CSOradio
CSOtv
CSOradio
Though he’s a jazz legend, with every honor the genre can bestow, Herbie Hancock started out with another career goal in mind: becoming a concert pianist.
At age 11, he won a CSO Youth Auditions and appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on a Young People’s Concert at Orchestra Hall on Feb. 5, 1952. In a wide-ranging interview published Aug. 27 by Newcity, Hancock recalls that formative event, his Chicago childhood and his introduction to jazz. Since that debut, Hancock has returned to Orchestra Hall countless times over his six-decade career, and he will come back again for a Symphony Center Presents concert Sept. 2.
That magical 1952 appearance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra “pretty much solidified my desire and aspiration to be a musician,” Hancock recalled in the Newcity interview. “But I thought I would be a concert pianist, a classical musician. I wasn’t attracted to jazz at that time. I heard it, but I thought it was for older people. At the time, I only listened to classical music and rhythm and blues. That was it."
Once he entered Hyde Park High School (now Hyde Park Academy), he had a life-altering experience while watching a student variety show. "Folks from various classes would participate. And there was a jazz trio that performed, and the pianist was in my sophomore class. And that was what really did it for me with jazz because he was improvising on my instrument! I didn’t know how to do that. So that’s when I decided I wanted to learn how to improvise. I want to learn how to play jazz.
“After my classmate performed, I went backstage to ask him, ‘How do I learn to play jazz?’ And he said, ‘If you like what I did, get some George Shearing records’ [referring to the British jazz pianist]. After I got off the L, I ran home and said, ‘Mama, we got to get some George Shearing records!’ And my mother told me, ‘You have some George Shearing records.’ ‘No, I don’t. What are you talking about?’ ‘Yes, you do.’
"I went to the record cabinet, and there they were. A box of 78s, which was what albums were at that time. As a matter of fact, one of the pieces was a piece that my classmate played at that variety show. And what do you know? George Shearing sounded like my classmate!”
Passing through Shearing as a back-door introduction to jazz, Hancock recalled, “[Pianist] Erroll Garner was like the next cat. He could swing. We’d say swing you into bad health. I liked the feeling from the rhythmic side of it, but it also had a lot of heart.”
Then came jazz great Oscar Peterson, whose formidable technique formed an intersection with Hancock’s previous classical training. “Then I heard a kind of East Coast hard-bop stuff. That really got me excited. And I was smitten from then on.”
Growing up on the South Side at 45th and South Parkway — now King Drive — Hancock still has strong feelings about that neighborhood. “Not only because I was born there, but because it was from there that I first went to hear people like Miles Davis. I heard Miles at the Regal Theater, which is at 47th and South Parkway. Miles was like Zeus to me. He was already at the top of the heap, so I felt privileged I could even see him. [John] Coltrane was with him at that time so that had to be about 1955. Wynton Kelly was playing piano with him, not Bill Evans, if I remember correctly. I didn’t hear Bill Evans until I moved to New York.”
And what brought Hancock from Chicago to New York, where, among other things, he would later be recruited by Davis for the new Miles Davis Quintet he was forming in the early 1960s? “Actually, I got a gig with [trumpet great] Donald Byrd when I was still in Chicago,” he said. “One winter there was a blizzard, and there was a gig that they had to play in Milwaukee. So Donald flew into Chicago because his piano player had gotten stranded somewhere, and he needed a piano player for at least the first weekend of a 10-day gig. He figured by Monday his piano player would show up.
"Anyway, he went to a club called the Birdhouse in Chicago and saw the club owner and told him he needed a pianist for the weekend. And the club owner said, ‘Do you want to try out a new, young up-and-coming pianist on the Chicago scene?’ And he mentioned my name, and they called me and I got the gig. Donald and the band seemed to really like the way I played, and before the weekend was over, he told me he was going to fire his pianist, and he wanted me to be the pianist in the band. But I’d have to move to New York.
"That was in Milwaukee when he told me that. ‘Everybody in the band loves the way you play, and we want you to stay in the band.’ And I said, ‘I would love to, but first you have to ask my mother.’ ”
Reprinted with permission from Newcity
The photos below were taken at Herbie Hancock’s recent performance at Symphony Center on March 30, 2024.
