New Year and all that Jazz!!
For those who need a primer on these two jazz legends, here goes:
Herbert Jeffrey Hancock (born April 12, 1940) is an Academy Award- and multiple Grammy Award-winning jazz pianist and composer from Chicago, Illinois, USA. Hancock is one of jazz music's most important and influential pianists and composers. He embraced elements of rock, funk, and soul while adopting freer stylistic elements from jazz.
Like many jazz pianists, Hancock started with a classical music education; Hancock studied from age seven. His talent was recognized early, and he played the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 5 in D Major at a young people’s concert with the Chicago Symphony at age eleven.
As part of Miles Davis's "second great quintet", Hancock helped redefine the role of a jazz rhythm section, and was one of the primary architects of the "post-bop" sound. Later, he was one of the first jazz musicians to embrace synthesizers and funk. Yet for all his restless experimentalism, Hancock's music is often melodic and accessible; he has had many songs "cross over" and achieve success among pop audiences.
Hancock's best-known solo works include "Cantaloupe Island", "Watermelon Man", "Maiden Voyage", "Chameleon", and the single "Rockit."
Wayne Shorter's music pumped new blood into the Miles Davis Quintet of the time with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. And these unique innovators developed into a team that changed the sound of jazz.
Throughout the sixties, Wayne also recorded an impressive body of work under his own name for Blue Note. He also contributed his playing and compositions to countless other Blue Note sessions.
Wayne, Miles and Herbie Hancock would again change instrumental music in the late sixties with an open-ended music that would later be called fusion. Wayne and Joe Zawinul, both of whom can draw great drama and beauty from music using color, rhythm and leaping intervals, formed the most creative and innovative of fusion bands, Weather Report, which they co-led until 1985.