Top 100 Herbie Hancock Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Nobody told me I was a child prodigy.”

— Herbie Hancock

52. “When I was young I used to listen to everything.”

— Herbie Hancock

53. “Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.”

— Herbie Hancock

54. “I try stuff. I synthesize what’s of value with some of the other things I have at my disposal.”

— Herbie Hancock

55. “Wisdom corresponds to the future; it is philosophy.”

— Herbie Hancock

56. “Technology has developed to a whole other level and theres the scientist part of me that loves that stuff.”

— Herbie Hancock

57. “I like to be on the edge, on the cutting edge, or be into the unknown, into the territory where I have to depend on being in the moment and depending on my instincts.”

— Herbie Hancock

58. “I’m one of the people who was a pioneer in encouraging musicians, early in the game, to get interested in technology, and now all the musicians are getting into it.”

— Herbie Hancock

59. “One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It’s a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.”

— Herbie Hancock

60. “While knowledge may provide useful point of reference, it cannot become a force to guide the future.”

— Herbie Hancock

61. “One of the greatest attributes of jazz, I think, is that it is that open.”

— Herbie Hancock

62. “I don’t look at music from the standpoint of being a musician; I look at it from the standpoint of being a human being.”

— Herbie Hancock

63. “My first Grammy wasn’t even in a jazz category, but of course I was really excited. ‘Rockit’ was the beginning of kind of a new era for the whole hip-hop movement.”

— Herbie Hancock

64. “Music truly is the universal language.”

— Herbie Hancock

65. “You would not exist if you did not have something to bring to the table of life.”

— Herbie Hancock

66. “The Internet opens up a whole new range of possibilities in a wide range of areas.”

— Herbie Hancock

67. “There’s so much spontaneity involved, what do you practice? How do you practice teamwork? How do you practice sharing? How do you practice daring? How do you practice being nonjudgmental?”

— Herbie Hancock

68. “I hope to use dialogue and culture as a means of bringing people of various cultures together, and using that as a way to resolve conflict.”

— Herbie Hancock

69. “I don’t go around, the way many musicians do, with earbuds in my ear listening to my iPod all day and just sticking my head in the music all the time.”

— Herbie Hancock

70. “I’ve always been interested in science. I used to take watches apart and clocks apart, and there’s little screws, and a little this and that, and I found out if I dropped one of them, that thing ain’t gonna work.”

— Herbie Hancock

71. “But I have to be careful not to let the world dazzle me so much that I forget that I’m a husband and a father.”

— Herbie Hancock

72. “It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.”

— Herbie Hancock

73. “When you struggle to reach for something you don’t know, that’s where most of the interesting stuff is.”

— Herbie Hancock

74. “Being a musician is what I do, but it’s not what I am.”

— Herbie Hancock

75. “I am not fundamentally a musician, I am fundamentally a human being.”

— Herbie Hancock

76. “I’m aware that a lot of what is happening in jazz has not had a very dynamic change in a long time.”

— Herbie Hancock

77. “At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.”

— Herbie Hancock

78. “Clare Fischer was a major influence on my harmonic concept. He and Bill Evans, and Ravel and Gil Evans, finally. You know, that’s where it really came from. Almost all of the harmony that I play can be traced to one of those four people and whoever their influences were.”

— Herbie Hancock

79. “So in other words, we were constantly challenged to grow, and thats what a master does.”

— Herbie Hancock

80. “Getting the Oscar had the biggest impression on me.”

— Herbie Hancock

81. “But, the truth is that everyone is somebody already.”

— Herbie Hancock

82. “There are a lot of records coming out, in every field of music, not just jazz.”

— Herbie Hancock

83. “Creativity shouldn’t be following radio; it should be the other way around.”

— Herbie Hancock

84. “So much of what I create has been due to the influence of Miles Davis and Donald Byrd, and so many of those that have passed on. Their music, their legacy lives on with the rest of us because we are so highly influenced by their experience and what they have given us.”

— Herbie Hancock

85. “In the past, there’s always been one leader that has led the pack to development of the music.”

— Herbie Hancock

86. “I keep recycling and repackaging music that I’ve done in the past, as though I can’t write anymore. Like, okay, I’m done with that. But I need to kind of prod myself again into come on, Herbie, get off your duff and start writing some new music.”

— Herbie Hancock

87. “The thing that we possess, that machines don’t, is the ability to exhibit wisdom.”

— Herbie Hancock

88. “I feel a lot more secure about the directions I take, than I might have, had I not practiced Buddhism.”

— Herbie Hancock

89. “The arts have always served relationships between people of different cultures so well. In a way, the arts function as a very serious kind of ambassador.”

— Herbie Hancock

90. “One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.”

— Herbie Hancock

91. “I’ve never really been interested in doing a solo piano tour.”

— Herbie Hancock

92. “Music is not the only reason that I practice Buddhism anymore because it has affected my whole life.”

— Herbie Hancock

93. “Inspiration is constantly in the air. It’s up to us to develop the sensitivity to pick up on it.”

— Herbie Hancock

94. “I’ve been practising Buddhism for forty years, and that’s what has led me to this path of discovering my own humanity and recognizing the humanity in others.”

— Herbie Hancock

95. “I started off with classical music, and I got into jazz when I was about 14 years old. And I’ve been playing jazz ever since.”

— Herbie Hancock

96. “I don’t mind being classified as a jazz artist, but I do mind being restricted to being a jazz artist. My foundation has been in jazz, though I didn’t really start out that way. I started in classical music, but my formative years were in jazz, and it makes a great foundation.”

— Herbie Hancock

97. “It’s not the style that motivates me, as much as an attitude of openness that I have when I go into a project.”

— Herbie Hancock

98. “The music becomes something that is its own entity.”

— Herbie Hancock

99. “Jazz translates the moment into a sense of inspiration for not only the musicians but for the listeners.”

— Herbie Hancock

100. “People always want to protect what’s really going on inside. They want to kind of make visible something that looks more pleasant than what may be happening inside of themselves.”

— Herbie Hancock