T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION FRIDAY, AUGUST 2, 2019| 17

Culture

The Woodstock 50 music festival is offi-

cially dead.

After months of uncertainty, which

saw organizers battling a former invest-

or in court, losing two potential sites in

upstate New York, and attempting a

last-ditch move to an amphitheater in

Maryland, the planned 50th anniversa-

ry concert was finally called off on

Wednesday.

“We just ran out of time,” Michael

Lang, one of the partners behind Wood-

stock 50, as well as the promoter of the

original festival in 1969, said in an inter-

view. The event was to have been held

Aug. 16-18, almost exactly 50 years after

the original.

Once planned as a world-class out-

door concert for up to 150,000 people,

featuring Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, the

Killers, Dead and Company, Santana,

John Fogerty and dozens of others, the

festival met an ignominious end after

the majority of its artists abandoned the

event once Lang and his partners tried

in recent days to move it to Merri-

weather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md.

Merriweather, which could hold about

30,000 people for a festival, would have

represented a drastically lower profile

for the event, which had been planned

for the grounds around a racetrack in

Watkins Glen, N.Y.

In addition, the new location may

have had practical complications for

many artists, through so-called radius

clauses — a requirement in many tour-

ing contracts that restrict artists from

appearing too close to other stops on

their tour.

“It’s disappointing that those that

could have come didn’t,” Lang said. “I

understand that there are radius

clauses, and that a lot of the potential

artists were eliminated because of that.”

Artists booked for the festival were

paid upfront, with some earning fees

well into the seven figures; according to

a court filing, Woodstock 50 paid $

million to book its original lineup.

In a statement announcing the can-

cellation of Woodstock 50, Lang encour-

aged artists to donate 10 percent of their

fees to HeadCount, a nonprofit group

that registers voters, “or the causes of

their choice in the spirit of peace.”

By the time we got to where?

Woodstock 50 is canceled,

after most of the festival’s

performers jump ship

BY BEN SISARIO

Michael Lang, left, with John Fogerty at an event announcing Woodstock 50 in March.

EVAN AGOSTINI/INVISION, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

If jazz for you means tradition and

inheritance, maybe Herbie Hancock

can change your mind. At the very

least, he’d like to make you think twice

about what “tradition” means. Mr.

Hancock, a pianist and composer, has

never been interested in upholding any

stylistic conventions — “I like to break

things,” he said when we spoke last

week — but he does insist on a few

trusty ideals. For him, jazz will always

mean cross-pollination, adventurism

and faith in what’s ahead.

After double-majoring in music and

engineering at Grinnell College in

Iowa, Mr. Hancock joined Miles Davis’s

band in 1963, close on the heels of his

own debut album. Immediately, his

piano playing represented some big

new possibilities, connecting the

shaded harmonies of Romanticism and

the earth tones of the blues. By dec-

ade’s end, venturing into jazz-rock

fusion, Mr. Hancock had figured out

how to make synths and electric key-

boards sound splintered and percus-

sive. On albums like “Head Hunters,”

“Thrust” and “Mr. Hands,” he put a

kick of futurism into funk. A few years

later, he turned right back around,

returning to an acoustic format years

before jazz’s neoconservative moment

dawned.

More recently, Mr. Hancock’s fusion

recordings from the 1970s and ’80s

have become a touchstone for younger

musicians, and he has welcomed these

new acolytes into his own creative

process. The crossover stars Terrace

Martin and Thundercat were sched-

uled to join Mr. Hancock onstage

Thursday when he played the Beacon

Theater in New York.

Speaking from his home in Los

Angeles, Mr. Hancock reflected on five

decades at the vanguard of American

music, and he dangled promises of a

new record — the product of that inter-

generational exchange — which he

said could begin trickling online, track

by track, in the next few weeks. This

would be a welcome development from

Mr. Hancock, 79, who hasn’t released

an album in nearly a decade and has

not made one devoted to original mu-

sic in twice as long.

Not that he’s been idle. As a UN-

ESCO global ambassador and the

chairman of the recently renamed

Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, he

stays busy advocating the continued

relevance of jazz across the globe.

These are edited excerpts from the

conversation.

