For Herbie Hancock's Birthday, a Brief Interview Clip
With a special musical memory of his best friend
Happy 83rd birthday to Herbie Hancock!
And there’s so much to celebrate. I’ve been lucky enough to talk at length with Herbie about his music and innumerable other things. Wayne Shorter’s recent transition has their special relationship on my mind. As best friends who also happened to be musical geniuses and long-practicing Buddhists, Herbie and Wayne’s rapport was one of particular meaning and enchantment.
I thought about their friendship recently for a Wayne Shorter class I taught through Jazz at Lincoln Center, gathering some materials to illustrate their musical and extramusical association.
Herbie often enthuses about the unique language of musical metaphor that connected Joni Mitchell and Wayne. After improvising with Wayne in many settings over the years, Herbie understands Wayne’s metaphorical and cinematic playing to be a major part of his inventive improvisation.
A favorite example is on River: The Joni Letters, Herbie’s 2007 Joni Mitchell tribute album produced by Larry Klein. River: The Joni Letters won a Grammy for Album of the Year—not just in the jazz category, but the whole shebang.
For this album, the musicians adapted Joni’s song “Edith and the Kingpin” with vocals by the great Tina Turner, who channels both the Kingpin and Edith, the song’s main characters.
With the song’s core drama covered, Wayne decided to respond on saxophone from another perspective, a more peripheral vantage point . . . that wasn’t actually in the lyrics at all. Herbie first told me this story when I met with him in 2007 to work on a press release for the album. Here’s Herbie remembering the Joni Letters recording in a brief interview clip, followed by an excerpt from “Edith.”
Tell all the truth, but tell it slant, Emily Dickinson wrote. As Herbie and Wayne knew, an instrumentalist can’t represent every lyrical meaning or nuance in a song. If they do, it can sound like musical caricature, which is of course best suited to cartoons.
Instead, for “Edith and the Kingpin,” Wayne comes at the song slant, playing an imaginary background commentator on the action, one of noir nightlife’s guys at the bar. He both composes and improvises another role for himself in the scene.
This applied more generally to his improvisation as well. As an improviser, Wayne didn’t necessarily want to play the hero or protagonist. Herbie understands perhaps better than anyone how Wayne was always thinking of the big picture, the greater composition, and imagining about how to enrich the whole with his playing.
Herbie’s relationship with Wayne brought us sublime music and insight into musical meaning itself. Among the infinite reasons to celebrate Herbie Hancock on his birthday, I want to thank him for being Wayne Shorter’s best friend for almost six decades.
Holy smokes, thank you! 🥰
Edith and the Kingpin is one of my all time favorites of Joni’s and now has even more depth and breadth with this amazing glimpse. So glad I subscribed, though I know this one’s not behind the paywall. 😉 it’s just another reason to love ya!
This is a gem! Just like your recent recounting of the time you were encouraged by Wayne after a book release encounter had gone, not so well. Highly emotional re-countings that reach the reader. in Buddhism we refer to it as "Ichinen Sanzen" "3000 realms in a single moment of life" Thanks Michelle