He jammed with Herbie Hancock, got “Happy” with Pharrell Williams and showed LeBron James how to slam dunk a piano chord. Oh, and Ron Howard’s working on a movie about his early years.

Clearly, Lang Lang isn’t your typical classical pianist. For starters, he loves to take listeners from “Let It Go” to Liszt and Metallica to Mozart, letting his flying fingers do the talking. And they’ve had a lot to say ever since his 2001 debut in New York, at 18, when The Post’s headline read, “Lang Lang is hot hot hot!”

He’s hardly cooled down. On Monday, the 37-year-old performs at the New York Philharmonic’s gala concert. It’s just the latest highlight in a year full of them, including an April stop at Madison Square Garden, where Billy Joel introduced him as “the top pianist in the world” before they went hand to hand on “The Root Beer Rag.”

They’d played together before, Lang tells The Post, at Joel’s home on Long Island. “I came by helicopter, and he picked me up in his golf cart,” he says, shaking his head. “I was, like, ‘Billy Joel’s picking me up personally?’”

Over lunch in Midtown, Lang looks pretty fresh for someone who’d flown in from China the day before. Lean and long-haired, he’s now a “brand” — with a signature Hublot watch and a limited edition of Lang Lang grand pianos that Steinway rolled out last spring.

For now, he’s more excited about his wedding ring — he married Korean-German pianist Gina Alice Redlinger last spring, at the Palace of Versailles — and the “smart pianos,” or digital keyboards, his foundation donated to 30 American schools, six of them in Harlem and the South Bronx. Becoming a UNICEF “Ambassador of Peace,” he says, helped him realize the healing power of music.

“I went to Africa, South America — places where kids had never seen a piano in their lives,” he says. “They were living with HIV/AIDS, malaria, terrible poverty . . . Then I started playing, and I see their eyes shining.”

He started on piano at 3 in his native Shenyang, China. His mother stayed behind while he and his father moved to Beijing to advance his studies. It was a rough time: At one point, his father, afraid Lang wasn’t progressing fast enough, handed him a bottle of pills and told him to jump off a balcony.

“I wanted to show the reality behind the fantasy,” Lang says about describing that scene in his 2008 memoir, “Journey of a Thousand Miles.” He says that when his mother found out, several years later, “She wanted to kill him!”

Father and son eventually reconciled, especially after his dad realized that no one pushed Lang harder than he did himself. But decades of practicing 10 hours a day and playing hundreds of concerts a year took their toll: In 2017, tendinitis forced him to step away from the keyboard.

‘I kind of escaped from the real world, which was good.’

Actually, it wasn’t such a bad thing, Lang says. Foregoing cortisone shots, he opted for rest, physical therapy and running through the woods.

“I kind of escaped from the real world,” he says, “which was good.”

It also seemed to change his playing. His latest album, “Piano Book,” is a switch from the showboat-y Rachmaninoff concertos that made him famous. Instead, it’s filled with simpler, quieter works like “Fur Elise” — the pieces piano students start with, but rarely hear performed professionally.

“These pieces are more than ring tones,” Lang says. “They’re beautiful.”

He hopes to continue his crossover concertizing as well, ideally with Lady Gaga. “She’s a great performer,” he says, “and a good pianist, too.”

There’s just one piano in his and Redlinger’s Midtown apartment, so “whoever is awake, practices,” jokes Lang, who has a few more at the couple’s homes in Paris and Beijing.

He says he’d like to start a family soon, and yes, his kids are going to learn to play the piano.

“It’s the easiest instrument to start with — you touch it, and it sounds,” says the man who’s inspired 50 million Chinese kids (or, at least, their parents) to follow his lead.

“Everyone should play. It opens up our creativity, our mind, our heart.”