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Herbie Hancock VibeZ

He played with Miles Davis, invented jazz-funk, made the first scratch record to reach a mass audience, and won Album of the Year with a Joni Mitchell tribute. Fifteen tracks of Herbie Hancock's restlessness.

The most curious man in jazz

Herbie Hancock was a child prodigy who played a Mozart concerto with the Chicago Symphony at eleven, joined Miles Davis's second great quintet at twenty-three, and has spent the sixty years since refusing to stay anywhere.

The arc is genuinely extraordinary: hard bop with Blue Note, then the electric experiments with Miles, then the Mwandishi band's free jazz, then Head Hunters — which fused jazz with Sly Stone funk and became one of the best-selling jazz albums ever made — then disco, then "Rockit," which put turntable scratching in front of a mainstream television audience, then a late career of collaboration and reinterpretation.

He is also a practising Buddhist and has spoken often about the philosophy behind the restlessness: that repeating yourself is the only real failure.

What to listen for

"Cantaloupe Island" and "Chameleon" are the two most sampled and interpolated pieces in his catalogue — the former became US3's "Cantaloop," the latter is the jazz-funk template.

"Rockit" is the landmark. Built with Bill Laswell and featuring Grand Mixer DXT on turntables, it won a Grammy and its video was in heavy rotation on MTV at a moment when the channel played very few Black artists. It introduced scratching to millions.

"Speak Like A Child" is the 1968 Blue Note title track and shows the harmonic sophistication underneath everything else.

The River: The Joni Letters material — "River" with Corinne Bailey Rae and "Edith And The Kingpin" with Tina Turner — comes from the album that won Album of the Year in 2008, only the second jazz record ever to do so.

"Imagine" assembles Seal, Pink, India.Arie, Jeff Beck, Oumou Sangaré and the Congolese group Konono N°1, and "The Mighty Tree" puts him alongside Terrace Martin, Glasper, Rapsody and Kamasi Washington.

Go deeper

Maiden Voyage (1965), Head Hunters (1973) and Future Shock (1983) are three albums that could have been made by three different people.

For the Miles years, Nefertiti and Miles Smiles are the essential quintet records.

And Wayne Shorter — his lifelong friend and bandmate, who died in 2023 — is the other half of that story and one of the great composers in American music.

A closing note on the method. Hancock has said in interviews that the lesson he took from Miles Davis was to treat a wrong note as information rather than a mistake — the famous story is of Miles playing something that made Herbie's error sound intentional. That instinct explains the whole career: sixty years of treating every unfamiliar genre as a chord to resolve rather than a threat to avoid. Very few musicians of any era have stayed curious that long.

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