For Herbie Hancock, who improvised with Miles Davis, taking musical risks is second nature. So it was no sweat working with such disparate talents as India.Arie, Jeff Beck, P!nk, Tinariwen, Seal and Lisa Hannigan (singing Bob Dylan as Gaeilge) on new album The Imagine Project. The jazz legend talks to BELINDA MCKEONin New York
HE HAS been melting the boundaries between musical genres since before half those genres had even been named. One of the most innovative musicians ever to sit in front of a piano, Herbie Hancock stands, at the age of 70, as a true jazz legend. But on his new album – which brings the tally to a vertiginous 48 – Hancock's concern is just as much with language as it is with music. That's because The Imagine Project, a collection of international collaborations, brings together renditions of iconic songs that trip along a gamut not only of musical traditions, but of mother tongues.
The album takes as its springboard a recording of John Lennon's Imagine, which combines Hancock's harmonisation with a Congolese arrangement (courtesy of DIY instrumentalists Konono No 1), the vocals of P!nk, Seal, Jeff Beck and India.Arie and the chants – in the Bambara language of her native Mali – of Oumou Sangare. The Saharan nomads Tinariwen contribute their Tamashek battle hymn Tamatant Tilay("Death Is Here"), woven by Hancock and his producer around pulsings of Bob Marley's Exodusfrom the Chicano rockers Los Lobos and the Somali-Canadian rapper K'Naan.
There are tracks matching Hancock's jazz chords to Brazilian bossa nova (Céu's Tempo de Amor) and to Colombian implorings (La Tierra by Juanes, apparently some kind of rock god). There's an original song by Chaka Khan ( The Song Goes On), bringing Hancock together with jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter, sitarist Anoushka Shankar (daughter of Ravi) and other Indian musicians.
And on a track partly recorded in Dublin, Hancock's slow piano and Alex Acuña's brushed percussion lead the way to Lisa Hannigan's solemn and lovely version of Bob Dylan's The Times They Are a-Changin', chased not just by the trad strains of The Chieftains and by African kora and guitar pickings, but by Hannigan's own phrasing of a Dylan verse in Irish.
To Hancock, the presence of several languages is essential to the album's conceptual core, which is nothing if not well- intentioned: it's about the need for peace, the art of global collaboration, the responsibility for greater communication and understanding between cultures. If, with his last album, River– a tribute to Joni Mitchell, which became the first jazz record to win the Grammy for best album in 44 years – Hancock turned to a diverse cast of vocalists to explore the pure artistry of song, on The Imagine Projectthe artists and the songs are put to work on a definite and somewhat trumpeted purpose.
“I thought about the purpose first – about the message behind the record,” he says. “I tried to think of ways I could implement that, ways to show respect for cultures outside of your own. And it hit me like a ton of bricks that one of the ways to do that was through language. I’ve had a chance, because of touring, to see the music charts of countries and cultures outside America, and a lot of times you see American records in there. But they’re always in English. And this is the 21st century. We don’t have to think nationally any more. We need to start thinking globally.”
One of the things that excites him about this record, he says, is the idea that an audience in Mali will be able to listen to an American album with some lyrics in Bambara. That there are lyrics in Spanish, too. And in Ireland, we can hear a bit of Bob Dylan in our own language. Or is it our own language? That’s a thought that has, for Hancock, given rise to some concern.
Because it turns out that Lisa Hannigan’s rendering of Dylan as Gaeilge was a little bumpy, pronunciation-wise. Hannigan herself makes no secret of her own rusty Irish (see panel), and took guidance from an Irish-speaking friend on how to deliver the last verse. “And I thought it sounded great,” says Hancock. “But then some people who really know Irish seemed to have a hard time understanding it. And then Tal Wilkenfeld, who’s going to be singing on the live version of that track, started getting really worried. She said: ‘I can’t sing this. I’m ridiculing the language. But we’ll be trying, right? We’ll get some brownie points for trying?’”
I tell him they will, so listeners, please bestow the brownie points – Hancock deserves them for sitting patiently through my ad-libbed attempt to explain why so few of us can speak Irish (I mean, please, who ad-libs to the man who learned to improvise from Miles Davis?) “Well, it certainly sounded Irish to me,” he says.
Hancock has recorded with Hannigan before. On his 2005 album, Possibilities, she and Damien Rice teamed with him on a version of Billie Holiday's Don't Explain. But this was Hancock's first time to meet with The Chieftains, when he and producer Larry Klein travelled to Dublin to overdub their melody on to what he calls the "hybrid African tracks" on the Dylan number. Hannigan's vocals were added later, in Hancock's LA home studio.
In the case of some songs on The Imagine Project, the artist interactions were entirely of the long-distance variety – Hancock still has not met James Morrison, with whom he "collaborated" on the Sam Cooke anthem A Change Is Gonna Come.
The work of choosing the artists and the songs, meanwhile, was done largely by Klein. Some artists with whom he had hoped to work on the project – Sting, The Black Eyed Peas, Will.i.am and Renée Fleming – were unavailable, while others, including Elton John, had to be ruled out because of the exigencies of matching so many tracks. Other, unnamed artists, refused to give their approval to Klein’s mixes, and had to be replaced late in the game. But Hancock’s not worried – the final track listing is hardly light on major names.
Like Possibilities, this is a pop album with a heartbeat of jazz – a combo that's scarcely a risk to a musician who collaborated with Davis on the 1969 jazz-rock fusion Bitches Brew and later went on to shoot jazz through with funk ( Head Hunters, 1973) and hip-hop and electronica ( Future Shock, 1983).
"I wasn't thinking about jazz specifically," Hancock says of the impulse behind The Imagine Project. "I've been playing jazz so long I don't have to think about it. So most of my thinking was not about the placement of jazz per se, not about my own playing taking the form of a traditional pop accompaniment. I was able to use my jazz training and my jazz sensibility to create the atmosphere from the piano or the synthesisers that you hear on this record.
“But it’s my jazz training that gives me the freedom and the courage to make a record like this. Because in jazz, you’ve got to have courage at every moment. You just don’t know what you’re going to do next.”
The Imagine Projectis out now
He is legend: Lisa Hannigan on working with Herbie Hancock
“Since we recorded Don’t Explain in 2005, Herbie and I have collaborated on a couple of other cover versions whenever I’ve been in his neck of the woods – nothing that’s recorded or out there; we were just messing and working out stuff – but songs like Rufus Wainwright’s Poses or The Band’s It Makes No Difference. I think with covers it’s always more interesting to do something that isn’t obvious for you to do.
“Herbie asked me whether I’d like to do this song and of course I said yes, being both a Herbie fan and a Dylan fan. As everyone does, I know the song so well, and have heard it so many times, but it was great to get into the song in a different way.
“I like to be prepared, but working with someone like Herbie you can never really be that prepared. He just makes stuff up, and it’s exciting to be a part of that, thinking on your feet. I just did loads and loads of different variations and hoped for the best, really.
“It’s obviously quite nerve-wracking for a non-legend to sing in front of a legend. But he’s such a lovely man and a generous musician.
“He made me feel very comfortable and free to do it.”
* This article was amended on October 4th, 2010
