March 12, 2008--The Grammy's did an unexpected thing this year. They awarded Album of the Year to a deserving talent. Herbie Hancock won for River: The Joni Letters, a tribute album - homage to Joni Mitchell. He was up against a hard rock record, a country guy, a rapper and a druggie... Thank heavens someone at the Grammy's came to their senses! His 47th album was released on September 25, 2007 by Verve Records; guest vocalists include Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Tina Turner, Norah Jones, Corinne Bailey Rae and Luciana Souza.
But Herbie has created such magic all throughout his career. In 2005, an intimate documentary was filmed about POSSIBILITIES - Herbie Hancock and his in-studio collaborations with a dozen formidable pop recording artists, collaborations that explore the unexpected, like jazz improvisations. The film is also about how Herbie’s unique worldview shapes a creative environment that encourages artists to step outside their comfort zones - into a world of creative exploration heretofore unknown.
The documentary opens with Herbie jotting notes on staff paper - the intuitive talent miraculously channeled from paper to fingers to instrument. He states emphatically that to be "pigeon-holed" is the death of creativity. His solution: exploring by collaboration.
POSSIBILITIES follows Herbie Hancock over a year and a half collaborating with musical icons Carlos Santana, Sting, Angelique Kidjo, Annie Lennox and Paul Simon, Christina Aguilera, John Mayer, Trey Anastasio and Jonny Lang as well as Joss Stone, Raul Midon, Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan. The film also includes rarely seen archival footage of Herbie with the Miles Davis Quintet in 1962; Herbie’s classic video for “Rockit”; and never-before-seen duets of Herbie playing for peace in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 2005 on the 60th anniversary of the atomic explosions. Hancock said then that he tried to use his music to spread a message of peace and help humanity, and that he intended to continue his efforts at the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in Hurricane Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.
His ability to marvel at the talent of those he chose to do this documentary with is amazing. "Each artist brings what they want to the table" - he from jazz. Their youth, their connection to the era in which they were born will bring new light, a new sound. "I feel that many of our systems that worked to encourage creativity are being challenged and there's more of an encouragement to stay where you are - don't make a wave. I think the word that captures the spirit of what I believe in and what I'm really about and what I hope to achieve is POSSIBILITIES."
"As children, we have that sense that anything is possible and we have that kind of openness; we're not jaded. The older we get, the more closed in we get, the more frightened we get, the more set in our ways we get because we're afraid of the unknown; whereas as a child, everything is unknown! What a beautiful place to reside in - in your own being - where you still have the wonder of a child."
In The Mystic Artist I wrote: "...artists, more sensitive than the average person, feel or intuit their way into other dimensions - magnetic fields that remain shut to the 'normal' individual. Artists realized the validity of the acausal factor long before physicists began..."
An artist's natural impulse that does not involve logical reasoning, reacting somewhere beneath the conscious level, allows the truest art to blossom from the seeds of the soul. Such quick and ready insight that is child-like, original and without preconceived notions, prejudice or artifice brings forth the most meaningful creations. Federico Fellini couldn't have said it better: "An artist is a child always and sees things with childlike wonder. That is what makes him an artist." The singer interprets a song effortlessly; the painter designs his canvas without mechanical caginess.
Living child-like by instinct and intuition alone is perhaps the most difficult thing to relearn once the harshness of life robs us of our innocence. But awakened intuition is a powerful force; though the fragile bonds of memory must run its natural course. We must search the silence of who we are; and the inward journey through the World of Chance can't be imagined because all at once, part of us is living in the afterlife... especially during childhood.
Recapturing innocence is the only way to truly understand what lies beneath the prisons of who we are, what we've turned out to be. We may relearn such innocence - lost aspects of ourselves - through children who are the only people truly able to live freely by instinct and intuition. "Dreams, imagination, courage and self-confidence - these are what really nourish us," states Robert Fulghum, a teacher and best-selling author. As we pass into adulthood, we lose our most valuable gift - instinct.
"To draw is to look.
To look is to see.
To see is to have vision.
To have vision is to understand.
To understand is to know.
To know is to become.
To become is to live."
We must, each day of our lives, try to LIVE - the way we did as children, the way we lived before we were not yet old enough to know we CANNOT. We are all unique individuals; yet we limit ourselves more and more as time goes by. We've got to go back to the Kindergarten of our lives to re-enable ourselves to channel through intuition, instinct and emotion.
Remember the image we once had of ourselves before we became aware of and conditioned by our own limitations. We must learn from great creative geniuses like Albert Einstein who made incredible breakthroughs in science simply because he did not accept what he had learned as being the absolute and final truth. In fact, he didn't get along in school too well and mostly refused to be taught. He was obliged to go back to the simple, original basics and reformulate from there. In many ways, he was just returning to "the conceptual world of childhood." It was his powerful intuitive wisdom that nudged him to close in on the new solutions the world was waiting for.
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Herbie Hancock expressed it with such purity: "The strongest thing that any human being has going is their own integrity and their own heart. As soon as you start veering away from that, the solidity that you need in order to be able to stand up for what you believe in and deliver what's really inside, it's just not going to be there. So that's one thing. The other thing is to - and this is the advice I try to give to anyone - is forget about trying to copy someone else. Forget about trying to compete with someone else. Create your own pathway. Create your own new vision. There's an infinite number of ways to look at things, so find one that hasn't been done. Or find a way that something hasn't been done. I made a collaborative record. A lot of collaborative records have been done before, but I don't think they've been done like this."
I was about 4 or 5 here with my brother and stepmother in France. 
A gorgeous white table cloth table with chairs at the Milleridge Inn, NY... 
I loved that photograph so much, I painted it... 
I love this quiet little corner table at the famous
Here is a sidewalk café in Shelter Island, NY 
I just had to paint it!
