It happened one day. I was chanting. I knew I didn’t want to play this music I had been playing, but I didn’t know what music I wanted to play. I hadn’t quite figured it out. I don’t remember having any other idea, but what was uppermost in my mind was that I knew I didn’t want to play what I had been playing. (…) I wanted to find the answers within myself.

The more I chanted, the more my mind opened up, relaxed and begun to wander. (…) Then I had this mental image of me playing in Sly’s band playing something funky like that. Then the next image that came to me was about my own band playing in Sly’s musical direction. (…) I knew I had to take the idea seriously.

Herbie Hancock

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Die oben stehenden Bemerkungen sind  Herbie Hancocks Liner Notes zur CD-Ausgabe seines “Head Hunters”-Album entnommen und sind ein schönes Beispiel für den Prozess und den Moment einer persönlichen musikalischen Innovation. Als Künstler verlässt er sich auf eine Intuition — eine Wahrnehmung auf einer tieferen, nicht-bewussten und emotionalen Ebene — und nimmt eine Inspiration auf, aus der sich eine für ihn neue Spielweise und Stilistik ergeben wird… Hier der gesamte Text:

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“By the end of 1972, my feeling was that the sextet had reached a peak for a while, and we tried to go beyond that, but it was like fighting uphill. We had found a way to make this music happen, that is, each musician finds a way to get a real rapport going, a certain musical direction. But the sound wasn’t going any further and it just wound up (to me) less focused. We lost the connection somehow. I suspected that my own energy needed something else. It was more spiritual and it had more to do with me as a human being. I began to feel that I had been spending so much time exploring the upper atmosphere of music and the more ethereal kind of far-out, spacey stuff. Now there was this need to take some more of the earth and to feel a little more tethered; a connection to the earth. People were evolving. We begun to hear jazz artist’s interests, including and paying attention to Rock-and-Roll, including that into whatever they were doing. It was musical reality that was happening, and jazz musicians could take almost nothing or anything and make music out of it.

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I was beginning to feel that we (the sextet) were playing this heavy kind of music, and I was tired of everything being heavy. I wanted to play something lighter. We had this music that we were doing, and the thing was, how could we take this music in a new direction by making it more palatable, but still keep this essence of our original philosophy? The answer was not so much to add a balance of stuff from Rock or R&B, although we touched on this with the albums Crossings and Sextant.

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It happened one day. I was chanting. I knew I didn’t want to play this music I had been playing, but I didn’t know what music I wanted to play. I hadn’t quite figured it out. I don’t remember having any other idea, but what was uppermost in my mind was that I knew I didn’t want to play what I had been playing. I wanted to feel more earthy and be a little more grounded. I wanted to find the answers within myself.

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The more I chanted, the more my mind opened up, relaxed and begun to wander. I started thinking about Sly Stone and how much I loved his music and how funky “Thank you for letting me be myself” is. I was hearing that song over and over and over again. Then I had this mental image of me playing in Sly’s band playing something funky like that. Then the next image that came to me was about my own band playing in Sly’s musical direction. My unconscious reaction was “No, I don’t want to do that”.

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What I saw in this reaction was seeing in myself the same things I hated about many other jazz musicians that put jazz on a pedestal, and at the same time putting Rock and Funk on a secondary level. I don’t like that about anything. There’s room for everything. But I noticed my gut reaction was the same kind of hierarchical look of putting jazz on a pedestal. I said to myself “Whoa! What are you doing?” I knew I had to take the idea seriously. Would I like to have a funky band that played the kind of music Sly or someone like that was playing?

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My response was, “Actually, yes”.

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