With one album left on his record deal with CBS, jazz legend Herbie Hancock found himself looking around in 1982 for an infusion of creativity to revitalize his decades long career. That’s when bassist Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn from the band Material popped onto his radar.

“(Herbie) had a PA or something like that and he somehow convinced Herbie he needed to work with Laswell since Laswell was really up and coming.” Beinhorn remembers.

Once Hancock got onboard with the idea, Beinhorn and Laswell began working on tracks in a studio they had access to in Brooklyn. One of those pieces would come to be known as Grammy award winning instrumental “Rockit.”

“We just began building this track up. It was based around Hip Hop…you know music of the day…Electro music. We just wanted to combine a whole bunch of different elements into it. (Sort of) like…’What would Herbie Hancock be doing right now? How would he integrate and assimilate some of the influences that we found important?’ (And) it was all done very quickly.”

Arriving at Hancock’s Los Angeles home studio to finish off the track, Laswell and Beinhorn found that the keyboard master had a fairly simple setup that included a Fairlight CMI, a Rhodes Chroma, and a Minimoog.

“There was one part that actually took me hours. I programmed this clicking sound that was part of the percussion track on the Minimoog. We had to sync that up to the drum machine tracks and at that time the syncing technology was almost non-existent.”

But thanks to a semi-obscure piece of gear called the Garfield Doctor Click, Beinhorn was able to marry the Model D as sequence being driven by another element of the track.

“Honestly that little bit was an homage to Kraftwerk because they do something similar on that song ‘Numbers.’ I just got the filter to oscillate and after spending probably an hour to get the attack and release on the filter and on the amplifier to do what I wanted. I was like ‘Oh I'd really like to get that kind of effect into this song. I just feel like it would add something really cool.”