Suddenly without work, he accelerated plans to form his own band and was soon playing the music that he had been writing in every spare moment.įourteen Grammy awards, one Oscar and scores of albums later, the scope and success of life beyond Miles Davis vindicates Hancock’s retrospective view that the split was a blessing in disguise. This was gruffly confirmed by Davis, ending a five-year partnership and filling him with apprehension looking back, he welcomes the sharp push it gave him. Hancock’s job had already been offered to another young pianist, Chick Corea, as he discovered when preparing his post-honeymoon resumption of live work.

“Then I got food poisoning on my wedding night.” Gigs were missed as a consequence but, even when his pianist returned to the US, Davis was suspicious of the food poisoning excuse “because he knew all the members of the band were thinking of leaving”. “My wife and I went to Brazil for our honeymoon,” Hancock replied. The journalist, who spoke glowingly of Hancock’s reputation as “one of the nicest men in jazz”, asked if it was true he had been thrown out of the band for being late back from the honeymoon.īut there was more to it. The wedding was also responsible, indirectly, for the sacking, an event that Hancock recalled with a smile in an interview with London’s The Independent newspaper nearly 40 years later. That record was released in 1968, the year of their wedding now in its 46th year, the marriage has produced one daughter, Jessica, who helps to handle Hancock’s business affairs. He also found time to marry Gigi Meixner, who was photographed with him in silhouette for the striking cover sleeve for his sixth album, Speak Like a Child. Still in the 1960s and still playing with Davis, he began collaborating with other artists, composed his first film score – for Michelangelo Antonioni’s risqué thriller Blow-Up, starring David Hemmings, Sarah Miles, Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Birkin – and formed his own sextet. It was Davis who had, in Hancock’s early 20s, identified his exceptional talent and snapped him up for his Second Great Quintet, arguably one of the finest combos in jazz history. The diversions into rhythm and blues, soul, synthesised pop and funk endear him to lovers of each genre, but have also brought him some disdain from jazz purists.Īnd he had to rise above one early setback, being fired by Miles Davis, a monumental figure of US jazz. Yet Hancock’s career has not been a voyage without the occasional squall.

His film work includes soundtrack composition for audio books and a documentary on basketball by the former NBA star and Muslim convert Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Music has been good to Hancock, enabling him to navigate a small ocean of other activities from film scores and acting to serving as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) and a jazz professor at the University of California. Yet even with the addition of those everyday roles, we barely scratch at the surface of a man who has been an extraordinarily versatile fixture of six decades of artistic expression. It includes my being a father, a husband, a neighbour, a citizen and an Afro-American.” What I am is a human being includes me being a musician.

Gigi hancock