It seems like your influence — your

shadow — is everywhere these days,

particularly among young jazz and

electronic musicians. I wonder if you

feel gratified by that, and if you think

it casts your work in a fresh light?

The truth is, I’ve been sticking my

nose into what they’redoing. And that

shadow that you’re talking about,

that’s me: I’ve been going and hanging

out with the younger musicians, like

Robert Glasper. Sitting in. Terrace

Martin has turned me on to a lot of the

young people on that scene. I’m exam-

ining their approaches to music, and

their use of social media, and how they

record. Then we begin to exchange

ideas. So it’s not just what I’ve done in

the past, but the fact that I’m physi-

cally here now and accessible.

I like to break rules. I like to break

convention. I’m interested in virtual

reality now, even though I’m not a

gamer. I don’t know when I’m going to

get in that door, but I’m looking into it.

I have an Oculus Rift, and I just bought

a Valve Index.

How has working with younger musi-

cians helped expand your palette?

As far as the new record I’m working

on, I wanted to explore what young

musicians are doing these days. I

started off hanging out with Flying

Lotus. Through him, I met Thundercat.

Flying Lotus sent me a text: “Listen to

Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp a Butter-

fly.’ It’s an important record.” I didn’t

know who Kendrick Lamar was. And

the first time I listened to it, the first

thing I heard were words that I don’t

like to hear on records. And this was

my mistake: I assumed it was going to

be what rap had been before. I heard

that, and it turned me off. Then I

started to think. I said, wait a minute.

Flying Lotus says it’s an important

record. So if I’m going to hear this

record, I have to remove that barrier

that I’ve put up.

For years, I’ve been against people

prejudging stuff without paying atten-

tion to what is actually there. So I said,

don’t tell me I’m falling into the same

trap I’ve been fighting against, that

happened to me when I did “Head

Hunters”! I listened to it again, and the

record blew my [expletive] mind.

[Laughs.] I mean, this guy’s such a

genius.

You have always ventured in and out

of stylistic idioms, but nowadays it

seems nobody wants to be stuck

inside a single genre. I wonder if you

think the era of stylistic labels has

come and gone.

Genres made it easy to put things in

categories so that they could be pro-

moted. One person’s face could be

recognized for one category, and an-

other person’s face could be recognized

for another category. It was just to

make some sense of it all. But when it

starts to interfere with cross-collabora-

tion, and the fact that that toocan be

musical, then it becomes a problem. I

can only say that the word “jazz” today

is much broader than it has been in the

past.

You know, the most important thing

is the spirit of jazz — which is about

freedom, about improvisation, about

courage. I mean the courage to play

something that you haven’t played

before, to create something on the

spot. And it’s also about sharing, be-

cause onstage we don’t compete with

each other. Each of us expresses our-

selves from our own being, and no two

people are alike, so the idea of being

judgmental is not on the table.

As a UNESCO good-will ambassador,

you were instrumental in the creation

of International Jazz Day. Why was it

important for you to put jazz in a

global context?

Well, jazz actually has been function-

ing as an international music for a

number of years. Jazz musicians are in

pretty much every country on the

planet. So my first idea was to intro-

duce the idea of UNESCO making an

International Jazz Day, which is an

offshoot of what I’ve wanted to pro-

pose to UNESCO: that jazz become

officially an international music, and

not just an American music. That it

belongs to the world now, not just to

the United States.

What are Americans? We’re immi-

grants. We all come from every corner

of the planet. So it’s like giving this

music that developed here back to the

rest of the world, because we also

come from the rest of the world. Yes,

the beginnings of the music started

from the African-American experience,

but it permeated all of America and

developed through this melting pot.

Frankly, we need more events and

more things that point out the impor-

tance of bringing people from all over

the planet together. To laugh together,

to cry together, to work together, to

help each other.

Herbie Hancock at his home studio in Los Angeles. The jazz-rock fusion recordings of Mr. Hancock, below right in 1981, have become a touchstone for younger musicians.

PHILIP CHEUNG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Herald of jazz’s global reach

At 79, Herbie Hancock

is still breaking rules and

listening to younger artists

BY GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

“The most important thing is the

spirit of jazz — which is about

freedom, about improvisation,

about courage.”

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