Herbie receives the Musical Arts award at BET Honors.

Click here to watch the video via BET

Click here to watch a video of Herbie accepting the BET Musical Arts Award

“Just took home the Grammy for best improvised jazz solo. Honored to accept amongst such wonderful company.”

“Whoa. Thrilled to be given the award for Best Pop Gollaboration w/ Vox for ‘Imagine'” – Herbie Hancock

Congratulations to Herbie Hancock on his GRAMMY awards in the categories of ‘Best Improvised Jazz Solo’ and ‘Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals.’

Herbie picked up the ‘Best Improvised Jazz Solo’ award for his solo on the song “A Change Is Gonna Come” from The Imagine Project, while the title song, “Imagine,” was awarded ‘Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals.’ “A Change Is Gonna Come” features vocals from James Morrison and “Imagine” features vocals from India Arie, Pink, Seal and guitar work from Jeff Beck.

Herbie Hancock, George Clooney, Gwyneth Paltrow, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Rene Zellweger and More Join Landmark One-Hour Event.

SEPTEMBER 1, 2010 / LA & NYC – The extraordinary line-up of actors, musicians, athletes and journalists participating in the Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) primetime roadblock television fundraising event (September 10, 2010, at 8PM EST & PST / 7PM CT) continues to grow. The following supporters have now joined the broadcast: Elizabeth Banks, Kathy Bates, Sir Richard Branson, Michael Chiklis, George Clooney, Bill Hader, Dorothy Hamill, Anne Heche, Cheryl Hines, Vanessa Hudgens, John Krasinski, Dr. Jon Lapook, Rob Lowe, Marlee Matlin, Lea Michele, Matthew Morrison, Lisa Niemi, Chris O’Donnell, Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Passmore, Naya Rivera, Will Smith, Sam Trammell, Denzel Washington, Aaron Yoo and Renée Zellweger.

Musical guests scheduled to perform include: Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, Neil Diamond, Jakob Dylan, The Edge, Delta Goodrem, Herbie Hancock, Kris Kristofferson, Lady Antebellum, Leona Lewis, Orianthi and Ann Wilson and Nancy Wilson of Heart. These artists join previously announced performers including Natasha Bedingfield, Queen Latifah, Martina McBride, Aaron Neville, Dave Stewart and Stevie Wonder.

The Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) telecast will raise funds that will accelerate innovative cancer research. The live, one-hour fundraising event will be simulcast commercial-free on ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, Bio, Current TV, Discovery Health, E!, G4, HBO, HBO Latino, MLB Network, mun2, Showtime, Smithsonian Channel, The Style Network, TV One and VH1 and hosted by network news anchors Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer and Brian Williams. The broadcast will air in 195 countries, as well as on the Armed Forces Network.

“Plain and simple, cancer takes too much from us,” said Laura Ziskin, SU2C co-founder and executive producer of the September 10th broadcast, who is a cancer survivor. “Loved ones lost to it, pain and suffering endured by those in treatment, even the recent report that cancer has the most devastating economic impact of any cause of death…this disease exacts a very high price. We want people all over the country to rise up and say, ‘ENOUGH!’

“Tune in on Sept. 10th to see your favorite stars, who’ll ask, ‘Will you stand up with us?’ Person by person, saying ‘yes’ moves us toward a goal completely within our grasp: a world without cancer. A donation of any size brings scientists one step closer to a cure,” Ziskin said.

Cat Deeley of FOX’s So You Think You Can Dance will host the pre-show promotion to kickoff the evening as the celebrity phone bank opens at 4:30 PM PST. A 30 minute online “after hours” extended play featuring jams with musical guests Fitz and the Tantrums, Orianthi, Natasha Bedingfield, and Heart will conclude the night’s events. The pre-show promotion and extended play will be featured on numerous online portals and destination sites (which will all also stream the one hour special online) including: ABC, ABC News, AOL, Bing, CBS, CBS News, Crackle, Discovery Health, E! Online, FOX, G4, Hulu, Livestream, MLB Network, MSN, mun2, NBC, Style Network, TV Guide, TV One, Ustream, VEVO, VH1, Wonderwall.MSN.com, omg.yahoo.com, and YouTube.

