Click here to watch the full concert video recorded at The White House on April 30th, 2016 in commemoration of International Jazz Day

“Not a bad venue, right?” asks UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, chairman of International Jazz Day, and living jazz legend Herbie Hancock jokingly, after mention of what’s sure to be the genre’s biggest event of the year: an all-star jazz concert, broadcast from the South Lawn of the White House in primetime on ABC (April 30, 8 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CT).

Jazz has been at the White House almost as long as it’s existed — though what Ray Miller and his band were playing for Calvin Coolidge in 1924 likely bears little resemblance to the music President and Mrs. Obama will be listening to as they celebrate International Jazz Day (also April 30), the impetus for the concert and broadcast. 2016’s concert will feature a wide range of artists including Wayne Shorter, Aretha Franklin, Sting, Esperanza Spalding, Robert Glasper, Chick Corea, and Hancock himself, among dozens of others.

“When it was presented to the President and Mrs. Obama, they immediately embraced the idea of doing this at the White House,” says Tom Carter, President of the Thelonious Monk Institute (the organization that runs International Jazz Day, now in its fifth year), adding, “Jazz has been a very important part of both of their lives.

“The President will tell you about his teens, when he started listening to Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter and others, and how jazz has been an integral part of his life,” says Carter, “and the First Lady will tell you about her grandfather’s passion for jazz, and how he exposed her as a child to this music. They’ve both been surrounded by jazz for most of their lives, so they jumped at the opportunity to have their friends and the artists that they follow to the White House.”

Hancock’s already been a part of Obama’s presidency, though, as well as almost every president since Carter, who famously had his own South Lawn jazz celebration in 1978, organized by Newport Jazz Festival impresario George Wein. In fact, he’s performed there so often, he’s lost count: a Valentine’s Day celebration during the second Bush administration, at the invitation of First Lady Laura, President Obama’s 50th birthday, a recent state dinner where he did a duet with classical virtuoso Lang Lang…”I’ve seen a range of presidents,” he concludes. The pianist has even been enlisted on the campaign trail. “When Clinton was running for president for the first time,” he says, “he asked me and Wayne Shorter — was Ron Carter there too? — to fly in to Little Rock [an ensemble that would have included all the living members of Miles Davis’s famous Second Great Quintet]. He actually flew us there on a private plane — he really wanted us there. It was really cool.”

The reason he’s been called up so often is because jazz is, as he puts it, “America’s classical music these days.” With a primetime slot, though, the International Jazz Day organizers want to show that it’s anything but stodgy. “I think it’s an opportunity for those who know the word jazz, and have maybe some conception of what they believe jazz is, to watch it on this stage and to hear incredible jazz artists from around the world,” adds Carter. “A lot of people have thought of this as a music of the past, but it really is living.”

Showing the vibrancy of jazz culture is one of the primary missions of International Jazz Day, which in its short life has already swelled into events in 190 countries (including “two stations down in Antarctica, McMurdo and Palmer,” he says, “and all 50 states”) annually on April 30th, with a special emphasis on each year’s host city. “What better place to have it than to come back to America,” says Carter of this year’s host, “and to have it at the White House” (full listings of International Jazz Day events are available on their site).

“Jazz is about coming in with an open mind,” adds John Beasley, the all-star concert’s musical director, of what makes the international festival special. “Getting these people from all over the world to come and play together. It gives hope that someday we really can resolve our differences. It’s not just about soloing — it’s about the support underneath the soloists.”

“Part of its character is that it borrows from any genre or culture that touches it, and it also lends itself to any genre or culture that touches it,” adds Hancock. “I think that’s what has kept it alive over the decades.” Showing that evolution at the White House, to those in charge at International Jazz Day, is just proof that it’s not going anywhere. “I think,” concludes Carter, “that it’s an evening people will be talking about for many years to come.”

Click here to read the original source article via Billboard

“Proud to announce an amazing set of tools for students to learn math and science through their love of music with US Sec. of Edu John King & the NYU MusED Lab and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz.” – Herbie Hancock

On Tuesday, April 26, U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. will join jazz legend Herbie Hancock and professors from some of the nation’s top universities for a discussion on Math, Science & Music, a new initiative that uses music to teach math and science to students. This special event will take place at the Department’s National Library of Education in Washington, D.C., as part of the educational programs surrounding International Jazz Day 2016, which is celebrated on April 30.

