He has seventy years of music to his name, ranging from his work with Miles Davis to funk, synthesizers, and Buddhist philosophy. Talk to him and you realize you are in the presence of a free mind in constant motion. Those who wrote that Herbie Hancock gradually converted to commercial funk with little connection to jazz understood nothing. It is not just Hancock they misunderstood, but the essence of jazz and, more broadly, Black music itself: fusion, open-mindedness, freedom. Hancock has embodied this since he was eleven, when he performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, playing the first movement of Mozart’s Concerto K 537. His Blue Note recordings from the 1960s — Empyrean Isles and Maiden Voyage among them — are masterpieces of the African American idiom. Like many others, Hancock gained lasting fame after being chosen and shaped by Miles Davis. The sextet he led from 1971 to 1973 […]