Close to two hours after the doors of Delhi’s The Piano Man Jazz Club are thrown open, the buzz coming from all its corners is hushed, and the first bars of a piano are heard, then the bass, trumpet and the alto saxophone, followed by the pounding of the drum, and the room is awash in various moods. You are on your barstool but the city has changed. It is San Francisco and a fog horn is blaring through the night-fog but the very next moment the sax is winding up that’s scratching some fragility in your heart, or that, in the moment after, you are in Dashiell Hammett territory in Prohibition-era New York and you are looking on as a shady deal is being struck by the dance floor in a rundown club.
Students of the Class of 2025 of The Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance, UCLA, are a great opening act for the evening, though the best is reserved for when jazz maestro Hancock and Grammy Award-winning vocalist Dianne Reeves come up on stage to honour Martin Luther King Jr on his birth anniversary (January 15, 1929) organised by the US embassy in Delhi, and perform. Reeves in a loose orange top and trousers begins her routine with her trademark scatting and lets the audience know—singing this if you please— that she “has been trying to come to India for a long time” and now that she is here, she’s having a “blast”. With ‘Don’t you know I’m all smiles, darling’ from her Grammy album, A Little Moonlight (2003), she has the audience.
New sounds
Hancock, one of the most influential jazz fusion musicians of all times, joins her, dapper in a suit, on stage to audience hoots.
A classical pianist prodigy whose talent was spotted at 11, Hancock joined the legendary Miles Davis in his second great quintet in the mid ’60s when he was 23, going on to take chances with new music, and pushing the limits of what people had known as jazz with different sounds, elements, genres and arrangements.
It is very much in keeping with that spirit that Hancock says this evening: “Let’s mix it up.” He begins with ‘Chameleon’, now considered a jazz standard from his genre-breaking album Headhunters (1973), and moves between the synthesiser and the piano all the time he is on stage showing that at 83, he still has game. Ambassador Eric Garcetti also gets on stage to play a tune. “Jazz has a lot of flavours, you can paint whatever picture you want with it and it always surprises with what comes out,” says Hancock as his fingers move on the piano, and with the beat that ripples through
the room you find many a shoulder shudder, then lift and move with it. Looking down below from where I was seated, glasses stayed half empty, pizzas went uneaten on the tables close to the stage—the sound of the piano or the synthesiser as Hancock played, at times, with great support from his young musicians, had everyone undone.
Herbie Hancock tradition
Hancock closed the evening with ‘Canteloupe Island’—closing it with this track is somewhat of a Hancock tradition. It is one of his signature tracks, which he recorded twice, the first time in 1964 for his classic studio album, Empyrean Isles, and the second time in 1977 for his jazz-funk fusion album, Secrets.
Jazz is a soft power product of the US that has travelled well. The night ended suitably with a short speech, with Hancock asking everyone “to love everybody”. Hancock, however, has in his life walked the talk. By the ’70s he had left the Miles Davis band to form the Mwandishi Group to “join” the civil rights movement—and “find themselves” as Black musicians expressing the Black American experience—headed by Martin Luther King, who had been assassinated a few years earlier in 1968.
Jazz, a soft power
This is Hancock’s fifth visit to India and his first after his last trip, 15 years ago. King had visited India in 1959 on a privately arranged trip; from that trip he went home convinced and inspired by Gandhian non-violence. Today, he is mainstream and no longer an American rebel. Jazz and Luther King, as the evening in Delhi proved, are a fit.