CHAPTER EIGHT

A few years before I joined the Miles Davis Quintet, I heard a record Miles had done with the arranger Gil Evans. It was called Miles Ahead, and the first time I listened to it I found myself in tears, the songs and arrangements were so gorgeous. I must have played it five times in a row that first day—it was the most beautiful record I had ever heard. To this day Miles Ahead is one of my all-time favorites. I still cry when I listen to it, and I’m not a guy who cries, ever . . . well, not often, anyway.

The genius of Gil Evans was that the sound he created with brass and woodwinds was like that of a full orchestra. He wrote classical references into his arrangements, both traditionally orchestral and harmonically contemporary, and the way he melded them was achingly lovely. Throughout my time with Miles, that influence grew on me.

When it came time to do my next record after Maiden Voyage, I wanted to capture the essence of the Gil Evans sound. But instead of doing it with the same instrumentation Gil did, I decided to set myself a challenge, to try something impossible: What was the smallest number of horns I could use and still get the essence of that sound?

I figured I would need at least six horns to capture some of its key colors and nuances, so . . . could I do it with five horns? That would be more difficult, but it still didn’t seem like enough of a challenge. What about four? That would be really hard, and it was probably the least number that could actually work. If four was the smallest workable number, then I had to push it one more step, to do the impossible. I decided to use just three horns.

But which three? If there was any hope of creating a rich, orchestral sound, each horn would have to serve as its own section, and all three horns would have to be able to play on either top or bottom—that way I’d have more colors to work with. I picked the alto flute and the fluegelhorn, but I wasn’t sure what the third horn should be. Miles said two words, “Bass trombone,” which is essentially a regular trombone with a bigger bell and some extra tubing to get lower registers. So that’s what I chose.

Now I had the instruments. But what was I getting myself into? I called my friend Joe Zawinul, the great pianist and composer (who later went on to co-found Weather Report with Wayne Shorter), and told him what I was trying to do. “You got any tips?” I asked him. I would need all the tricks and devices I could find to get the fullness of sound I wanted.

In listening to Gil’s arrangements, I could hear the bass playing little countermelodies. Gil sometimes doubled these with a tuba, which wasn’t typical of big-band writing, but it gave the sound more heft. I wanted to do something similar, but if I had the trombone player double the bass, then I’d have only two other horns to create the rest of the palette. I also noticed that Gil had certain colors that, when standing alone, sounded like a clash of harmonies, but in the flow of the music they didn’t clash at all. How did he do it?

I was getting up in my own head about everything, so Joe said, “Herbie, here’s what you have to do. First you have to get away from the piano.” He told me to write the arrangements without sitting at the piano, just hearing the various instruments in my head. “If you do that,” he told me, “you won’t be just duplicating your piano lines.” I had never written an arrangement that way, so it wasn’t going to be easy.

“Next,” Joe said, “make every line that each horn plays a singable melody.” Normally a composer would write vertical harmonies for the two horns that weren’t playing the melody, but Joe’s idea was to create melodies for them, too. “Even if the melodies clash vertically with the harmony,” Joe said, “the strength of the singable melody will pass right by. The clashes won’t sound like clashes—they’ll sound like spices to the ear.” I wasn’t so sure, but Joe just said, “Trust me. It will work.”

Writing the arrangements for that record, Speak Like a Child, was like solving a puzzle. I used every device I could think of, layering in different melodies, scales, and trills. Most listeners probably never noticed the influence of Gil Evans on that record, but it was very clear to me. I just loved the colors we got out of those three horns, and I began to think that when eventually I started my own band, that was the instrumentation I’d like to have.

Little did I know it, but that day was coming soon.

In May of 1968, two months after Speak Like a Child was released, the quintet went into CBS Studios to finish recording our new album, Miles in the Sky. On our last day of recording, May 17, I walked into the studio and there was no piano for me to play. At first I didn’t say anything, figuring someone would take care of that little oversight. When that didn’t happen, I finally said, “Miles, what am I supposed to play?”

“Play that,” he said, and nodded toward a Fender Rhodes electric piano in the corner.

Even though I’d always loved electronics and mechanical gadgets, I had no interest in playing electric piano. The conventional attitude, shared by most jazz musicians and particularly by piano players, was that they were cute but not substantial. There was no way they could produce the full, rich sound of a real piano, so why bother with them? They were gimmicks.

So when Miles said he wanted me to play the Fender Rhodes, I wasn’t too happy about it. I thought, You really want me to play this toy? I walked over, flipped it on, and played a chord. And, to my surprise, I thought it sounded kind of cool. It was prettier than I had anticipated, even if it didn’t have the same fullness or depth of an acoustic piano. I played around a little bit and then decided to have some fun by turning up the volume as loud as it would go.