Previously announced participants in the September 10th special include: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tatyana Ali, Dave Annable, Christina Applegate, Lance Armstrong, David Boreanaz, Abigail Breslin, Cindy Crawford, Fran Drescher, Elizabeth Edwards, Donald Faison, Sally Field, Derek Fisher, Michael C. Hall, Alyson Hannigan, Tony Hawk, Jon Heder, Marg Helgenberger, Terrence Howard, Ken Jeong, Rashida Jones, Minka Kelly, Laura Linney, Zachary Levi, Ray Liotta, Seth MacFarlane, Mandy Moore, Apolo Anton Ohno, Sharon Osbourne, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Jim Parsons, Aubrey Plaza, Dr. Ana Maria Polo, Yarel Ramos, Naya Rivera, Robin Roberts, Seth Rogen, The Simpsons, Eric Stonestreet, Marcia Strassman, Alison Sweeney, Maura Tierney, Gabrielle Union, Sofia Vassilieva, Sofia Vergara, Marissa Jaret Winokur, Reese Witherspoon and Ethan Zohn.

Also appearing on the September 10th special as an inspiration to those currently in the fight against cancer are Anne Feeley and Pearce Quesenberry. A brain cancer survivor, Anne Feeley, at age 55, recently cycled from San Francisco to Washington D.C. to generate awareness about and funds for the fight against the disease. Pearce Quesenberry is a 13-year-od who was featured in the 2008 Stand Up To Cancer broadcast, as she was battling brain cancer. Pearce is now cancer-free, and will participate in this year’s broadcast as a survivor.

The broadcast is dedicated to the 12 million U.S. cancer survivors, illustrating how groundbreaking research can change the tide in the fight against the disease. Updates will be provided on the work of the five Stand Up To Cancer Dream Teams, and Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent, will report on other new medical developments.

SU2C’s star-studded television special builds continuing public support and donations for cutting-edge cancer research that translates at a rapid pace from the laboratory to treatments and technologies benefitting patients. One hundred percent of all donations received from the public will go directly to cancer research. Viewers will have the ability to donate via a dedicated phone line, the web, or through text.

The 2008 telecast helped raise over $100 million. To date five multi-disciplinary “Dream Teams” of researchers from more than 50 institutions, as well as 13 young innovative scientists who are undertaking high-risk yet potentially high-reward projects have received SU2C funding. SU2C brings together these scientists from different disciplines across various institutions to work collaboratively, rather than competitively, at a critical time in the field of cancer research.

The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), which consists of more than 32,000 scientists engaged in the fight against cancer, is Stand Up To Cancer’s sole scientific partner. The AACR, the oldest and largest scientific organization in the world focusing on every aspect of high-quality, innovative cancer research from the bench to the bedside, is responsible for administering and managing the grants, and providing scientific oversight in conjunction with the SU2C Scientific Advisory Committee, led by Nobel Laureate Phillip A. Sharp, Ph.D., institute professor at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

About the Stand Up To Cancer Initiative

Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) — a program of the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF), a 501(c)(3) charitable organization — raises funds to hasten the pace of groundbreaking translational research that can get new therapies to patients quickly and save lives. In the fall of 2007, a group of women who have been profoundly affected by cancer began working together to marshal the resources of the media and entertainment industries in the fight against it.

Stand Up To Cancer will return to primetime TV on September 10, 2010, at 8PM EST & PST / 7PM CT. The one-hour fundraising event will be simulcast live and commercial-free on ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, Bio, Current TV, Discovery Health, E!, G4, HBO, HBO Latino, MLB Network, mun2, Showtime, Smithsonian Channel, The Style Network, TV One and VH1.

The SU2C founding members include Laura Ziskin, executive producer of the Sept. 5, 2008 broadcast and the upcoming one, who is a cancer survivor; Sherry Lansing, chairperson of the Entertainment Industry Foundation’s Board of Directors and founder of the Sherry Lansing Foundation; EIF President and CEO Lisa Paulsen; Katie Couric; EIF Senior Vice President Kathleen Lobb; Rusty Robertson and Sue Schwartz of the Robertson Schwartz Agency; nonprofit executive Ellen Ziffren; and Noreen Fraser, founder of the Noreen Fraser Foundation (NFF) and a cancer survivor. SU2C was formally launched on May 27, 2008.

Major League Baseball was the founding donor to contribute to Stand Up To Cancer. Other major SU2C supporters include Sidney Kimmel, the country’s largest individual supporter of cancer research; Amgen, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, The Gateway for Cancer Research Foundation, GlaxoSmithKline, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Wallis Annenberg & The Annenberg Foundation, Alliance for Global Good, Milken Family Foundation, Philips Electronics, Steve Tisch, The Island Def Jam Music Group, Comcast and many others. SU2C major media partners include AOL, Bonnier Corporation, Condé Nast Media Group, Costco Connections, eBay Inc., Facebook, Hearst Corporation, iTunes, MySpace, Rodale, Inc., Los Angeles Times, Martha Stewart Living, Meredith Corporation, Time Inc., Twitter, VEVO and YouTube.

