Herbie Hancock

Bio

Herbie Hancock (Chicago, 1940) with more than 60 years of experience is one of the most avant-garde musicians in the international music scene. He was recognized both by the public and by the critics as an exceptional pianist and composer and was a reference point from the Sixties onwards.

Hancock started playing in 1961 with Donald Byrd and his group until the Blue Note Records noticed him and offered him a deal. The following year Herbie published his first solo album Takin’ Off (1962).

In 1963, Miles Davis selected him to join his band with which Hancock recorded the sessions of Seven Steps to Heaven. Hancock stayed in the group for five years, and this experience was of great importance in his musical production and launched him towards electronic sonorities.

In 1968, after the project with Davis, Herbie recorded a funk album of extreme elegance: Fat Albert Rotunda. In 1969 he founded a sextet and published The Prisoner (1970), an album closer to electronic sonorities, and thanks to which he definitely approached the funk scene. One of the most important albums of this period was Head Hunters (1973), which contained the acclaimed single “Chameleon”.

The following years were the continuation of Herbie’s journey through funk until the Eighties when the electronics kicked in and the artist published albums like Perfect Machine (1988) and Future Shock (1983), which contained the single “Rockit” that won one Grammy Award as Best Performance of the Year.

The Nineties and the 2000s were a period of experimentation and great production for Herbie, who published The New Standards (1995), Future2Future (2001), and Directions inMusic (2002).

In 2005 released Possibilities, which had a featuring with Christina Aguilera and John Mayers, followed by his collaboration with Quincy Jones for the song “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” in the tribute album We All Love Ennio Morricone (2007).

In 2008, Hancock published River: The Joni Letters, dedicated to his friend and songwriter Joni Mitchell which won a Grammy Award as Best Record of the Year, and in 2010 his latest solo album The Imagine Project.

Herbie Hancock scheduled for July 2020 a concert in Italy at Vittoriale degli Italiani (BS), which however has been postponed, due to the Covid-19 emergency, to July 2021.

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