I played a chord, and it was LOUD. And I suddenly realized that if I played this electric piano, Tony wouldn’t have to back down from his intensity and volume when I soloed. No matter how hard I hit the keys on an acoustic piano, he always had to pull back so he didn’t drown me out. But on the electric piano I could play really loud without even putting any more pressure on the keys—all I had to do was turn a knob. Suddenly I felt excited to play this instrument that I had been so ready to dismiss.

I learned something that day, and not just about the electric piano. I had formed a judgment based on the opinions of others, rather than on my own experience. I had locked the door for no reason at all and almost missed out on an exciting new musical experience because of it. This was one more step in overcoming my musical snobbery, and I vowed not to forget it.

I had actually started listening to electronic music a few years earlier, when Tony Williams turned me on to the German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Tony had broadened my musical horizons over the years, introducing me to artists like Alban Berg, John Cage, and Paul Hindemith. I was always asking him, “What are you listening to?” because I knew I’d learn something. And one day his answer was to play me Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, one of the first great works of electronic music.

In Gesang der Jünglinge Stockhausen used sine waves and clicking noises to form a mesmerizing electronic tableau. When I first heard those sounds, I felt drawn to them, though I didn’t really investigate how he’d created them, since I wasn’t interested in making electronic music myself. Stockhausen’s work was often categorized as classical, but it fell on a continuum of avant-garde music that intrigued me, a continuum that stretched from Stravinsky and Bartók all the way to Jerry Garcia.

One evening in 1966 I was performing with a trio at the Village Vanguard. The club was in a basement, and during a break I was walking up the stairs with another musician when a guy came chasing after me. He said, “There’s a musician from the classical scene here who liked the way you played. He wants to meet you.” I was always curious to meet classical players, so I said, “Great! Who is it?” And the guy said, “Karlheinz Stockhausen.”

I flipped out. I was so excited to meet him that I went running right back down the stairs. We talked for a while, and I told him I was a big fan of his work. He said, “I’m writing a piece using the national anthems of various countries. Would you record the U.S. national anthem for me?” He wanted me to put my version on tape, and he would then manipulate the tape to get the sound he wanted. I was really excited to do it, but between one thing and another I didn’t get it done in time. Stockhausen created that piece, called Hymnen, over a two-year period, and it premiered in November of 1967.

The late sixties was an exploratory period, and Miles telling me to “play that” Fender Rhodes was part of his own leap into that exploration. Miles in the Sky was the first record he made with electric instruments, and he never made another all-acoustic record again. And, thanks to him, I discovered an unexpected love for electronic instruments that would change the way I made music.

By the summer of 1968 Gigi and I had been together for almost four years. We loved each other, but our relationship hadn’t been completely smooth sailing during that time. One of the roughest spots had come a couple of years earlier, in the summer of 1966, when she nearly left me after an incident in Denmark.

The quintet was touring Europe, and Gigi had taken time off from work to come along for part of it. I liked having her with me, but I also wanted to do my own thing sometimes. I had never been abroad before joining Miles, and suddenly we were traveling all over the world, so I wanted to explore and experience everything I could.

One night in Copenhagen a group of Danes invited the band to have drinks after the show. I was always up for that, so we headed out into the night and proceeded to drink our way through the city. I had a pretty high tolerance for alcohol, but the Danish just take it to a different level altogether. I made the mistake of trying to keep up, and by the time I got back to our hotel I was really tanked.

Gigi helped me into the bathroom and started filling the tub, so I could have a bath and pull myself together. But I was too far gone—I threw up all over the place, and she just left the bathroom, disgusted. To my surprise, she went right to the phone by the bed and called the concierge for help booking a plane ticket. “I’m going back to New York, Herbie,” she yelled to me in the bathroom. “That’s it. I’m done.”

She was angry about the state I was in, but she was also angry about the state of our relationship. We had been living together for two years by then, and even though attitudes were changing, most people in the 1960s still frowned on unmarried couples living together. My mother had a very Victorian attitude about it, which she made known. And Gigi felt uncomfortable checking into hotels with me as my girlfriend. She figured that people would notice the absence of a ring on her finger and assume she was either a loose woman or a hooker.

Gigi was also painfully aware that neither my mother nor my sister liked the fact that I had a white girlfriend. A lot of black women felt that way, and some still do. My sister, Jean, would say, right in front of Gigi, “How come all the nice, well-to-do black men end up with white women?” She was resentful, and she made sure Gigi knew it.

I knew that marrying Gigi would make things easier for her, but I was nervous. Because Gigi was European I wasn’t sure she really understood what it meant for a white woman to marry a black man in America. A white American girl would have grown up understanding how deeply entrenched American racism was; she would know what to expect. But what would happen when Gigi had to face that ugly underside of American society? She had never seriously dated a black guy before me, so I’d decided it was best to wait a while, to make sure she knew what she was getting into.

But in that hotel room in Copenhagen Gigi decided she’d had enough. When I heard her making arrangements to fly back to New York, I managed to pull myself together enough to come out of the bathroom. “Gigi, come on. Please don’t do this,” I said to her. She just shook her head, still angry. So then I said, “Let’s get married.”

