhere.
“Cantaloupe Island” is the same lesson at street level. Sixteen bars in four four-bar sections, built on three distinct chords — F minor seven, D flat seven, D minor seven, then F minor seven again — and Hancock spends most of his solo inside a D minor blues vocabulary, setting a mood rather than exploiting every harmonic corner. It is one of the earliest modal jazz compositions and it swings like a soul record, which is the whole trick.
Three things worth stealing, in ascending order of difficulty:
- Play a minor seventh chord with the bass a fourth above its root, and sit there for two minutes. Just that. Learn what the suspension does to your ear before you try to use it.
- Comp a whole chorus leaving out one chord per four bars. Not a rest: a deliberate hole where the harmony should be, and let the bass and your own right hand imply it. This is the quintet lesson and it is uncomfortable.
- Play something wrong on purpose and then justify it. Hit a chord that does not belong, and instead of correcting it, spend the next two bars making the harmony arrive somewhere that retrospectively explains it. That is what Davis did for him, and it is a practisable skill rather than a philosophy.
The Blue Note years, which are easy to undercount
Between 1962 and 1968 Hancock was effectively the house pianist at Blue Note, and the sideman discography is absurd: Donald Byrd, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Sam Rivers, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Hutcherson, Grant Green, Billy Higgins, Elvin Jones. If you have listened to much mid-sixties Blue Note, you have heard a great deal more Hancock than you realise.
Under his own name the essential four are Takin’ Off, Empyrean Isles, Maiden Voyage and Speak Like a Child, with My Point of View and Inventions & Dimensions in between. He also wrote the score for Antonioni’s Blow-Up in 1966, which opened a second career in film and eventually produced an Academy Award for the score to Round Midnight twenty years later.
Two things to notice about that period. First, he was twenty-two when “Watermelon Man” became a hit in Mongo Santamaría’s cover, so he had composing income before he had a reputation. Second, he was doing all of this while holding down the piano chair in the most demanding band in jazz. The output is not the product of a man with spare time; it is the product of someone who worked out early that composing and playing feed each other.
Mwandishi, which almost nobody starts with and probably should
Between the quintet and the funk there is a band most listeners skip. In 1971 he formed the sextet that became known by his Swahili name, Mwandishi, and made what is usually filed as his breakthrough fusion record. It is abstract, long form, electric and difficult, and it is the sound of a player taking the quintet’s freedoms as far in one direction as they will go.
It matters here for one reason: he stopped. The account repeated everywhere, including by us until we went looking for where it started, is that the group had reached the limits of that kind of improvised abstraction and that his Buddhist practice pointed him toward something more earthbound. We have not traced it to a first-person source. Treat it as the standard secondary telling.
What is observable without any of it is just the shape of the discography: the abstraction stops, the grooves start, and the musician doing both is plainly not running out of ideas.
1973, and the part the purists hated
By the early 1970s the Mwandishi band had gone about as far into abstraction as it was going to, and Hancock had begun practising Buddhism. What he made next sounded like nothing he had made before.
Head Hunters, in 1973, is that record, and the clearest way to hear what changed is to put its “Watermelon Man” next to the 1962 original. Same composition, same composer, eleven years apart, and almost nothing in common beyond the tune: the first is a hard-bop head with a walking feel, the second is a groove record. He did not write a new piece. He re-decided what the piece was for. It peaked at number thirteen on the Billboard 200, became the best-selling jazz album for a period, sold over a million copies, and in 1986 became the first jazz album to receive an RIAA platinum award. “Chameleon” was his first mainstream hit and is now a standard, which is a strange thing to say about a funk vamp and is nonetheless true.
Jazz critics were not uniformly pleased. The honest thing to say is that the complaint was not stupid — the record really does simplify the harmony drastically compared to what he had just been playing — and that the complaint missed what was being traded for it. Rhythm got the attention harmony had been getting. It is the same musician making a different allocation, not a lesser musician making a commercial one.
Then in 1983 he did it again with “Rockit”, from Future Shock, which put a turntablist on a jazz musician’s record, won a Grammy, took five MTV awards for its video, and introduced scratching to an audience that had never encountered it. Future Shock went platinum faster than Head Hunters had.
The Grammy, and a fact nobody can agree on
In 2007 he made River: The Joni Letters, a record of Joni Mitchell material with Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, Lionel Loueke and Vinnie Colaiuta, and guest vocals from Norah Jones, Tina Turner and Corinne Bailey Rae. On 10 February 2008 it won the Grammy for Album of the Year, beating Kanye West and Amy Winehouse, which caused a considerable row.
