Jazz, pop in spirited harmony

Jazz pianist-composer Herbie Hancock makes no effort to conceal the source of inspiration for his new album, “Possibilities,” a series of duets with pop and rock stars including Sting, Paul Simon, John Mayer, Christina Aguilera and Carlos Santana.

“When I first approached Carlos about [playing on] this record,” Hancock said recently while seated in the living room of his Beverly Hills home, “I told him that I was looking at his [‘Supernatural’] record as a model, in a sense. He put his hands on my shoulders and said, ‘Look, if you really want to do that kind of record, you have to really want to do it. Do you really want to do this?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ And he said, ‘OK. I’ll help you in any way that I can.’ ”

Hancock, looking trim, relaxed and at least a decade younger than his 65 years, says he drew up a wish list of possible participants, tapping Santana and others for their suggestions.

“When we put out the feelers,” he added, “I had no idea what would happen. I’d never met John Mayer. I knew Sting. But I’d never met Christina Aguilera or Joss Stone or Lisa Hannigan or Jonny Lang or Trey Anastasio. When we got the feedback, and it was ‘yes’ from everywhere, it really shocked me -- and pleased me.”

It also has pleased the people putting the album out, through a kind of business-sharing model that’s becoming increasingly common. “Possibilities” is a joint production of Hancock Music, Vector Recordings and Starbucks’ Hear Music.

The coffee connection follows in the highly successful footsteps of Ray Charles’ posthumous duets album, “Genius Loves Company,” which came out last August and -- according to Starbucks Entertainment President Kenneth Lombard -- sold more than three-quarters of a million CDs in the chain’s stores alone.

“ ‘Possibilities’ is a special-event album with an extraordinary array of talented artists,” says Lombard, “precisely the sort of innovative idea that we believe appeals to the Starbucks customer.”

Hancock, sitting on a couch near a cabinet containing the numerous Grammy, Oscar, MTV and Playboy Music awards he’s won, says that hooking up with Starbucks represented “a win-win kind of deal, an opportunity to reach a listening audience that often isn’t well served by pop music. Which fit perfectly with what we wanted to do with ‘Possibilities.’ ”

And that is?

“We’re not trying to do a jazz record,” Hancock says. “We’re trying to be as inclusive as we can be, with an underlying spirit that is a jazz spirit.

“The notes aren’t necessarily jazz -- although I do some improvising -- and you couldn’t specifically define this record as a jazz record,” he says. “But the spirit underlying everything is really jazz.”

For instance, there was the approach he and Sting took in revisiting “Sister Moon,” a track from the British rocker’s 1987 “Nothing Like the Sun” album.

“When Sting said he wanted to do ‘Sister Moon’ for the record,” Hancock says, “I thought it could be interesting to give it some African spice. So I called Lionel Loueke, a guitar player from Benin in West Africa, to do the arrangement. He made the bass line sound funky and familiar, but yet it’s fresh and new. Sting loved it.”

Other sessions provided other challenges, with most triggering unique musical solutions.

“Paul Simon was originally thinking about maybe just doing a duet of piano and voice for ‘I Do It for Your Love,’ ” said Hancock. “But I remembered a session I did with Don Was in which he took Hank Williams tunes and put them together with five or six percussionists.

“So I told Paul, ‘What if we had two or three percussionists -- not too heavy, make it light -- and add bass and that’s about it?’ He liked it and added the idea to do it in a minor key,” he says. “So it really was a collaboration.”

One of his partners in the collaboration process, singer Raul Midon, said he learned a thing or two about Hancock’s global view of the art of singing.

“What floored me about working with Herbie,” Midon says, “was the attention he paid not only to chords and tempo, but also to the dramatic aspects of the song. He was interested in getting me to tell the story. He wanted to get the emotion to come through in my voice.”

“Possibilities” isn’t by any means Hancock’s first flirtation with pop music. His song “Watermelon Man” is a jazz and R&B; standard, and “Rockit” was an ‘80s music video breakthrough.

Still, the plan for an album so overflowing with pop music might risk credibility in the jazz world for a musician who was part of the classic Miles Davis Quintet of the ‘60s and the all-star Davis alumni V.S.O.P. band, and who also led his own Headhunters bands and engaged in various musical ventures with his close friend, saxophonist Wayne Shorter.

But the kind of meeting of minds he’s been accustomed to in the jazz world isn’t all that different from what he found diving headlong into the deep end of the pop music talent pool.

“We spent a lot of time talking together while they were setting up the studio,” he said of his session with Annie Lennox. “We found that we see eye to eye on a lot of things, which was true with most of the artists.

“That was good,” Hancock says, “because I didn’t want this record to grow out of chords or notes. I wanted it to come from our shared humanity.”