Now, A Jazz Moment...

MUSIC: Mozart: Piano Concerto No.5 in D major, KV 175, CD: Mozart Complete Piano Concertos: Vol 1, EMI CZS 7 62825 2 (disc 2, cut 1)

Until high school, NEA Jazz Master Herbie Hancock was renowned not as a jazz pianist, but as a budding classical musician. At the tender age of eleven , he performed a Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. A few years later, a brief musical encounter changed Herbie's destiny...

Herbie Hancock: When I was about 14, at one of the variety shows that my high school used to give every semester, one of the students who was in my class played piano and he improvised on MY instrument. See, piano was my instrument. Now here's a guy my age doing something that I couldn't do on my instrument. So, I said, I gotta learn how to do that. Jazz was drawing me in like a magnet. So that was the beginning.

MUSIC: "The Sorcerer," CD: Speak Like a Child, Blue Note, CDP 7 461362 (cut 6)

This Jazz Moment on Pianist Herbie Hancock was created by the National Endowment for the Arts