Hancock, chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, is a musician whose career spans more than five decades. He has won 14 GRAMMY Awards and an Academy Award, along with a GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award. Hancock serves as Goodwill Ambassador of Intercultural Dialogue for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and he was the 2014 Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. He is leading the Math, Science & Music initiative to engage students and help educators incorporate music into the teaching of math and science in kindergarten through college.

The panel discussion is part of a series of school visits and events by King focused on the importance of a well-rounded education. With the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), signed into law by President Obama in December 2015, the country has the opportunity to ensure that all students not only can master math and English, but also have exposure to sciences, social studies, the arts, physical education and health, and the opportunity to learn a second language. The Department is taking action across a range of areas to support states and districts in ensuring that schools provide a rich selection of subject-matter offerings.

Joining Hancock for the panel will be Harvard University’s Vijay Iyer and Rajna Swaminathan; New York University’s Alex Ruthmann; Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Eric Rosenbaum; University of California Berkeley and MIT Emeritus Professor Jeanne Bamberger; University of Massachusetts’ Gena Greher; Johns Hopkins University’s Dan Naiman; and San Francisco State University’s Susan Courey and Endre Balogh.

The event is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education’s Student Art Exhibit Program, now in its 13th year, which features visual, literary and performing art created by students in U.S. and international schools, from pre-K through professional art school. It is part of a series of events by the Department focused on providing a well-rounded education for all students. ESSA creates the opportunity to ensure an education that not only includes strong numeracy and literacy, but also provides all students with access to science, social studies, the arts, physical education and health, and the opportunity to learn a second language. The Department is taking action across a range of areas to support states and districts in ensuring schools provide a rich range of offerings. The Secretary recently visited Las Vegas, Nevada; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Springdale, Arkansas, to learn about efforts in those districts to provide students with a well-rounded education.

Click here to read the original source article via The Department of Education

As a child, before he started playing jazz, composer and musical icon Herbie Hancock was fond of taking things apart and putting them back together. He was perpetually inquisitive and analytical, a quality that carried from his days of tinkering with clocks and watches to his playing of music, where he threw himself into jazz as a teen.

“I would always try to figure out how things work,” Hancock said. “It was that same instinct that I have that made me learn jazz more quickly. . . . It wasn’t a talent for music. It was a talent for being able to analyze things and figure out the details.”

Hancock later studied electrical engineering at Grinnell College before starting his jazz career full-time. He says there is an intrinsic link between playing music and building things, one that he thinks should be exploited in classrooms across the country, where there has been a renewed emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education.

Hancock joined a group of educators and researchers Tuesday at the U.S. Education Department’s headquarters to discuss how music can be better integrated into lessons on math, engineering and even computer science, ahead of International Jazz Day this weekend.

Education Secretary John B. King Jr. said that an emphasis on math and reading — along with standardized testing — has had the unfortunate side effect of squeezing arts education out of the nation’s classrooms, a trend he thinks is misguided.

“English and math are necessary but not sufficient for students’ long-term success,” King said, noting that under the Every Student Succeeds Act, the new federal education law, schools have new flexibility to use federal funding for arts education.

Hancock is the chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, which has developed MathScienceMusic.org, a website that offers teachers resources and apps to use music as a vehicle to teach other academic lessons.

One app, Groove Pizza, allows users to draw lines and shapes onto a circle. The circle then rotates and each shape and line generates its own distinct sound. It’s a discreet way for children to learn about rhythm and proportions. With enough shapes and lines, children can create elaborate beats on the app, all in the context of a “pizza” — another way to make learning math and music palatable to kids.

Another app — Scratch Jazz — allows children to use the basic coding platform Scratch to create their own music.

“A lot of what we focus on is lowering the barriers to creative expression,” said Alex Ruthmann, a professor of music education at New York University who helped develop the Groove Pizza app.

Other researchers discussed their experiments with music and rhythm to teach fractions and proportionality, a challenging concept for young students to grasp when it is taught in the abstract. Susan Courey, a professor of special education at San Francisco State University, developed a fractions lesson that has students tap out a beat.

