St. Louis Jazz Notes: Herbie Hancock

Each year since 1925, Harvard University selects a well-known artist to deliver what are called the Norton lectures, named for Charles Eliot Norton, a celebrated professor, university president, and editor of the Harvard Classics. During their tenure, each selected artist delivers six public talks on topics of their choosing, and in 2014, the lecturer was none other that Herbie Hancock, the celebrated pianist, composer, and bandleader.

Hancock's lectures were documented on video, and now you can see all of them right here. The titles of the six talks, in order, are "The Wisdom Of Miles Davis," "Breaking The Rules," "Cultural Diplomacy And The Voice of Freedom," "Innovation And New Technologies," "Buddhism And Creativity" and "Once Upon A Time." All together, the lectures offer a rare opportunity to "go deep" with one of the most forward-thinking and influential musicians of our time.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

With live music still shut down for the foreseeable future, this week we revisit an idea used in this space occasionally during the slow weeks of summer, and offer up a mini-festival of six feature-length films about jazz.

The first film, embedded up above, is 1959, The Year That Changed Jazz, a 2009 documentary originally aired on the BBC. It uses archival performances and interviews to look at developments in jazz as reflected in four historically significant albums released that year by Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus, and Ornette Coleman.

After the jump, you can see A Great Day In Harlem, an Academy Award-nominated documentary released in 1994 that tells the story of the iconic 1958 photo of dozens of jazz greats taken on a Harlem stoop.

Next up is Mingus: Charlie Mingus 1968, a documentary by filmmaker Thomas Reichman that captures the bassist and composer at a particularly tumultuous time, including some infamous footage of Mingus being evicted from his New York City apartment.

After that, it's keyboardist, bandleader, composer and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial Sun Ra in an extended cut of Space is the Place, a 1972 film that DownBeat described as "a sci-fi trip through the East Bay during the 1970s with Sun Ra in the lead."

The penultimate video is Thelonius Monk: An American Composer, a 1993 documentary that includes archival footage and various jazz greats discussing Monk and his enduring influence on jazz.

Last but not least, it's Herbie Hancock - Possibilities a 2006 "making of" documentary about Hancock's album of the same name, featuring guest performers drawn from rock, pop, hip-hop, and more.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...