Mumbai: ‘Jazz is music where conversation happens’

Herbie Hancock (in black) with American jazz singer Dianne Reeves at the NCPA. Tom Carter (extreme left), the president of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, and Greg Pardo (fourth from left), spokesperson for the US Consulate General of Mumbai, were also present, as well as sitar maestro Purbayan Chatterjee and tabla player Swarupa Ananth-Sawkar. Pic/Shadab Khan

Herbie Hancock is a name that every jazz enthusiast will recognise, no matter how nascent their love for the music form is. The American jazz legend is in Mumbai with jazz singer and five-time Grammy Award winner Dianne Reeves for performances and masterclasses dedicated to celebrating Dr Martin Luther King Jr. The performance, which took place on Saturday evening, also featured six students from the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance at UCLA Ensemble, including two Indian musicians, sitar maestro Purbayan Chatterjee and tabla player Swarupa Ananth-Sawkar.

This is the fourth time the 83-year-old jazz pianist has visited the country for a jazz performance. "I'm always ready to promote the arts and culture," he said, when asked what drew him to the city. "The arts have a powerful effect on the heart of human beings." And there's the fact that indo-jazz has been a form of jazz he's interested in. He said Zakir Hussain's father, the prominent tabla player Ustad Allah Rakha Khan, was one of the first Indian artistes he heard when he was in his twenties.

Hancock started playing the piano when he was just seven years old and started his career with the jazz band Miles Davis Quintet in 1963. "I didn't choose jazz. It picked me," he mused. "New York was the Mecca for jazz back in the day. Now there are two Meccas - New York and Los Angeles." The music form has a rich history, believed to have originated in the African-American communities settled in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th century with blues and ragtime influences. Today, he says, jazz has become a spectrum, with a range of sub-genres, like jazz rap, which highlight the openness of the music form. "The life-blood of jazz is that it is open and inclusive."

Reeves, who hails from a musical family, waxes eloquent about jazz, when asked what it means to her. "It's soulful, pulsating, beautiful music that depends on improvisation, which blew me away when I first came across it," she gushed. "Today, the voices of women are becoming more prominent, which is a great thing."

Hancock said he doesn't call himself a jazz musician. "What I really am is a human being. What I do is play music." He asked why everyone wants to be famous, eliciting laughs. "The most important thing is to be a better person today than you were yesterday."

Jazz has always been known to be a "free" form of music, one that demands the art of improvisation. "It demands its own voice," as Reeves put it. Hancock said that it flows from the heart. "Whatever happens, make it work," he quipped - something that can be applied to life as well. "You can turn a mistake into a treasure."