It might have been the most important stage Herbie Hancock ever played.
Not the Grammys. Not the White House. Not even Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, where Hancock made his debut playing Mozart as a preteen.
On Wednesday morning, as part of Chicago’s ongoing International Jazz Day festivities, Hancock, 86, performed onstage in the Hyde Park Academy High School auditorium, where he heard his first live jazz performance more than 70 years before. He even remembers where he was sitting — a few rows in from the stage, near the aisle.
“It was on this stage that I first discovered my passion for jazz,” Hancock told an auditorium full of students and visiting dignitaries. “That moment opened my mind and set me on a path I could never have imagined.”
After 14 years of roving around various global capitals, International Jazz Day — organized by UNESCO and the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz — has officially arrived in Chicago this week for its 15th iteration. Returning to the US for the first time since 2016, this year’s event is framed as a thank you to the United States for its gift of jazz to the world, at a time when the U.S.’s place on the global stage has never been more fraught. And Chicago is, if anything, an overdue host for its wide-ranging contributions to the genre, from Louie Armstrong’s early stands to its polyglot present.
But Wednesday’s festivities were just as much a salute to Hancock himself. During an evening reception at the Chicago Cultural Center, Mayor Brandon Johnson presented Hancock with a key to the city of Chicago — a rare honor for a musical artist. Past musicians to receive keys to the city, or an equivalent honor, include Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra.
Johnson praised Hancock for “creat(ing) a unique sound that has redefined modern jazz.”
“He has carried the sound and creativity of Chicago from Hyde Park to the global stage,” Johnson said.
Hancock was born and raised on the South Side and attended Hyde Park Academy High School. During his sophomore year, he heard a classmate, Don Goldberg, improvise during a student variety show and fell in love with the music immediately.
“The first things I learned about playing, about improvising in jazz, were from a young Jewish kid,” Hancock told the Tribune in an interview last week. “That kind of opened the doorway.”
One course credit shy of graduating from Grinnell College in Iowa, Hancock briefly returned to Chicago in 1960 to try his hand at being a working musician. He clocked in day shifts at the post office, and nights on city bandstands. It was the last time he would hold a job outside music.
More Top Picks Dji Mini 2
“There were jam sessions in Chicago that I would attend and learn from,” Hancock remembers. “They really helped me so much in my own development, in learning how to play jazz.”
He left Chicago in 1961 to join trumpeter Donald Byrd and saxophonist Pepper Adams’ quintet. Hancock was 20 and living at home. The band had to ask for his parents’ blessing.
“They said, ‘OK, if that’s what you want to do, go ahead.’ So then I went to New York, and that was beginning of my career,” Hancock recalls.
Much has changed since Hancock’s Chicago days. Few of the clubs he once played still exist, including the Plugged Nickel, where he made a seminal appearance with Miles Davis’s second great quintet in 1965. And across the street from Hyde Park Academy, construction crews swarmed to ready the Obama Presidential Center behemoth for its Juneteenth opening date.
Hancock’s visit came at a somber time for his alma mater. This spring, three Hyde Park Academy students have been killed — two in hit-and-runs, and a third in a shooting just a block from campus.
“It’s been a tough few weeks,” said teacher Daffney White, who attended the assembly with a class of senior girls.
But the students, she said, were resilient. Prom was just around the corner, as was Decision Day, when students celebrated their post-graduation plans.
A video filmed six weeks ago and shown at the Hyde Park Academy event shadowed Hancock on a trip to his old apartment block, now razed and rebuilt. He also lingered over the alleyway, behind the building, where watermelon vendors used to peddle their wares. The irregular clack of the cart wheels on the cobblestones, and the shouts of prospective customers, inspired his first hit, 1962’s “Watermelon Man.”
International Jazz Day is right around the corner: 16 picks for the global event taking over Chicago
To bring it full circle, he, bassist Marcus Miller and a band of Herbie Hancock Institute students launched into a vivacious account of the tune. And to endorse former U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona’s assertion, in his speech, that students’ favorite artists were no doubt influenced by Hancock somewhere down the line, they followed it up with the deep, electric groove of “Chameleon” — a precursor to the driving 808s that fueled so much pop and hip-hop.
“The beautiful thing about music is it teaches us how to listen. It’s about expressing yourself while also uplifting and respecting the voices around you,” Hancock told the assembled students. “Learn from them, listen to each other, respect each other, support each other. You are each other’s possibilities.”
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.