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“I like it a little bit closer to the ground, down with my past which was growing up in Chicago hearing blues and R&B blasting out all around me on the street,” he said. “When we were on tour with Mwandishi, off stage I was listening to Sly Stone and really getting into the funk. So when I heard the clavinet and how it had kind of a guitar sound, I thought I could really turn that into something I could use instead of a guitar and it served that function in Headhunters.”

The more that mainstream success came from his forays into jazz/funk fusion, the more that jazz purists bemoaned what they felt was a betrayal of his earlier work. This wasn’t at all accurate, and Hancock would record superb acoustic solo albums as well as with the star unit V.S.O.P., including trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, drummer Tony Williams and saxophonist Wayne Shorter. He defends his choices to this very day.

“I might get flack from fans and critics for many of the choices I’ve made, but I’m the one in this body, I’m the one who makes decisions about what I want to do and can’t be dictated to about that,” he said “While they were complaining about me selling out and so forth, I wasn’t thinking of that at all. I just wanted to get funky.”

Today, Hancock’s experiments of the ’70s and early ’80s still sound fresh and his name is associated with the burgeoning new Afro-Futurism embraced by acts such as Kamasi Washington, Janelle Monae, Kendrick Lamar and artists appearing at the jazz festival this year such as The Comet is Coming. Hancock sees nothing unusual about this.