Music in Schools Today volunteer Elaine Dennis interviewed jazz legend Herbie Hancock for Dig_iT magazine. Following is Elaine's article.

Talk about a frontrunner: Herbie Hancock performed a Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age 11. As a youth, he became obsessed with electronics. In college, he took a double major in music and electrical engineering.

By 23, he was playing with jazz giant Miles Davis. In the '70s, he was the first major jazz musician to use synthesizers. And Dig_iT will never forget Herbie as the digital lifestyle pioneer who read his Grammy acceptance speech from a Palm Pilot, a first. It was one of eight Grammies (and an Academy Award) the jazz legend has earned.

Hancock embodies the digital lifestyle: in the studio, at work, on the road, and at home. He's always up on the latest gadgets, and continues to pioneer the use of technology in music and performances, currently by working with new Surround-Sound technologies.

Herbie also founded Transparent Music, a multimedia company dedicated to the presentation of barrier-breaking music, with the help of his manager David Passick and former Verve Records president Chuck Mitchell. The company plans to take advantage of almost every distribution format available including concert events, films, TV, CDs, DVDs, and the Internet. A recent company project called "Future 2 Future" has Hancock collaborating with Bill Laswell and some of the edgiest young hip-hop and techno artists to create their own music of the future via technology.

As if he's not busy enough, five years ago Hancock founded the Rhythm Of Life Foundation, an organization that's trying to help bridge the technological divide and find ways to use technology to help humanity. According to Hancock, "the philosophy of the foundation is based on the communication of multi-cultural awareness and tolerance among communities, on instilling a sense of courage and creative initiative in children, and educating one another about our rich and complex ethnic heritage." The foundation's website is at www.rolo.org.

We caught up with Herbie just before he headed out on a concert tour for Future 2 Future, and just before he completed his Future 2 Future Live DVD, mixed in Surround Sound.

Herbie told us his motto was "don't be afraid to try." He's certainly lived up to his words.

Elaine Dennis:
What was your earliest recollection of technology being significant in your life -- something that really made you say 'Wow!'?

Herbie Hancock:
That was in the early '70s during my very raw avant-garde jazz period. It was also a time when people were still into new sounds and psychedelic stuff from the late '60s. Synthesizers were just starting to show their face on the scene as being a cool new thing.

I was working on my Crossings record in San Francisco at the time. My manager and record producer, David Rubenson, suggested we put a synthesizer on the record. I said, "Well that's cool, but I don't know anyone that plays the synthesizer." David said he knew this guy, Patrick Gleason, who had his own studio and was doing synthesizer stuff and had a whole big set-up. I didn't know anything about synthesizers, but I said, "Tell you what. Here's this tune. Why don't you ask him if he'd be interested in creating an introduction on spec -- if I don't like it, I'm not gonna use it."

I didn't even have to go to his studio. We gave him the tape and he sent it back a couple days later. When I sat down to listen to what he did, it blew my mind.

Elaine:
Were you worried at all about how your fans would react? How did you feel about taking this out on the road and having this totally new experience?

Herbie:
I was excited about it! Nobody in jazz was using synthesizers at the time. It's interesting to me that a lot of the artists that are creating the new electronic music scene today have been influenced by Sextant and some other records I did during that period. So it's kind of come back in another form today.

Elaine:
I remember when we went to a party together during Macworld in the late '90s and we heard one of the DJs spinning your tune Rockit.

Herbie:
Rockit was much later than Sextant, it was 1983. I'm talking about music that I did back in 1972 -- so it was 10 years or so before Rockit. This totally avant-garde music I was doing then was basically non-electronic, except for some of the stuff Patrick did. But was reaching out in that direction. We were very much into new textures and new sounds. And that music was very raw and far out. That kind of sound had an influence on Rockit. Also, it was a precursor to a lot of the hip-hop things and to the electronic scene today. But it wasn't Rockit that was the biggest influence on them, it was Sextant and a tune I did called Nobu. I didn't find that out until I did Future 2 Future.

Elaine:
Tell us about the Future 2 Future concept.

Herbie:
It started with Bill Laswell, my producer. He sparked my interest by saying that the stuff that I had done back in the very early '70s was influencing young electronic musicians today. I'd heard maybe one or two things that sounded a little bit interesting, but I really didn't know anything about the new electronic music. Then Bill started playing me some things I hadn't heard and I finally got the idea. He thought it would be interesting for me to work with young people who are working electronically and were influenced by stuff that I did acoustically back 30 years ago.

Elaine:
So did Bill help find these people?

Herbie:
He helped me connect with these people -- and I trust Bill. The first stuff I heard was what he had put together with them to submit to me for my record. I didn't hear material that they had done before. This was the idea for Future 2 Future -- to record my immediate musical response from hearing what they were doing for the first time.

Bill wanted that kind of spontaneity and I was interested. Even Gershwin's World, which I did before Future 2 Future, came from a more spontaneous place. So it was Bill's realization that people in this new electronic scene had been influenced by me, and his own vision of what I might like to do and what would sound good on a record.