In the book, he writes lovingly about how he came under the spell of jazz pianists George Shearing, Errol Garner, and Oscar Peterson. 26 in D Major with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when he was 11 years old. Introduced to the piano by a childhood friend, Hancock soon developed impressive skill with the instrument and performed Mozart’s Concerto No.
His parents came to the Windy City from Georgia. With Dickey’s assistance, Hancock writes about growing up on Chicago’s South Side with his brother, Waymon Jr., and sister, Jean. We were both involved in writing the book.” It wasn’t like I just talked to her, and she wrote the book. We would continually refine what was written. I would read and edit, and sometimes shift the wording, or change phrases or delete things. “We got together a lot,” Hancock recalls fondly. His agent, Robert Barnett, enlisted ghostwriter Lisa Dickey, who has worked on a number of bestselling books on the arts, business, and science ( The Time of My Life, with Patrick Swayze Remembering Whitney, with Cissy Houston), to coauthor Herbie Hancock: Possibilities. Hancock tours constantly, so he could not simply stop, sit down, and write the book.
He kept prodding me, ‘Herbie, you better get started on that book, because the older you get, the more you’re going to forget. “Quincy Jones was an instigator,” Hancock says, laughing, during a phone call from his Los Angeles home-office, “because he had written a book about his life. Though Hancock had thought about writing a book for years, Possibilities, which is named after his 2008 album, was slow to make the leap from his mind to the printed page.
In Herbie Hancock: Possibilities, his first book, which will be released October 28 by Viking, the 74-year-old jazz master chronicles the pioneering arc of his musical career, describing many aspects of his life-his musicianship, his family, his commitment to Buddhism, and his work with Unesco-in eloquent and honest detail. And in recent years he’s recorded and collaborated with a star-studded lineup of musicians, including Joni Mitchell, Sting, Stevie Wonder, and classical pianist Lang Lang. A decade later, he scored another hit with “Rockit,” a track inspired by hip-hop, and won an Oscar for the soundtrack to the film Round Midnight. “Chameleon,” his synthesizer-driven smash hit, ushered in the jazz-fusion era of the 1970s. He was a member of Miles Davis’s groundbreaking quintet in the 1960s he recorded a long list of seminal albums for the legendary Blue Note jazz label and his compositions-from “Maiden Voyage” and “Watermelon Man” to “Cantaloupe Island”-are recognized as jazz standards. During a career that spans seven astonishing decades, the Chicago-born, Los Angeles-based, Grammy- and Oscar-winning pianist and composer Herbie Hancock has gone where no jazz musician had gone before.
0 kommentar(er)
