Herbie Hancock has never been a guy who picks a lane and stays in it. He came up playing hard bop, spent five years inside Miles Davis's second great quintet reshaping how a rhythm section could think, then turned around in the seventies and made funk records that filled dance floors. So by the time he got around to a George Gershwin tribute in 1998, nobody should have expected a straight, reverent songbook album. And that's not what he made.

Gershwin's World (1998) takes Gershwin's music — the guy who wrote Broadway tunes and also composed Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess — and treats it as raw material rather than sacred text. Hancock brings in Wayne Shorter, Stevie Wonder, Ysaolette Pearson, opera singer Kathleen Battle, and a West African percussion group to work through the same handful of songs, and the record jumps from a duet with Wonder on 'St. Louis Blues' to a piece that traces Gershwin's music back to its African American roots without ever feeling like a history lecture. It's a smart move: instead of arguing that Gershwin belonged to jazz, Hancock shows where Gershwin's music actually came from in the first place.

The record works because Hancock is comfortable being the least flashy person in the room. He's not trying to prove he can outplay anybody here — by 1998 that was settled business. He's arranging, listening, and letting other musicians take the spotlight while he holds the frame together at the piano. That's a different kind of confidence than the one he had blazing through 'Watermelon Man' decades earlier, but it's the same guy underneath.

If you only know Hancock from Head Hunters (1973) or his Miles Davis years, Gershwin's World (1998) will surprise you — it's slower, more orchestral, occasionally verging on classical crossover. But give it a chance and you'll hear an artist who spent forty years absorbing every style he touched, using that whole toolkit on one project instead of picking just one side of himself to show.