WASHINGTON (Reuters) — U.S. jazz legend Herbie Hancock donated several of his instruments to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History on Tuesday and said he hoped they would inspire others.
A keyboard used to create some of his most famous hits, two synthesizers and a headphone microphone joined the museum’s other musical memorabilia from jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Lionel Hampton.
“Maybe some little kid will identify with them and think that one day I can create music on a new instrument. Maybe I can be somebody,” Hancock told Reuters in an interview after a ceremony at the museum.
“But the truth is that everyone is somebody already. You don’t need the fame to be vital. You would not exist if you did not have something to bring to the table of life.”
The keyboard, a Fairlight CMI Series II that cost Hancock $25,000, was the computer-based instrument he used to compose his 1983 hit “Rockit,” a song famous for its use of a scratching technique.
Hancock said he managed to convince the Australian supplier of the Fairlight to show him the instrument before giving a demonstration to another music icon, Stevie Wonder.
A winner of eight Grammy awards in the past two decades and an Academy Award in 1987 for the film score “Round Midnight,” he is best known for fusing jazz techniques with electronic instrumentation.
“Hancock’s instruments not only represent the career of one of our country’s most prominent musical figures, they help us to better understand the story of electric and electronic musical instruments,” said American History Museum curator John Hasse.
Born in 1940, Hancock was a child prodigy pianist and performed at age 11 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Brought up in a poor neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, Hancock’s mother recognized his talent early on and bought him a piano for his seventh birthday.
It was the “magnetism of improvisation” that first attracted Hancock away from his classical roots to jazz, a form which he said, though it grew out of slavery, was more about the human experience than anything else.
Hancock said he had already sold many of his instruments to a company but was holding onto many of his more valuable items so they could go into his estate when he died.
“I am still a jazz musician and not a pop star in terms of money, and so I have to take care of my family first, then my extended family and my country.”
Hancock is working on a new record called “HH Project 2004,” which involved a collection of artists. He declined, for legal reasons, to give any further details.