“It goes across language barriers, cultures and achievement barriers and offers the opportunity to engage a very diverse set of students,” Courey said. In a small study, students who received the music lesson scored 50 percent higher on a fraction test than those who learned with the standard curriculum. “They should be taught together.”

“If a student can clap about a beat based on a time signature, well aren’t they adding and subtracting fractions based on music notation?” Courey said. “We have to think differently.”

Hancock thinks that the arts may offer a better vehicle to teach math and science to some students. But he also sees value in touching students’ hearts through music — teaching them empathy, creative expression and the value of working together and keeping an open mind.

“Learning about and adopting the ethics inherent in jazz can make positive changes in our world, a world that now more than ever needs more creativity and innovation and less anger and hostility to help solve the challenges that we have to help deal with every single day,” Hancock said.

Click here to read the original source article via The Washington Post

NEW ORLEANS, LA – The crowd for Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter’s show Sunday (April 24) at New Orleans Jazz Fest took up every seat and spilled out beyond the Zatarains / WWOZ Jazz Tent. The MC warned everyone to stay out of the aisles, reminding them of tragic incidents at overcrowded concerts in the past. When was the last time someone was trampled at a jazz show?

When Hancock sat down at the piano and Shorter picked up his soprano sax, the music they played sounded like the conversation of two old friends, sharing memories, telling jokes. Like friends who have a deep history, and can finish each others sentences.

It was as if we’d all been allowed to eavesdrop on two geniuses.

Hancock and Shorter’s past takes in a wide swath of jazz’s history. And the two of them had leading role much of that history. They were half of Miles Davis’ Second Great Quarter (the first featured John Coltrane, whose son Ravi played Jazz Fest on Saturday with Jack DeJohnette and Matt Garrison). The pair played on Davis’ first fusion album, “In a Silent Way,” and Shorter continued with Davis on “Bitches Brew.”

As leaders, they produced some of the greatest jazz recorded. And Shorter co-founded the celebrated fusion group Weather Report. In 1997, the pair won a Grammy for a song on their duet album “1+1.”

The first song Hancock and Shorter played at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell stretched across most of the set.

It began with as many rests as notes. The two, somewhat tentatively at first, tossed phrases back and forth. Soon they were responding to each other. And at times they would briefly lock into a groove, before stepping back, with Hancock, at first on a Steinway grand piano, often grounding the music and Shorter playing delicate, haunting runs above.

In one quiet moment, the audience was fooled into standing and clapping, believing the song had ended. Hancock and Shorter continued undaunted. Hancock soon switched to his Kronos synthesizer, unleashing retro, outer-space noises and otherworldly, breathy chords that rang like bells.

A drum machine began to beat out an insistent rhythm, and the reflective tone momentarily vanished. The music became urgent, at times angry, and Shorter made his sax sound like the moan of an animal. And then, the drums stopped, and the pair returned to a more meditative state.

For those with the right inclination (and sufficient concentration to block out the thudding beat from the Acura stage), Hancock and Shorter offered an experience every bit as spiritual as what was promised down the track at the Gospel Tent. But this wasn’t about exaltation. Hancock and Shorter’s music was about looking inward.

When they finally came to a rest more than half an hour after starting, Hancock almost immediately looked at his watch. They still had time left in their set. Hancock gestured to Shorter that they should play more. And they did.

Click here to read the original source article via NOLA

“It was an honor to be presented with The GRAMMYs Lifetime Achievement Award last night in Austin by my good friend Wayne Shorter.” – Herbie

Terrace Martin’s production credits are as impressive as they are eclectic — the jazz-reared saxophonist has been behind the boards on projects by everyone from Snoop Dogg to Lalah Hathaway to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-winning To Pimp a Butterfly. But 2016 is bringing Martin a totally new set of challenges: he’s working on albums for Compton rapper YG and jazz icon Herbie Hancock…at the exact same time.

Hancock has been a vocal supporter of Martin and his peers in L.A.’s resurgent jazz scene — many of who also worked on TPAB. “It’s something that’s fresh and new. Revolutionary,” he told Billboard before Clive Davis’s Grammy party. “It’s not something that’s locked into a box. These people have opened up this box — we called it hip-hop.”

Martin elaborated on his many current projects in a recent conversation with Billboard, including his upcoming album Velvet Portraits. Read the second half of the interview below, and check out the first half here for more on what went on behind the scenes and in the studio on TPAB.

