Herbie Hancock

From Miles Davis to the Headhunters

Herbert Jeffrey Hancock was born on April 12, 1940 in Chicago and plays keyboards, keytar, vocoder and synthesizer. He worked with Donald Byrd and Coleman Hawkins from 1960 and made his first solo album, Takin' Off, on Blue Note in 1962. In May 1963 he joined the Miles Davis quintet with Ron Carter, Tony Williams and Wayne Shorter, and stayed until 1968; Blue Note albums include Speak Like a Child (1968) and The Prisoner (1969). He also appeared on Davis's electric albums In a Silent Way, A Tribute to Jack Johnson and On the Corner. From 1969 to 1973 came the Mwandishi era: Mwandishi (1971), Crossings (1972) and Sextant (1973), on Warner Bros. and then Columbia.

In 1973 he disbanded the sextet and formed the Headhunters. Head Hunters (October 26, 1973) was recorded that September, in the evenings, at Wally Heider Studios and Different Fur Trading Co. in San Francisco, produced by Hancock and David Rubinson, and reached 13 on the Billboard 200 and 2 on the R&B albums chart. Hancock said, via Uncut as relayed by Songfacts, that instead of getting jazz cats who knew how to play funk, he got funk cats who knew how to play jazz; he had been influenced by James Brown and Sly Stone's "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)". Thrust (1974), Man-Child (1975) and Secrets (1976) followed, V.S.O.P. formed in 1977 with ex-Davis bandmates, and "Rockit" from Future Shock (1983) is often cited as early jazz hip-hop.

He won an Academy Award for best original score for Round Midnight (1986) and the Grammy for album of the year in 2008 for River: The Joni Letters, and Wikipedia counts 14 Grammys. Honors include the Kennedy Center Honors (2013), the Norton Lectures at Harvard (2014), a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award (2016) and the Polar Music Prize (2025). Other records include A Tribute to Miles (1994), Gershwin's World (1998), Future2Future (2001), Possibilities (2005) and The Imagine Project (2010). He wrote the memoir Herbie Hancock: Possibilities (2014, with Lisa Dickey), and the documentary Herbie Hancock: Possibilities appeared in 2006. The Library of Congress added Head Hunters to the National Recording Registry in 2008. The official site lists 2026 and 2027 tour dates.