Last summer, Herbie Hancock sat down with PBS’s Tavis Smiley for an interview about an upcoming solo tour. During the course of the short conversation, the two touched upon what it means to be innovative.
I had learned about the interview from a friend, Eric Kingstad, who owns the event planning company, The Event Guys. Over coffee, Eric and I were talking about innovation, leadership, and what it means to understand the customer.
So what does jazz have to do with any of that?
In the interview, Smiley comments that he has never seen the same Herbie Hancock show twice. He then asked Hancock whether that presents a problem for audiences expecting to hear “Rocket” and other Hancock standards.
“I like to present something the people haven’t seen or heard before,” Hancock said. “Otherwise, they should stay home and play the record.”
But is the audience prepared to receive that type of innovation, asked Smiley?
“I have to give them my heart,” Hancock answered. “I have to care and I have to be honest and have the courage to be vulnerable. To just be a puppet is not very courageous.”
He goes on to say that having that courage really means being vulnerable and knowing you will make mistakes – that it may be your second, third or thirtieth attempt before you get something right. And when you do … Well, customers or, in Herbie’s world, the audience may “get turned on by a new experience.”
I will soon be reading the Steve Jobs biography. From what I understand about Jobs and Apple is that they didn’t bother with focus groups, rather invited customers to trust them on what innovations to bring to the market place. While they encountered some setbacks, they also hit some major home runs.
That was the case, too, for Hancock when his Head Hunters album was released in 1973 after several other experimental projects. The album is now included among the 500 greatest albums ever.
“Being vulnerable is allowing yourself to trust others. That is hard to do,” Hancock said. “To have that kind of trust takes courage. It means not being afraid of making mistakes.”
And when you make mistakes, he said, you learn from them and then try again. And sometimes those mistakes can be magical, too.
He recalls touring with Miles Davis in the 1960s in Europe.
They were at the peak of the tour and everything is clicking one night. They were playing “So What,” and everyone was taking turns with their solos – Wayne Shorter on sax, Tony Williams on drums, Ron Carter on bass. And then it was Miles turn. And that is when Herbie, who struck a cord that was so off, “I thought I lit a match to the whole thing and burned it to the ground.”
But, he said, “Miles took a breath and then played some notes that made my cord right. I couldn’t believe what I heard. He made it fit somehow.”
“Miles didn’t judge what I had played,” Hancock said. “He heard it as an event and played some notes to make it work right.”