You said you’re working with both Herbie Hancock and YG — how does that work day-to-day? It’s a lot to handle!

I’ve been playing with him every day — which is very weird, that I play keyboard next to Herbie every day, a very weird thing. I try to be cool, since I’m “the producer” and everything, but then he throws these things at you harmonically, and you have to catch ’em! He is 75, and his ideas — they’re like he’s 12 years old. They keep coming every second of the day.

I work with him five days a week. We usually start about 12 or 1 p.m. and I’m done about 5. That’s a five-hour session. When I work with a rapper, I can do 15, 20 hours and not be tired. When I leave Herbie’s, I’m exhausted. My brain is exhausted — he stretches my brain so much that I have to leave his house, take a three-hour nap, and then go to work with YG.

They both stretch my brain — YG works on a whole different schedule, where he doesn’t work that long, but he works more intensely. They both are challenging, and I love a challenge — I don’t think you can grow without a challenge. YG has grown — he has his own things he wants to do now. He knows how he wants things to sound. Working with him is a challenge because he’s so into the funk element. Can’t be jazz funk — it’s gotta be funky for him. Herbie — first of all, he helped shape music 12 times. Talk about being around greatness. You’re looking at him like, “Do you really like me?” They’re at the opposite ends, but yet the same end, because they’re both challenging. I’m excited for the challenge because I want to be great, only so I can inspire other kids to be great. I don’t feel I’m great yet, but I’m trying to get there — and I think working with cats like that, I’m learning so much.

What have you learned from working with them so far?

Working with Herbie has actually taught me how to produce records better for YG, better for Kendrick — because one thing Herbie does, is he honors the mistake, and he expects the unexpected. Those are two rules that I haven’t lived by, that I’m now practicing. I’ve realized that I’ve missed out on so much by just being in the box. Now my eyes are open for new music — I want to just grow, and be better, and work with new people. And that’s all from Herbie! With Herbie, you realize that you have to have a million influences to catch what he’s throwing at you!

The album I’m doing with him, it’s not what you think: Kendrick is on the album, Snoop is on the album. It’s not like it’s just Herbie Hancock over a hip-hop beat. It’s like, I’m really digging into his world, and he’s digging into the hip-hop, and we’re just trying to figure out a thing. In the process of us trying to figure it out, something is happening magically through the music. Something that I’ve never heard and he’s never heard. Kendrick came over the other day and he was like, “Yo, I hear so many ideas.” We’re just going in all different directions.

When can we expect the album?

With Herbie, I’ll know we’re done when he says, “Don’t come over to my house and record anymore.” Then I’ll know we’re done.

Click here to read the original source article via Billboard

The androids turn out to be breakdancers.

That’s the spoiler recap of Herbie Hancock’s performance at the 26th Annual Grammy Awards, in 1984. He was there to play his crossover hit “Rockit,” an early hip-hop touchstone, ubiquitous in the clubs and on the street. (It won for Best R&B Instrumental that year.) What nobody could have foreseen was that his performance would be a Grammy Moment, to use the Recording Academy parlance, of rare cultural impact — one of the most stealthily influential in the history of the awards.

Mr. Hancock was 43 when he walked onstage at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles that evening, a veteran jazz pianist riding his latest popular resurgence. He had titled his most recent album “Future Shock,” and he looked the part, with a keytar slung over a black leather jacket and a reflective silver shirt.

His band featured synth drums, a stacked keyboard rig and a D.J. behind a set of Technics 1200s — Grandmixer D.ST — whose scratching made him the track’s breakout hero. The stage design echoed the frenetic, posthuman surrealism of the song’s music video, which had been in heavy rotation on MTV. Hence those herky-jerky robots, including three pairs of disembodied legs kicking and flailing above the stage.

Hip-hop was a thriving underground movement in 1984, just beginning to find traction in the mainstream. (The genre will be a larger focus of this year’s awards on Monday; the rapper Kendrick Lamar is the night’s most-nominated artist.) Mr. Hancock tapped into it fortuitously. His previous studio album, “Lite Me Up,” a pop-disco collaboration with Rod Temperton of Heatwave, had been a dud. His most recent hit had come a decade earlier, with his funk-fusion band the Headhunters. He needed to reconnect with a younger audience.