About the Entertainment Industry Foundation

Stand Up To Cancer is a program of the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF), the 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization that serves as the collective philanthropy for the television and film businesses. EIF has distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to support programs addressing critical health, education and social issues.

Media Contacts:

Ongoing SU2C Contact:
Chet Mehta, [email protected]
ID-PR
323.822.4871

Sheri Goldberg, [email protected]
ID-PR
646.723.3800

Spirit. It’s a crucial element in any show that attempts to be as broad-ranging as the 70th birthday celebration the Hollywood Bowl threw for Herbie Hancock on Wednesday night (9/1).

All the right guests were on hand — musicians he had worked with for four decades and the folks who appear on his latest album — and the material was equally expansive and inclusive, covering nearly every phase of his career from the early 1960s to today. Spirit, which was abundantly evident, was the key.

Hancock and a band of alto saxophonist Wayne Shorter, trumpeter Terence Blanchard, bassist Esperanza Spalding and drummer Jack De Johnette kept the first 45 minutes focused on not just Hancock’s early acoustic classics — “Maiden Voyage” and “Cantaloupe Island” were part of the four-song set — they demonstrated how the pianist works as a bandleader and improviser.

Which is where the spirit element comes in. There was no deferring to Hancock, no kid glove treatment in the improvisation or reining in of the soloists. Shorter went in stream-of-conscious directions where he is completely comfortable and Blanchard, known more for controlled atmospheres, followed with enthusiasm, Spalding and De Johnette providing a muscular and free-swinging rhythm section. It was exhilarating music, the sort usually limited to clubs and small theaters, that captured not just the tunes of Hancock’s post-Miles Davis work, but the adventurousness of his acoustic projects over the last two decades.

Part two of the evening, with a supporting band of guitarist Lionel Loueke, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, bassist Pino Palladino and keyboardist-singer Greg Phillinganes, covered his plugged-in years and his latest album, “The Imagine Project.” Both were achieved admirably.

To record “The Imagine Project,” Hancock traveled to seven different countries to gather collaborators, so it was something of a coup that this party featured five of the artists who appear on the album and a few exceptional replacements — congueras Alex Acuna and Paulinho Da Costa, tablaist Zakir Hussain and sitarist Niladri Kumar. Kristina Train, whose debut was released by Blue Note a year ago, took on parts sung by Pink on the new album and Norah Jones on the Grammy Winner “River: The Joni Letters”; Phillinganes filled in for John Legend and James Morrison on Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up” and Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.”

Amid the eight selections from “Imagine Project,” Hancock also worked in the landmark fusion tune “Actual Proof,” the funk classic from his Headhunters days “Watermelon Man,” and, for a finale, “Chameleon.” The musicians took their bows while a recording of “Rockit” played.

Considering that Hancock’s involvement with many of the musicians was limited to a single track on record, the interplay onstage was consistently focused and — here comes that word again — spirited. Hancock, who moved between two synthesizers, acoustic piano and a portable keyboard strapped around his neck, had a powerful duel with the slide guitarist Derek Trucks and displayed a telepathic command of the shape the music was about to take with Hussain, Kumar and Shorter on “The Song Goes On.” Da Costa brought sizzle and levity to a tambourine-synthesizer duet on “Watermelon Man”; Acuna’s hand percussion solo during Juanes’ performance of “La Tierra” was one of the evening’s highlights.

The medley of Tinariewen’s “Tamatant” and Bob Marley’s “Exodus” exploded with colorful movement from the Debbie Allen Dance Academy. Hancock’s version of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A’Changin'” with singer Lisa Hannigan was shortchanged from the rich and textured rendition on the album, but it’s quite possible the ticking of the clock was growing louder — the Bowl is adamant about not going past its 11 p.m. curfew — and Hancock was clearly aware of how many acts he needed to get onstage based on the number of times he peeked at his watch.

All in all, regardless of the reason each of the 12,000 people on hand showed up to wish Herbie a happy 70th, it would be hard to ask for a more fulfilling celebration. Though I do look forward to the day the innovative “Mwandishi” is fully embraced, that overlooked classic’s spirit could definitely be felt in many places throughout Wednesday’s show. – Phil Gallo, SoundSpike Contributor

Click here to read the original source article via Soundspike

Click here to watch a video of Herbie performing with Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, from ‘The Imagine Project’.

Click here to watch a video of Herbie performing with Pink, Seal, and India.Arie from ‘The Imagine Project’ via YouTube

Click here to watch a video of Herbie Hancock’s duet with Juanes from ‘The Imagine Project’ via YouTube

Marcus Miller will be playing with Herbie Hancock for one night only at the Mann Center in Philadelphia on a very special Friday the 13th!