Tune of the Week: Rockit & Turntablism

Since his early 20s, Herbie Hancock had a hand in the shaping of the sound of modern jazz. By the mid 1980s his career needed a boost. He connected with genre blender extraordinaire Bill Laswell to help bring his sound into the present. Laswell took him to a HipHop party in New York City where Hancock could see firsthand how DJs would manipulate music with records and their hands, creating new works. Incorporating this new art form resulted in one of his biggest hits: “Rockit”. At the next Grammy awards ceremony Hancock performed the song, featuring Grandmaster D. ST on the turntables. The television broadcast of this performance is one of the cornerstones of genre of Turntablism. Many of the innovators of the art form to come later in the 1990s site this performance as a main motivator to get into scratching. Nearly 40 years later this stuff is reeeeally freshhh!