Herbie Hancock - Herbie Hancock: Possibilities

I m onstage at a concert hall in Stockholm, Sweden, in the mid-1960s playing piano with the Miles Davis Quintet. Were on tour, and this show is really heating up. The band is tightwere all in sync, all on the same wavelength. The music is flowing, were connecting with the audience, and everything feels magical, like were weaving a spell.

Tony Williams, the drumming prodigy who joined Miles as a teenager, is on fire. Ron Carters fingers are flying up and down the neck of his bass, and Wayne Shorters saxophone is just screaming. The five of us have become one entity, shifting and flowing with the music. Were playing one of Miless classics, So What, and as we hurtle toward Miless solo, its the peak of the evening; the whole audience is on the edge of their seats.

Miles starts playing, building up to his solo, and just as hes about to really let loose, he takes a breath. And right then I play a chord that is just so wrong. I dont even know where it came fromits the wrong chord, in the wrong place, and now its hanging out there like a piece of rotten fruit. I think, Oh, shit. Its as if weve all been building this gorgeous house of sound, and I just accidentally put a match to it.

Miles pauses for a fraction of a second, and then he plays some notes that somehow, miraculously, make my chord sound right. In that moment I believe my mouth actually fell open. What kind of alchemy was this? And then Miles just took off from there, unleashing a solo that took the song in a new direction. The crowd went absolutely crazy.

I was in my early twenties and had already been with Miles for a couple of years by this time. But he always was capable of surprising me, and that night, when he somehow turned my chord from a wrong to a right, he definitely did. In the dressing room after the show I asked Miles about it. I felt a little sheepish, but Miles just winked at me, a hint of a smile on his chiseled face. He didnt say anything. He didnt have to. Miles wasnt one to talk a whole lot about things when he could show us something instead.

It took me years to fully understand what happened in that moment onstage. As soon as I played that chord I judged it. In my mind it was the wrong chord. But Miles never judged ithe just heard it as a sound that had happened, and he instantly took it on as a challenge, a question of How can I integrate that chord into everything else were doing? And because he didnt judge it, he was able to run with it, to turn it into something amazing. Miles trusted the band, and he trusted himself, and he always encouraged us to do the same. This was just one of many lessons I learned from Miles.

We all have a natural human tendency to take the safe routeto do the thing we know will workrather than taking a chance. But thats the antithesis of jazz, which is all about being in the present. Jazz is about being in the moment, at every moment. Its about trusting yourself to respond on the fly. If you can allow yourself to do that, you never stop exploring, you never stop learning, in music or in life.

I was lucky enough to learn this not only from playing with Miles but over the decades of playing that have followed. And Im still learning it, every single day. Its a gift that I never could have imagined back when I first started plunking around on my friend Levester Corleys piano at the age of six.

Levester Corley lived in the same building as my family, on the corner of Forty-Fifth Street and King Drive on the South Side of Chicago. We lived in a poor neighborhood, but it wasnt the worst one in 1940s Chicago. It was probably a step up from the worst, meaning that we didnt live in the projects but they were close by.

I never thought of our neighborhood as being a bad one, though parts of it were rough. There were gangs, and there was a run-down house down the block we called the Big Houseslang for prison. Most days there were young men hanging out in front of the Big House, and when you saw that, you knew to walk on the other side of the street. But for the most part I never felt unsafe or threatened. I just assumed that my neighborhood was pretty much like everyone elses.

I was born in 1940, and when I was really little, I thought we were rich, because we always had everything we wanted. We had clothes to wear and food to eat, and a Christmas tree and toys every year, so what did I know? I had never met anyone from outside our neighborhood, and compared to some of the other families on our block, we seemed to be doing great. In the basement of our own building, there was one family living with about ten people crammed into a single room. In comparison, we had a two-bedroom for five peoplemy parents, my brother, Wayman, my sister, Jean, and mewhich felt like a luxury.

Levester lived on another floor in our building, and when he turned six, his parents bought him a piano. Id always liked just hanging around with Levester, but once he got that piano, all I wanted to do was go to his apartment and play it. I loved the feel of the keys under my fingers, even though I didnt really know what I was doing. Wed plunk around on it, and Id try to play songs, and when I went back to our apartment, Id tell my mom about it. After a while she said to my father, We need to get this boy a piano. And so when I was seven, they gave me a used piano theyd bought for about $5 in a church basement.

Its not surprising that my mother, Winnie Griffin Hancock, was eager for me to have a piano. She was always anxious to instill an appreciation of culture in her children, even naming meHerbert Jeffrey Hancockafter an African American singer and actor, Herb Jeffries. To my mother, culture meant music, so she made sure we grew up listening to Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, and Handel. She also loved the music that came out of the black communityjazz and bluesand felt we should be connected to it as part of our heritage. But good music to her was classical music, so when I got my piano, she sent my brother and me to take classical lessons.