Herbie Hancock
Tulsa Performing Arts Center
April 7, 2024
It was a privilege to watch Herbie Hancock cavort around a stage with a keytar. I hope you got to see it too. His show at the PAC was a powerhouse example of the genre-defining and ‑breaking prowess he’s wielded over jazz for decades. The man still has more energy than some 30-year-olds I know, and he’s 83.
When the band opened with a lot of slow, lush, easy stuff, I was concerned that the show was going to be “Weekend at Herbie’s”: Hancock as an old, beleaguered, famous body to have on stage, the concert as a way to show off the extracurricular musicians. Within about ten minutes, the band dispelled that fear. Along with guitarist Lionel Loueke, bassist James Genus and drummer Trevor Lawrence, Hancock worked his way through two hours of fluid, feverish jazz that was somehow both free and perfectly formed.
On guitar, Loueke consistently pulled off tremendous solo work, at one point linking a pulsing rhythmic solo with a tongue-clicking technique derived from Xhosa, one of the languages of South Africa and Zimbabwe. The result, combined with fantastic pedal effects on both the guitar and his voice, sounded like five musicians let loose on the funkiest Mario music MIDI controller you’ve ever heard. Lawrence and Genus were no less fantastic on drums and bass, respectively, each taking solo moments in which they blew the crowd away.
My favorite moment came in the very middle, when Hancock played a song on the Vocoder (that instrument where you sing into a tube that transmits your voice into the instrument you’re playing). The song was great, but the thing it led into was the highlight of the show. Herbie gave a long, seemingly improvised monologue — about the terror of the pandemic, the need to love and care for each other, and the imminent takeover of robotics and AI supplementing the human experience (our children would all, he said, be AI children)—through the Vocoder. The fact that this speech, an emotional, powerful exhortation to empathy and love, was being spoken through a computerized piano, into the silence, was both extremely funny and extremely affecting.
I would have loved to see this show in a general admission venue; much of the material demanded the crowd to dance and I was sad to be stuck in a seat. Yes, Hancock deserves a sitting crowd. But at the same time, he’s a jazz artist. He was barely sitting himself, and he’s a pianist. Multiple times, the 83-year-old jumped and ran across the stage, just for fun.
Like the total solar eclipse the next day, Hancock’s visit was a not-that-many-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And he had a similar impact. For two hours, the crowd gaped and cheered at something that likely few of them understood (I count myself among this number). And somehow, afterwards, we all came away a little bit changed.
Next at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center: Orbit Arts Festival, April 20
