It’s time to dig into the archives. I’d seen this before, but it hits differently now. Herbie Hancock jams out in the studio with Quincy Jones in a 1984 film. It’s notable for what Herbie says with his music, with his approach to the machines, and with how he thinks about humans.
I was going to say how he thinks about humans and machines, but part of what resonates about this is that it really is mainly about the human side. And it’s relatable.
The clip comes from a star-studded 1984 documentary called “I Love Quincy,” directed by Eric Lippmann. [Archived BFI reference.] I expect this may have been recorded closer to 1983, but you get the point.
He talks mainly about the Fairlight CMI digital sampler, but his jam is on a different synthesizer, the Rhodes Chroma. It’s a great demo for another reason: he really illustrates the compositional imagination, editing a virtual score on the Fairlight display, and the performance imagination, shifting to his role as a keyboardist. (He doesn’t play the Fairlight, but he does express some excitement that it has both modes.)
It’s also great to hear that unfiltered, as a genuine conversation between two friends as well as two great artists — no brand sponsorship in site, no need to evangelize the tech other than sheer joy.
And then he talks about tools in a way that I suspect is why people keep coming back to that clip:
These instruments were designed for people to use. For people to use. You know, it’s just a tool, another tool. The way the way an axe is a tool, an axe can be a tool to to cut wood, to build a house — or can be a tool to slaughter your neighbor, you know? The same thing a synthesizer can be a a tool to really hurt people’s ears or interfere with their lives or can be a tool to make a really nice sounding instrument that can really affect people in a positive way. It all depends on the person that’s using them. People blame machines very often for — oh, it’s the machine’s fault. How can it be the machine’s fault? We have to plug it in. The machine don’t do anything but sit there until we plug it in. It doesn’t plug itself in. It doesn’t program itself. Yet. [laughter] It’s on the way, though. It’s on the way.
People might focus in on the prescient comment about machines programming themselves, but it’s the human part that gets me. It also hits hard when he talks about the violent potential of an axe. Computers by the early 80s had already proven themselves weapons of the defense industry. Now, this is even more vividly apparent, as the literal tools we use — Google apps, ChatGPT, Claude — have been used to kill. Some of those have even rained down bombs on people I know.
I’m not one for hero worship — I’m indebted to Herbie Hancock; he’s a reason I am even here writing this. But I saw this and thought — yeah. That’s it. For all their hits, Herbie and Quincy are two friends. Bring that friend to your studio. Play and program and be a human being. That’s as always the answer to everything around us. We, uh, don’t all necessarily promise not to hurt your ears, but even then, in a nice way.
The current feature over at The Verge is a great story by Benjamin Riley:
Our minds aren’t equipped to handle AI
I’d actually recommend it not so much for what it says about AI as what t says about modeling how we think. Quoting Paul Cisek, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal.
Cisek contends that rather than information processors, our brains are better understood as feedback-control systems. Our bodies don’t just receive input, they take action to adjust what that input is, contingent on what options are available. As Cisek himself is quick to note, this is not a new idea — writing at the turn of the 20th century, philosopher John Dewey described the mind as a circuit, “more truly termed organic than reflex, because the motor response determines the stimulus, just as truly as sensory stimulus determines movement.”
The important thing is human agency, and with a motor input — meaning even when Herbie has the light pen in his hand, there is still spatial-motor engagement of the mind. We’re perfectly equipped to understand this in music, because we always add a knob, a fader, a D-BEAM — whatever.
So if you want to be smarter, what you’re looking for is not AI — or a new plug-in or preset, for that matter. You’re looking for physical motor input. You’re looking for the ability to form your own ideas. I think the same is true when we’re listening. I know my favorite keyboardists were not necessarily the ones whose performances were most technical. You have rough edges, just like seeing the brushstrokes in a painting.
And because we’re social — that’s at the basis of this entire model — bring a friend. Maybe even one friend is enough of an audience.