Herbie Hancock plays Glazer Hall on Friday, May 8, at 8 PM — one of the most significant jazz bookings the island’s newest performing arts venue has secured in its inaugural season, and the kind of program that draws both lifetime jazz listeners and collectors whose relationship with Hancock begins with a Blue Note catalogue and ends with a conversation about what the music has been doing since.
The Artist
Hancock is 86 years old and touring with a working band that has anchored his live performances for the past several years: James Genus on bass, Lionel Loueke on guitar, Terence Blanchard on trumpet, and Jaylen Petinaud on drums. The lineup is not a nostalgia vehicle. Blanchard, who is 62, has spent the past decade operating simultaneously as a jazz bandleader and an opera composer — his 2021 Fire Shut Up in My Bones was the first work by a Black composer to open a Metropolitan Opera season in the company’s 138-year history. Loueke, from Benin, has been Hancock’s guitarist since the mid-2000s and brings a West African rhythmic sensibility that keeps the band’s approach from collapsing into straight-ahead repertoire even when Hancock plays it straight.
What Hancock plays on any given night in 2026 is genuinely unpredictable within a range. The Head Hunters material from 1973 — Chameleon, Watermelon Man — surfaces reliably. So do pieces from Maiden Voyage (1965), his acoustic quintet masterwork recorded for Blue Note with Freddie Hubbard, George Coleman, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. But Hancock has also, in recent touring cycles, played electroacoustic pieces that sit closer to the late-period Bitches Brew Miles Davis side than to the straight acoustic tradition, and the Blanchard and Loueke band facilitates that range.
The Venue
Glazer Hall opened January 22, 2026 inside the restored Royal Poinciana Playhouse at 70 Royal Poinciana Way — the 1958 John L. Volk building that had been dark since 2004 before Jill and Avie Glazer’s $15 million-plus anchor donation funded the renovation and reopening. The 400-seat waterfront theater has floor-to-ceiling glass at the rear overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway, retractable seating that allows the room’s configuration to shift between concert-hall and more intimate formats, and production infrastructure capable of supporting touring artists at the level Glazer Hall has been booking in its inaugural season.
The inaugural season has included Renée Fleming, Fran Lebowitz, and American Ballet Theatre. Hancock on May 8 is the season’s most significant jazz booking and one of the few events in the 2025–26 calendar that could credibly draw Palm Beach’s collector and philanthropic community on a Friday night in May, when seasonal residents who have remained through the post-polo shoulder period are a self-selected audience for exactly this kind of program.
Tickets and Access
Tickets are available through Glazer Hall at glazerhall.org and by phone at (561) 576-7860. The house price range is $275–$325 for most seating; premium inventory through secondary platforms runs higher. Doors open at 7 PM; the show starts at 8 PM. The Royal Poinciana Plaza parking is available, with additional street options on Royal Poinciana Way and the surrounding blocks.
The Calendar Position
May 8 arrives four days after the Met Gala in New York and one day after the NYCB Spring Gala at Lincoln Center. For Palm Beach collectors who have not made the trip north for the social calendar’s New York apex, Glazer Hall on Friday provides the season’s most credible local alternative — a serious artist, a serious room, and a program that doesn’t require prior context to reward an evening’s attention.
The Glazer Hall season runs through late May. After Hancock, the calendar includes Jason Mraz on May 12 and a closing week of programming before the venue enters its summer hiatus. The Royal Poinciana corridor — Café L’Europe, Testa’s, the Worth Avenue adjacency — positions the evening well for dinner before or after, and the venue’s bar is open from doors through intermission.