Creativity Quote by Herbie Hancock

Hancock frames the line like a confession: not of wrongdoing, but of being safely schooled. “Certain rules I’d always used” isn’t just harmony class etiquette; it’s the whole midcentury bargain jazz musicians inherited - the idea that mastery equals correctness, that taste is proven by staying inside approved shapes. Then he drops the pivot: “people like Trane.” John Coltrane becomes shorthand for a force of nature, a musician whose authority came from refusing to ask permission.

What makes the sentence work is its quiet power dynamic. Hancock doesn’t posture as the rebel; he positions himself as someone watching the real radicals with a mixture of awe and recalibration. “They would break those rules” lands with admiration, but also with an implied challenge: if the rules can be broken and the music gets bigger, then the rules were never the point. It’s a musician describing the moment when technique stops being a finish line and becomes a toolkit.

The subtext is about jazz as a living language. Coltrane’s “rule-breaking” wasn’t random provocation; it was disciplined intensity - harmonic substitutions, sheets-of-sound density, modal and freer approaches - pushing toward spiritual and emotional extremity. For Hancock, who came up in the hard-bop mainstream and then joined Miles Davis’s famously experimental band, the quote reads like a personal origin story of artistic courage: you learn the grammar to speak clearly, then you meet someone who reminds you that clarity isn’t the same thing as truth.