The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association is grateful to
Exelon for its generous support of the Symphony Center Presents Jazz series.
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SYMPHONY CENTER PRESENTS Thursday, September 2, 2021, at 7:30
Jazz Series HERBIE HANCOCK Herbie Hancock Piano James Genus Bass Lionel Loueke Guitar Elena Pinderhughes Flute Justin Tyson Drums This program will be announced from the stage. There will be no intermission.
The Symphony Center Presents Jazz series is sponsored, in part, by Exelon. Symphony Center Presents is grateful to DownBeat magazine, WBEZ 91.5 FM, and WDCB 90.9 FM for their generous support as media sponsors of this performance. Part of 2021: Year of Chicago Music and Chicago In Tune festival CSO.ORG 3
profiles Herbie Hancock Piano Herbie Hancock is a true icon of modern music. Throughout his explorations, he has transcended limitations and genres while maintaining his unmistakable voice. With an illustrious career spanning five decades and including fourteen Grammy awards, including Album of the Year for River: The Joni Letters, he continues to amaze audiences across the globe. Born in Chicago in 1940, Herbie Hancock was a piano prodigy who performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 26 in D major, K. 537 (Coronation) with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the age of eleven. He began playing jazz in high school, initially influenced by Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans. He also developed a passion for electronics and science, and double majored in music and electrical engineering at Grinnell College. In 1960, Hancock was discovered by trumpeter Donald Byrd. After two years of session work with Byrd, as well as Phil Woods and Oliver Nelson, he signed with the Blue Note label as a solo artist. His 1963 debut album, Takin’ Off, was an immediate success, producing the hit “Watermelon Man.” In 1963, Miles Davis invited Hancock to join the Miles Davis Quintet. During his five years with Davis, Hancock and his colleagues Wayne Shorter (tenor sax), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums) recorded many classic albums, including ESP, Nefertiti, and Sorcerer. Hancock later appeared on Davis’s groundbreaking In a Silent Way. Hancock’s own solo career blossomed on Blue Note with iconic records including Maiden Voyage, Empyrean Isles, and Speak Like a Child. He composed the score to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow Up, which led to a successful career in feature film and television music. After leaving the Davis Quintet, Hancock put together a new band called the Headhunters. The band’s 1973 self-titled recording became the first
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jazz album to go platinum with its crossover hit single “Chameleon.” By mid-decade, Hancock was playing for stadium-sized crowds all over the world and had no fewer than four albums in the pop charts at one time, with eleven albums total in the pop charts during the 1970s. His output during this period inspired and provided samples for generations of hip-hop and dance-music artists. Hancock also remained close to his love of acoustic jazz, recording and performing with VSOP (reuniting him with his Miles Davis colleagues) and in duet settings with Chick Corea and Oscar Peterson. In 1980, Hancock introduced the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis as a solo artist, producing his debut album and touring with him. In 1983, a new pull to the alternative side led Hancock to a series of collaborations with Bill Laswell. The first album, Future Shock, again struck platinum, and the single “Rockit” rocked the dance and R&B charts, winning a Grammy Award for Best R&B Instrumental; its music video won five MTV awards. Sound System, the follow-up album, also received a Grammy in the R&B Instrumental category. In 1986, Hancock won an Oscar for scoring the film Round Midnight, in which he also appeared as an actor. After his adventurous 1994 project for Mercury Records, Dis Is Da Drum, he moved to the Verve label, forming an all-star band to record the 1996 Grammy Award–winning album The New Standard. In 1997, an album of duets with Wayne Shorter, 1+1, was released. The legendary Headhunters reunited in 1998, recording an album for Hancock’s own Verve-distributed imprint, and touring with the Dave Matthews Band. That year also marked the recording and release of Gershwin’s World, which included collaborators Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Kathleen Battle, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Wayne Shorter, and Chick Corea. The album won three Grammy awards in 1999, including Best Traditional Jazz Album and Best R&B Vocal Performance for Stevie Wonder’s “St. Louis Blues.”
