LOVE Supreme Festival has announced US jazz icon Herbie Hancock as the second artist on the line-up for next year's event.

The 76 year-old was once part of Miles Davis's band and is the winner of 14 Grammy Awards. He joins jazz guitarist George Benson, who is three years Hancock's junior, on the bill for the festival at Glynde Place near Lewes in East Sussex.

Both musicians will be playing UK exclusive performances.

Next year's event is the fifth edition of Love Supreme, which has seen acts such as Van Morrison, Chic and Gregory Porter take to the stage. It takes place from Friday, June 30 to Sunday, July 2.

Mr Hancock said: "I am looking forward to playing at Love Supreme next year with some new music that I'm working on and a new approach to some of my older tunes."

The festival does not usually announce acts so early but given the high-profile nature of the two musicians on the bill the event team thought it wise to publish the news in both cases.

Festival director Ciro Romano said: "Herbie Hancock is without doubt one of the most pioneering and influential musicians of all time and is an artist we've been wanting to book since the festival's inception.

"His current band features some of the most exciting musicians on the scene and to say we're delighted that they'll be performing their only UK festival date of the summer with us is a huge understatement."

Love Supreme's main focus is jazz but it also incorporates pop, soul and R 'n' B music across four stages.

Mr Romano said he founded the festival due to a perceived "gap in the market" for an event that caters for music fans who "wanted more than chart fodder".

Mr Hancock has released almost 40 studio albums since 1962. His 2007 tribute record River: The Joni Letters won the 2008 Grammy Award for Album of the Year, only the second jazz release ever to win the award.

Tickets for Love Supreme Festival are available from www.lovesupremefestival.com

Profile

Herbie Hancock was born in Chicago in 1940.

He began studying piano when he was seven years old and a few years later he was playing Mozart with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

He worked with Miles Davis before releasing his debut album Taking' Off in 1962.

Hancock is a practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism, whose spiritual practices inform his art.

A prolific film composer, Hancock won an Academy Award for this score to 'Round Midnight in 1986 which he also starred in.

Hancock gave lectures at Harvard University in 2014 as part of its Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry series.