Herbie Hancock is a real icon of modern music. All though his explorations, he has surpassed constraints and genres while still maintaining his unique, unmistakable voice. Herbie's success at expanding the probabilities of musical thought has placed him in the records of this century's idealists. With an exalted career spanning 5 decades, he continues to dazzle audiences and continues to expand the public's vision of what music, particularly jazz, is all about today. Herbie Hancock's creative trail has moved fluidly between pretty much every development in acoustic and electronic jazz and RB since 1960. He has achieved a desirable balance of commercial and inventive success, arriving at the point in his career where he ventures into each new project inspired only by the need to expand the limits of his creativeness. There aren't many artists in the music business who've gained more respect and cast more influence than Herbie Hancock. As the immortal Miles Davis claimed in his autobiography, Herbie was the step after Bud Powell and Thelonious Friar , and I haven't heard anyone yet who has come after him. Born in Chicago in 1940, Herbie was a kid piano wunderkind who performed a Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the tender age of eleven. He commenced playing jazz in school, at first influenced by Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans.

Also at this time, a further zeal for electronic science began developing. As a consequence, he took a double major in music and electric engineering at Grinnell University . In 1960, at age twenty, Herbie was found by trumpeter Donald Byrd, who asked him to join his group. Byrd also introduced Herbie to Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records, and after 2 years of session work with the likes of Phil Woods and Oliver Nelson, he signed to the mythical label as a solo artist. His 1963 first album, Takin' Off, was a speedy success, manufacturing Melon Man, a major hit on jazz and RB radio. Also in 1963, Herbie received the call that was to switch his life and secure his place in jazz history. Miles Davis invited Herbie to join the Miles Davis Quintet.

During his 5 years with Davis, Herbie and his comrades excited audiences and recorded classic after classic, including the albums ESP, Nefertiti, and Wizard . Most jazz critics and fans regard this group, which also included Wayne Shorter ( tenor sax ), Ron Carter ( bass ), and Tony Williams ( drums ), as the best little jazz group of the 1960s. Even after he left Davis ' group, Herbie still made appearances on Davis ' revolutionary recordings In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, which heralded the arrival of jazz-fusion. Concurrent with his work for Miles, Herbie's own solo career bloomed on Blue Note, making such classic albums as Maiden Excursion , Empyrean Isles, and Talk Like a Kid . In 1966, he composed the score to Michelangelo Antonioni's movie, Blow Up. This led straight to a successful career in feature film and TV music, including music for Bill Cosby's Emmy-winning Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert and lots of other film scores in following years. 1970s : The Headhunters and VSOP After leaving Miles Davis in 1968, Herbie stepped fulltime into the new electronic jazz-funk that was sweeping the globe. Herbie gathered a new band called The Headhunters and, in 1973, recorded Head Hunters--a enormously successful crossover hit which became the 1st jazz album to go platinum. With its Wily Stone-influenced hit single Chameleon, this album signaled once and for all that Herbie Hancock wouldn't be pigeonholed or specified.

By mid-decade, Herbie was playing for stadium-sized crowds across the entire world and had no less than 4 albums in the pop charts right now. In total, Herbie had eleven albums in the pop charts in the 1970s. What's even more extraordinary about Herbie's '70s output is the foundation and immense supply of samples he furnished for the generations of hip-hop and dance music artists that followed just about 20 years after these recordings were at their top renown. This, though , wouldn't be the single time in his career that Herbie's work would have such an influence. Not content to go one creative trail, Herbie also stayed close to his love of acoustic jazz in the '70s. He recorded and performed with VSOP with numerous threesomes and quartets under his own name, and in duet settings with fellow pianists Chick Corea and Oscar Peterson.