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Hancock reunited with Bill Laswell to collaborate with young hip-hop and techno artists on the 2001 recording Future 2 Future. He also joined with Roy Hargrove and Michael Brecker in 2002 to record the live concert album Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall, a tribute to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Possibilities, released in August 2005, teamed Hancock with many popular artists such as Sting, Annie Lennox, John Mayer, Christina Aguilera, Paul Simon, Carlos Santana, Joss Stone, and Damien Rice. That year, he played several concert dates with a restaffed Headhunters and became the first artist-in-residence at the Tennessee-based festival Bonnaroo. In 2007, Hancock recorded and released River: The Joni Letters, a tribute to longtime friend and collaborator Joni Mitchell featuring Wayne Shorter, guitarist Lionel Loueke, bassist Dave Holland, and drummer Vinnie Colaiuta and coproduced by Larry Klein. He enlisted vocalists Norah Jones, Tina Turner, Corinne Bailey Rae, Luciana Souza, Leonard Cohen, and Mitchell herself to perform songs on the album, which received glowing reviews and was a year-end top-10 choice for many critics. It also garnered three Grammy awards, including Album of the Year; Hancock is one of only a handful of jazz musicians ever to receive that honor. In 2010, Hancock released the critically acclaimed The Imagine Project, winner of two 2011 Grammy awards for Best Pop Collaboration and Best Improvised Jazz Solo. Utilizing the universal language of music to express its central
themes of peace and global responsibility, The Imagine Project was recorded around the world and featured a stellar group of musicians including Jeff Beck, Seal, Pink, Dave Matthews, the Chieftains, Lionel Loueke, Oumou Sangaré, Konono No. 1, Anoushka Shankar, Chaka Khan, Marcus Miller, Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, Tinariwen, and Céu. Hancock’s influence extends beyond the stage and recording studio. Recently named as creative chair for jazz by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Hancock currently also serves as institute chairman of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, the foremost international organization devoted to the development of jazz performance and education. Hancock is also a founder of the International Committee of Artists for Peace and was appointed a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by French Prime Minister François Fillon. In 2011, he was designated a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador by UNESCO DirectorGeneral Irina Bokova. Hancock was the recipient of a prestigious Kennedy Center Honor in 2013, and in 2014, he was named the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, where he presented “The Ethics of Jazz,” as part of the Charles Eliot Norton Lecture Series, over the period of six weeks. His memoir, Herbie Hancock: Possibilities, was published by Viking in 2014, and in February 2016, he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hancock is currently in the studio at work on a new album.
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James Genus Bass James Genus is well known in many musical genres, playing both electric and acoustic bass. He has recorded and played with artists including Roy Haynes, Horace Silver, Whitney Houston, Michael Brecker, the Brecker Brothers, David Sanborn, Dave Douglas, Bob James, Ravi Coltrane, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Bob Berg, Makoto Ozone, John Scofield, Michel Camilo, Anita Baker, Branford Marsalis, and John McLaughlin. He most recently was a part of Daft Punk’s multi-Grammy Award–winning album Random Access Memories. He is currently performing with the iconic pianist Herbie Hancock, and Genus can be seen weekly on NBC’s longest-running late-night comedy show, Saturday Night Live.
Lionel Loueke Guitar Lionel Loueke is one of the most singular, compelling, and innovative artists of his and any generation on the international scene, and a figure who embodies the music’s most creative possibilities. According to JazzTimes, peers and elders deeply respect his individualism, his rhythmic capabilities, and his exhaustive harmonic knowledge. He is the ultimate original, having reached levels of individual expression that most artists can only dream of. Starting out on vocals and percussion, Loueke picked up the guitar late, at the age of seventeen. After his initial exposure to jazz in his native Benin, he left to attend the National Institute of Art in nearby Ivory Coast. In 1994, he left Africa to pursue jazz studies at the American School
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of Modern Music in Paris, then on to the United States on a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston. From there, Loueke gained acceptance to the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz), where he encountered his Gilfema bandmates Massimo Biolcati, Ferenc Nemeth, Gretchen Parlato, and other musicians with whom he would form lasting creative relationships. There he also had the opportunity to study his greatest mentors: Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Terence Blanchard. Soon after his time at the Monk Institute, Loueke began focusing exclusively on nylon-string acoustic guitar, an instrument on which he’s developed a signature voice. In 2008 and 2009, Loueke was picked as Top Rising Star–Guitarist in DownBeat magazine’s annual Critics Poll. His extensive recording catalog includes albums on the Space Time, ObliqSound, and Blue Note labels and performances on standout recordings such as Terence Blanchard’s Grammy-nominated Flow (2005) and Hancock’s Grammy Award–winning River: The Joni Letters (2007). Loueke has toured the world as a member of Hancock’s band for more than fifteen years and started touring with Chick Corea in 2017. Loueke is also a member of Blue Note’s 75th anniversary all-star band with Robert Glasper, Derrick Hodge, Kendrick Scott, Ambrose Akinmusire, and Marcus Strickland. Loueke’s album HH, a tribute to his friend and mentor Herbie Hancock, was one of the most critically acclaimed jazz records of 2020. Praised by his mentor Herbie Hancock as “a musical painter,” Loueke combines harmonic sophistication, soaring melody, a deep knowledge of African music, and conventional and extended guitar techniques to create a warm and evocative sound of his own.
