Herbie Hancock Quotes

We stand for creativity and pushing boundaries and having fun with one's music.

While I was a student at The Cooper Union, they discouraged too much of a focus on any one medium, and it helped me try new and different things.

Conceptually, I am open to mistakes - errors, actually. I do play lots of wrong notes while I am making some music, and a mistake or a wrong note is like a gift for me: 'Oh, wow, an unknown sound or an unknown harmony. I didn't know about this.'

See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that - but he's got to think differently in order to do it. He's got to play above what he knows - far above it. I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens.

The wonderful thing about Jazz is its willingness to take chances.

Miles Davis fully embraced possibilities and delved into it. He was criticized heavily from the jazz side. He was supposed to be part of a tradition, but he didn't consider himself part of a tradition.

I don't ever try to make a song better than my last song. I just try to make it different from my last one.

The only element of jazz that I keep is improvisation.

What I want to happen is to be really creative, and to play something new in the improvisations, every time.

I tend to just do whatever I want on an album and try to make it work. I'm just adventurous. It's most exciting to be at the edge of your abilities. I want to see how far I can push things.

People think that when they're playing it safe, they're trying to preserve what they have, but there is no preservation of what you have in music. There's no safety in music.

The best thing for an actor is to try it his way. The way they do it may not work, but it may inspire me to try something else.

Often, the fact that I haven't done something as a writer is all the reason I need to try it.

I want a long career in music, so you've gotta keep trying things out; it's gotta get progressively better.

There are so many ideas that I have in my mind, of projects that I would love to tackle, people I would love to work with, genres I would love to experiment with, and sounds that don't fit any of my previous projects that I need to find a home for.

Musically, I always wanted to experiment.

Really, I get inspired by just switching projects and instrumentation and things like that - that creative part of just being different every time is really what inspires me.

If you're always playing the correct notes, there's something wrong - you're not searching; you're not reaching for anything.

That's kind of the nature of being in a progressive band - always trying new things, moving forward.

I miss that thing I used to do when I first started out where I would just spontaneously generate ideas and try things and see where they'd go.

My playground as a musician is growing.

If you're not allowed to experiment anymore for fear of being considered self-indulgent or pretentious or what have you, then everyone's going to just stick to the rules - there's not going to be any additional ideas.

I’m an artist who is always looking for what is possible. I’m always looking to extend the boundaries.

We live in a world where art is always looked upon as the perfect medium. We live in a society where we can alter our body parts, we can act in the most perfect or right way. A lot of that is dangerous because, especially in the world of art, the chief enemy of creativity is being safe. If you're safe, you can't fall and hurt yourself. The older you are, the further down the crash is going to be. But if it works out, the higher the high.

I'm trying to figure out what I can do creatively. It's about trying to find new things and trying to figure out voices and borrowing from things and learning as much as possible so that I have an archive of things to borrow from.