AMERICAN:

Having credited his own musical mentors effusively over the years, Hancock has devoted much of his recent time to his own mentoring. He's the chairman of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz at UCLA; in 2014 he served as the Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard University, delivering six lectures on the theme "The Ethics of Jazz."

The lectures covered the full range of Herbie, including rule-breaking, embracing new technologies (he's cut tracks on Fender Rhodes, the ARP Odyssey synthesizer, Moog, Mellotron, and keytar), and "The Wisdom of Miles Davis." One talk focused on Buddhism's role in creativity.

This year marks his 50th year as a Buddhist practitioner. He had a vision one unlikely night in 1972 in a Seattle nightclub, he explains, after he and his bandmates arrived with less than two hours of sleep under their belts. The night before, they'd taken advantage of several parties, and Hancock was feeling less than inspired.

So he called a tune that began not with him but bassist Buster Williams. What Williams played that night to kick off the concert was astonishing, Hancock says.

"There was something coming out of him that I'd never heard before. He woke all of us up somehow. We had an amazing set. Some people who came up to us afterward were crying."

Later, Hancock asked the double bass player what had given him the strength to summon the performance. It was his Buddhist practice, Williams replied. Hancock was skeptical.

"Oh, you don't have to believe in it," Williams said. "Belief is something that grows from doing it and seeing that it works."

As Hancock testifies, Nichiren Buddhism "promotes looking at the world in different ways than most of us look at it," merging the external world with one's own individual being.

"You find out how to turn poison into medicine, sorrow into joy," he says. "Inside is outside."

Having always identified as a musician, one day while chanting, he thought about his wife.

"And I had an epiphany about who I am," he recalls. "To her, I'm her husband, not a musician. To my daughter, I'm her father. I'm a friend, I'm an American citizen, I'm an African-American, I'm a citizen of the world.

"The fact is that I'm a human being." Being a musician, he says, is what he does, not what he is.

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