Through his manager, Mr. Hancock met with Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn, whose vanguardist rock band Material was a fixture of New York’s downtown scene. Mr. Hancock decided to work with them on the basis of a demo tape — a prototype of “Rockit,” complete with scratching by D.ST. When a finished version of the track was played for executives at Mr. Hancock’s label, Columbia, it met with sputtering disbelief. He was refused a budget for a video.

So Mr. Hancock pursued that route on his own, enlisting Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, the English rock duo who had directed videos by the Police and others. His instructions were minimal but canny. “I don’t want it to look like a ‘black guy’ video,” Mr. Hancock recalls telling them, in his autobiography, “Possibilities” (2014 ). Knowing MTV’s damning track record with videos by African-American artists, he put in an implicit request for strategic self-erasure.

The result was those herky-jerky androids, created by the artist-inventor Jim Whiting, which took baths and read the newspaper in a warped parody of a middle-class domestic scene. Mr. Hancock appears only on a small television screen, playing his synthesizer. The video was a phenomenal success, but it didn’t reveal much about the artists who created the song.

By contrast, Mr. Hancock was front and center at the Grammys, which like MTV in that era could fairly be described as an instrument of the monoculture — that elusive ideal of true pop consensus, as opposed to a messy realm of fiefs. That year, the Grammy telecast had 43.8 million viewers, its highest ratings ever, which are unlikely to be surpassed. (Last year’s tally was 25.3 million.)

One reason for the strong numbers was Michael Jackson, whose epochal album “Thriller” won eight awards that year — a record. The success of “Rockit” on that stage validated Mr. Hancock as a player on the pop landscape, precisely at a moment when everyone was watching. And an important part of what they saw was Grandmixer D.ST, who sported a wireless headset and blocky sunglasses, looking like a figure out of a “Star Wars” movie. (One of Lando Calrissian’s hipper associates in Cloud City, perhaps.)

Breakdancing was ascendant in pop culture in 1984 — the movie “Breakin’” would be released that spring — but the art of the D.J., though it had migrated from the Bronx to downtown clubs like the Roxy, was still something new on broadcast television. That made the D.J. an ambassador. For a generation of important younger D.J.s outside New York, like Cut Chemist, DJ QBert and DJ Babu, “Rockit” was a gateway, and the Grammys were a catalyst. In the 2002 documentary “Scratch,” Mix Master Mike recalls the performance as pivotal: “Oh, that’s where that zigga-zigga sound comes from,” he remembers thinking when he saw the D.J. moving the turntable back and forth. “And then I knew, that’s what I’m going to be one day.”

There’s a well-known bias in the Recording Academy toward what one might inadvisably call “real music,” played by skilled musicians on conventional instruments. As recently as 2012, a performance by the electronic producers Deadmau5 and David Guetta had to be awkwardly grafted to appearances by Chris Brown and the Foo Fighters. A 2014 segment for Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” was set in what looked like a 1970s recording studio, with Nile Rodgers reprising his part on guitar and a cameo by Stevie Wonder.

In similar fashion, Mr. Hancock was his own legitimizing force behind “Rockit,” a bolt of reassurance that this music could, in fact, be seen as musical. The Grammy introduction made that point exactly: “Our next performer began with a rich classical background,” John Denver, the host, said, before noting his jazz credentials.

Mr. Hancock would of course become a familiar face at the Grammys, a trusted performer and a repeat winner. (You could do worse, as a conspiracy theorist, than to cite the “real music” rule to explain how he beat Kanye West and Amy Winehouse for Album of the Year in 2008.) In a sense, everything about his success in the field is evident in that “Rockit” performance — his ear for a hook; his disciplined enthusiasm as a bandleader; his willingness to stand at the center of a spectacle without commanding the center of attention.

His only solo occurs during the final eight bars of the tune, and by that point the android-turned-breakdancers have run away with the performance. Mr. Hancock shows no sign of misgivings about those circumstances, either in the moment or in hindsight. As he recalled in his book, “It was one of the greatest nights of my life.”

Click here to read the original source article via The New York Times.

Throwback to showing off the Fairlight CMI with Quincy Jones in the 1984 documentary, “I Love Quincy”

Click here to watch the video