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‘I always like the idea of being the first, or being among the first, to try this or try that,” says Herbie Hancock, over the phone from his office in Los Angeles.

“I'm the kind of guy who, when there's a new operating system, I want to get it as soon as it comes out. Right now the iPhone is coming out, from Apple. I want that like on the day it comes out, you know?” He laughs. “I want it the day before.” Nor is this a recent development. “I'm always an early adopter,” he says, “whether it's gadgets or music.”

For anyone who has followed the 67-year-old keyboardist's career, it would be hard to imagine otherwise. Hancock, after all, was one of the first jazz musicians to embrace electronic keyboards, using electric piano in 1968 with the Miles Davis Quintet before moving on to clavinet and synthesizers with his own group. His 1983 hit Rockit not only used a computer to co-ordinate his bank of synthesizers, but managed to be the first (and perhaps only) jazz single ever to make regular rotation on MTV.

A child prodigy who soloed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when he was 11, Hancock has played with the best of the best, a list that includes such jazz greats as Davis, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner and Quincy Jones, but pop stars as well – Mick Jagger, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt among them.

That ability to keep ahead of the curve and fit in with almost any playing situation may have given him an unusually high profile for a jazz musician, but it didn't necessarily win him fans in the jazz community. Critics sniffed that his flirtation with funk was somehow beneath him, and even a few fellow jazz musicians – most famously, Wynton Marsalis, who took on Hancock in a 1985 joint interview with Musician magazine – complained that he was “selling out.”

Hancock, of course, was doing no such thing, and the fact that he continues to move easily between straight-ahead jazz and pop-oriented electronic music – for instance, following 2002's Directions in Music, an all-acoustic album recorded at Massey Hall, with Possibilities, an album of pop duets with Paul Simon, Christina Aguilera and John Mayer – reinforces the idea that he's the type of musician who has little interest in enforcing musical boundaries.

“There is a tendency for people to find a particular niche that they feel comfortable with,” he says, referring to the way musicians and fans let themselves become identified with a particular style or taste. “And human beings, once they find something comfortable, are not encouraged to go beyond that, because they're identified with that. As a matter of fact, they not only identify themselves with that, but others identify them with that. So everybody feels comfortable if you put everybody in a box.

“But the truth of the matter is, that's just one aspect of, or one expression of, what that person is capable of doing. I think it takes more courage to say, ‘This is cool, but what else is out there?' and being willing to explore.

"And a lot of that depends on your own personality. I've always been a very curious kind of person, so it's natural for me to explore.”

Indeed, Hancock has done a bit of everything over the years. He's been responsible for a number of pop hits, both under his own name (Rockit and 1974's Chameleon) and others (his tune Watermelon Man was a 1963 hit for Mongo Santamaria and a sample from his Bring Down the Birds became the basis for Deee-Lite's 1990 smash Groove is in the Heart). In addition to 10 Grammys, he won an Academy Award for his score to 'Ro und Midnight, and the dancing-robot video for Rockit was named the 10th Greatest Music Video of all time by VH1.

He's done so much, in fact, that he seldom bothers to try to take the whole of his career on the road.

His current tour, however, comes pretty close. Working with the pop-savvy rhythm team of bassist Nathan East and drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, with saxophonist Chris Potter filling in for regular guitarist Lionel Louecke, Hancock says the show he'll be bringing to the Toronto Jazz Festival on Tuesday will cover a wide swath of his career.

“It's acoustic and electric,” he says of the group. “We're doing material that covers a broad spectrum of periods in my career – some things from the early sixties, some of the electric stuff with synthesizers. We're doing everything from, say, Maiden Voyage, which I did in the sixties, to the Headhunters version of Watermelon Man and Chameleon, and some songs from my latest record Possibilities. Nathan East is going to be singing.”

It's no accident that Hancock is working with players whose credits include both jazz and rock.

“Especially for the kind of tour that we're doing – they're really perfect for that,” he says. “I mean, Nathan's worked with Eric Clapton and Michael Jackson. He's also worked with Wayne Shorter – he did the record Joy Ryder. And Vinnie's worked with everybody from Sting to Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa and a variety of people. But he's also a straight-ahead player. A lot of people don't know him as much for his straight-ahead playing, but he's an amazing jazz drummer.”

But the tour is hardly the only thing on Hancock's plate. In addition to waiting for the latest Apple product, he's working on an album inspired by Joni Mitchell, whom he inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame last summer.

“We don't have a title for the record, but it's sort of a portrait of Joni Mitchell's music and life,” he says. “I mean, her music already describes her life, but we also have a couple of pieces that she didn't write.

“One of them is a song, In My Solitude. She heard that when she was really young, sung by Billie Holiday, and it resonated with her. That's one of the early influences on Joni, and that influence is really in her voice. And there's another piece we're doing, Nefertiti, written by Wayne Shorter … we were hoping that maybe Joni would want to participate by writing a lyric and for her to possibly sing it. But it didn't work out, because she's really busy now. She's doing her own album.”

Herbie Hancock plays the Beesborough Gardens in Saskatoon Saturday (www.saskjazz.com) as part of the Saskatchewan Jazz Festival, the Burton Cummings Theatre in Winnipeg Sunday as part of the Jazz Winnipeg Festival (ticketmaster.ca) and the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto on Tuesday as part of the Toronto Jazz Festival (ticketmaster.ca).