Universal harmony

In his 1989 autobiography, Miles Davis wrote of fellow jazz icon Herbie Hancock: "Herbie was the step after Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, and I haven't heard anybody yet who has come after him".

If Davis was around today, he probably wouldn't feel it necessary to revise that view. Hancock, 73, one of the most important pianists in the history of jazz and equally influential in electronic music, plays as mesmerisingly as ever.

He appears at the AC Hall in Kowloon Tong on Tuesday with an all-star band of drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, bassist James Genus, and guitarist Lionel Loueke. The quartet will perform compositions from several phases of a career that has now lasted more than half a century, and taken him into a bewildering variety of areas of music.

"I've worked in so many different directions that the audience covers a lot of different territories. If I only do something in one direction, considering what my fan base is, I would have a difficult time satisfying or reaching the vast majority of them," says Hancock over the phone from his home in Los Angeles.

"I've tried to figure out ways to do a lot of songs in a short time. Songs like Cantaloupe Island, Maiden Voyage, Chameleon are songs that a lot of people are very familiar with. They want to hear my take on them. What I don't do is play them like the version they have on the record. I wrote those songs a long time ago, and after a while you get kind of bored with playing them the old way. I have to breathe some kind of freshness into them, because if I'm bored, the audience is going to be bored, I can guarantee you."

Those three tunes provide only a superficial sample of a repertoire packed with self-penned jazz standards and pop hits. The very first track Hancock cut for Blue Note records in 1962, Watermelon Man, made the top 100 in the pop charts. Mongo Santamaria's Cuban pop cover took it to the top 10 the following year.