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Elena Pinderhughes Flute
Justin Tyson Drums
Elena Pinderhughes is a flutist and vocalist from the Bay Area, California. Her interest in music started at an early age, and she began singing and playing the flute at the age of seven. By age nine, she was performing, and recorded her first album, Catch 22. At eleven, she was featured in The Music in Me, an HBO special about young musicians. Versatile in many styles, Pinderhughes has won numerous best-soloist awards at festivals and from DownBeat magazine. A 2013 YoungArts Gold Award recipient, U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and DownBeat magazine’s 2016 Rising-Star Flutist, she has been a member of the Grammy Band, San Francisco Youth Symphony Orchestra, and Young Musicians Choral Orchestra. Pinderhughes has performed in numerous venues, including Carnegie Hall, the White House, the Kennedy Center, Monterey Jazz Festival, Marciac Festival, Coachella Music Festival, and Montreux Jazz Festival, as well as at jazz festivals and clubs throughout Europe, Japan, Africa, South America, and the United States. Pinderhughes has performed with Herbie Hancock, Hubert Laws, Kenny Barron, Ambrose Akinmusire, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Orlando “Maraca” Valle, Josh Groban, Common, Future, and others. Most recently, Pinderhughes was recorded on Herbie Hancock’s upcoming album, Christian Scott’s recent Ancestral Recall, and Lupe Fiasco’s Drogas Wave. She is currently performing with a range of musicians, as well as with her own group, and playing and touring internationally with Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Common, and Herbie Hancock. Pinderhughes is currently working on her debut album, which showcases her unique voice and flute playing style. She brings her musicality, harmony, rhythm, and culture to create a very specific sound all her own.
Justin Tyson is a writer, producer, filmmaker, and world-class musician. He has solidified his reputation as the drummer for Jason Linder’s Now Vs Now, Esperanza Spalding, Robert Glasper Experiment, Herbie Hancock, R+R=NOW, and the Electric Trio. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, Tyson was introduced to music by his late father, the prominent gospel organist and songwriter L. Craig Tyson. Tyson was mentored by drummers Jimmy Abney and Derico Watson before graduating from Berklee College of Music in Boston and moving to New York City, where he quickly became respected as a rising polymath and leader of the modern musical vanguard. Tyson played gigs with Cubic Zirconia, Jessie J, Estelle, and Ryan Leslie before joining Uptown collective Freelance. His recording credits include studio albums from Spalding, Glasper, Derrick Hodge, Terrace Martin, and Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Bubblers series. Tyson earned writing credits for seven of eleven tracks on R+R=NOW’s 2018 Blue Note Records debut, Collagically Speaking. His work with Esperanza Spalding includes production and cowriting credits on her 2020 album 12 Little Spells, which won Best New Jazz Vocal Album at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards. Tyson counts Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Taylor McFerrin, Jahi Sundance, Burniss Earl Travis, James Genus, Lionel Loueke, and Elena Pinderhughes among an impressive list of bandmates and frequent collaborators. Other notable performance credits include De La Soul, Common, Corinne Bailey Rae, Lalah Hathaway, Stalley, Bobby McFerrin, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Justin Tyson retains concurrent membership in the ensembles of Esperanza Spalding, Robert Glasper, Jason Lindner, and Herbie Hancock.
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