Here the reference works disagree with each other, which is worth showing rather than hiding. Wikipedia’s article on the album says River was the third jazz album to win Album of the Year, after Henry Mancini’s The Music from Peter Gunn and Getz/Gilberto. Wikipedia’s article on Hancock’s discography says it was the second, after Getz/Gilberto alone. The whole disagreement is a classification question: whether a 1959 television-theme soundtrack counts as a jazz album.
USA Today, reporting at the time, also called it jazz’s second, and supplied the number that actually conveys something: forty-three years since Getz/Gilberto. The likeliest reason for the split is a classification question — whether a 1959 television-theme soundtrack counts as a jazz album — but none of the three articles says so outright, so treat that as our reading rather than theirs.
The gap is not in dispute. Nor is the fact that Hancock was the last Black musician to win Album of the Year until Jon Batiste in 2022.
The long tail
The list after 1983 is long and worth knowing exists, because the popular story of Hancock tends to stop at Rockit. He won an Academy Award for the score to Round Midnight in 1986. He formed V.S.O.P. as an acoustic counterweight to the electric bands. He took the artistic direction of what is now the Hancock Institute of Jazz. He has kept making records into his eighties.
The through-line we would draw — and it is ours, not his — runs back to the anecdote at the top. A player who treats an unplanned event as material rather than as an error has no particular reason to settle, because settling means deciding in advance what counts as material. Whether that is actually why the discography looks the way it does, only Hancock could say, and as far as we can find he has not.
What is documented and what is a story
A correction to our own app. Our bio gave his age as a hardcoded number. Ages written into prose rot: he was born in April 1940, and any number typed into a sentence is wrong within a year of typing it. It has been replaced with the birth year, which is not going anywhere.
And a note on the wrong-chord story. It is genuinely his, told repeatedly and on camera, so it is not one of the orphan anecdotes that litter jazz writing. But the setting drifts between tellings, and the version that gets passed around online usually shortens it to a slogan about there being no wrong notes, which is not what he said and is much less useful than what he did say.
Where to start, honestly
Maiden Voyage, and give the title track your full attention rather than treating it as ambient: listen for the fact that the harmony never resolves, and count how long he makes you wait. Then Empyrean Isles for “Cantaloupe Island”. Then Head Hunters, loud, without apologising for it.
Then sit down and play those four chords, in order, for five minutes, and notice how little you need to do on top of them. That is the discovery the record is built on, and it is available to anyone with two hands and some patience.
Start with these records
- Maiden Voyage 1965
Perfect post-bop masterpiece. The title track uses suspended chords to create an oceanic, floating feeling. Essential study for modal jazz harmony. - Head Hunters 1973
Game-changing funk-jazz fusion. 'Chameleon' is a 15-minute groove odyssey. One of the best-selling jazz albums of the 1970s. You cannot be a modern pianist without knowing this record. - Empyrean Isles 1964
Features 'Cantaloupe Island' - one of the greatest jazz compositions ever. Perfect blend of groove and sophisticated harmony. - River: The Joni Letters 2007
Herbie's tribute to Joni Mitchell. Won Album of the Year Grammy (rare for jazz!). Shows his sensitivity and arranging genius.
How to listen
- If you are starting out
- 'Cantaloupe Island' - infectious groove, simple but genius. Then 'Watermelon Man' - pure fun!
- If you can already comp through a standard
- 'Maiden Voyage' full album. Study those suspended chords and how they create space. Notice the lack of traditional ii-V-I progressions.
- If you are transcribing
- Transcribe his comping on Miles Davis' 'E.S.P.' album. Analyze how he implies harmony without stating it. Mind-blowing sophistication!
Sources
Every date, title and quotation on this page is checked against at least two independent sources before it builds. Where sources disagree, the page says so instead of picking the better story.
- How to Play the 4 Maiden Voyage Chords by Herbie HancockContemporary School of Piano
- Herbie HancockEncyclopedia.com
- Herbie HancockHancock Institute of Jazz
- BiographyHerbie Hancock official site
- 50 Years Ago, Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters Changed Jazz ForeverKiley Larsen
- Herbie Hancock: No Such Thing as a Wrong NoteMasterClass (YouTube)
- Herbie Hancock, NEA Jazz MasterNational Endowment for the Arts
- What Miles Davis Taught Herbie Hancock: In Music, as in Life, There Are No MistakesOpen Culture
- Musical material for improvisation practice: Cantaloupe IslandRicardo Pereira
- Cantaloupe Island harmonyTalkBass
- Herbie Through the YearsUniversity Musical Society
- Herbie Hancock's win for 'River' stirs waters in jazz communityUSA Today, via Joni Mitchell Library
- Herbie HancockWikipedia
- Maiden Voyage (composition)Wikipedia
- Herbie Hancock discographyWikipedia
- River: The Joni LettersWikipedia