Herbie Hancock
One World Theatre, May 27
In the last of four sold-out performances over two nights at the ever-intimate and elegant One World Theatre, Herbie Hancock could have played beginning piano primer “Chopsticks” for 90 minutes and the ebullient audience would have still lavished on him the adulation due a music legend. “Can I take you on the road with us?” smiled the trim, youthful-looking, 60-year-old pianist warmly after receiving an introductory standing ovation. “The pay is not great.” Hard to imagine, seeing that this jazz pioneer is second only to perhaps Miles Davis as the genre’s most commercially successful and influential figure since the Sixties, when Hancock made his reputation as part of the late trumpeter’s groundbreaking quintet. “Chopsticks” nowhere in sight, Hancock kicked off the stormy evening’s second set with Cole Porter’s “I Love You,” not wasting an instant in striking a pose few in attendance will probably ever forget: straight-backed at the Steinway, under the streaming air conditioning blowing in waves through a spotlight on the piano. Head down, listening to his rhythm section one moment, face up, mouth open, and eyes straight ahead the next, Hancock gave off an Ellingtonesque air. “Cotton Tail,” the Duke’s landmark pre-bop hop, followed appropriately enough, the pianist’s hands moving purposefully over the ivories; tentative and searching during one measure, fast and nimble on the one following. Though he had met his bassist only the night before, Hancock found a worthy foil in drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, the two pushing each other throughout the evening. Though one sensed Carrington had a mad desire to break loose – just bash the funk out of some Seventies-style R&B – she was a model of restraint, Hancock clearly thriving on the controlled tension. Following the W.C. Handy standard “St. Louis Blues,” which began exploratory before bursting into a lustful swagger climaxed by an electric haze, the set stretched out into a free-form jam where several tunes devolved into more or less the same groove and note. Hancock, meanwhile, never delivered a solo that wasn’t full of ideas and imagination, intellectual turning instinctual in a flash of ivories. “Cantalope Island” capped off the 75-minute main set, followed by a brief, solo coda from Hancock, and in the end, the night finished as it had begun: with a standing ovation and the surreal sense that one of all-time jazz greats was playing piano in your living room.This article appears in June 9 • 2000.