It wasn’t the most romantic proposal in the world, but Gigi said yes. We called a jeweler the next day, and he came down to the hotel with a tray of rings. We picked out two simple bands and bought them—but even so, I still wasn’t quite ready to marry Gigi.

I was twenty-six when we got engaged, and although I knew Gigi was the woman I wanted to spend my life with, I wanted to be free to have more experiences, to not feel tied down yet. Let’s put it this way: I wasn’t a skirt-chaser, but I did like skirts. Whenever the quintet traveled, I liked to feel that I was allowed a certain degree of freedom.

Gigi struggled with this, and about a year after we got engaged we had a big fight about it. The quintet was about to go on tour, and she and I had it out before I left. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I also wasn’t ready to make the kind of promises that she needed. The whole time on the road I dreaded coming back to New York. I figured we would fall right back into the same argument, and I didn’t know how to resolve it.

When I got back home, I walked into the apartment like I was walking on eggshells. To my surprise, the lights were dimmed and there were candles on the dining room table. My favorite dinner was waiting, and a bottle of very expensive wine. What in the world was this? Was it a peace offering, or was Gigi about to kill me?

Just then Gigi walked in, and she looked absolutely gorgeous. She had a smile on her face, and she walked over and gave me a big hug and a kiss. We sat down, I poured the wine, and I asked her what was going on.

She told me that during the time I was on tour, she’d gone on a little vacation with her friend Maria. While she was away, she had thought about our relationship and the fight we’d had. And she had come to a realization.

“I realized that regardless of whatever else happens, I know you love me,” she said. “I trust that to be the truth.” I nodded, because it was true.

“The second thing I realized was, I have been depending on you for my happiness,” she said. She told me she had been relying on me, and on our relationship, to give her purpose. And because I was away so much on tour, she felt empty much of the time. After our fight, she saw that she was putting pressure on our relationship—so much pressure that it was threatening to collapse. “I have to create my own life and be responsible for my own happiness,” she said.

I could not believe what I’d just heard. But she meant every word of it. From that day forward she chose to trust in my feelings for her, and she became more independent, and more centered, than I could have imagined. She has such amazing strength of will that she was simply able to change her attitude. Our conversation that day released the pressure from our relationship, and it just got stronger and better from then on.

Gigi taught me something that day. No person is responsible for another person’s happiness, and you can’t make a person into who you want him or her to be. You have to love her for who she is or look for somebody else. Gigi and I loved each other before that day, but now we were free to love each other for exactly who we were. I looked at her across the table and thought, Wow, I am a lucky man. I still think that.

We decided to get married in the summer of 1968. I didn’t want a big, expensive wedding, so I said, “Okay, Gigi. You choose. We can either have a big wedding with a bunch of freeloading friends who’ll give us gifts we don’t want . . .” She was looking at me like I was crazy. “Or,” I went on, “we could fly first class to Brazil and live like a king and queen in a beautiful hotel on Copacabana Beach for two weeks.”

“Where’s my ticket?” she said.

We got married at New York City Hall on August 31, 1968, with my brother, Wayman, as our witness. And then we were off to Rio! We stayed at the Copacabana Palace, a gorgeous Art Deco−style hotel right across from the beach, and on our first night in Brazil we treated ourselves to dinner at the famous Ouro Verde restaurant. We drank champagne and ate oysters, and it was a fantastic night. Until we got back to our hotel.

It must have been the oysters, because I was sick as a dog that whole first night. The next day I didn’t feel much better, so the hotel called a doctor for me. I knew that getting a doctor to make a house call would be more expensive than going to the hospital, but the dollar was strong at the time, so how bad could it be?

Well, this doctor apparently knew he’d caught himself a live one. He examined me and said, “You must be very careful. Bacteria could get into your bloodstream, and you could get hepatitis.” He insisted on coming back the next day to see me again, and when I asked how much it would cost, he said, “Oh, nothing you can’t afford, don’t worry.”

The doctor came back the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. Every day he convinced me that I was practically on the brink of death. “Your liver is very swollen,” he would say gravely. “You must rest. I will come back tomorrow.”

This went on for our entire honeymoon. I spent the whole time in bed or resting on the beach, trying to make sure I didn’t get sicker. The doctor kept telling me I was in grave danger. And by the end of our two weeks he had the gall to say, “You are not ready to travel yet. Your liver is too big. You must stay here at least another week.” By now he had racked up thousands of dollars in fees from me, and he didn’t want to let his cash cow fly on home.

I had gigs with the quintet coming up, and if I didn’t get back to New York, I was going to miss them. I called Miles and said, “Listen, man, I got food poisoning, and the doctor here is telling me I shouldn’t travel. So I won’t be home for another week.” Miles, of course, thought I just wanted to have an extra week in Rio with my beautiful new wife, so he wasn’t very happy about that. As it turned out, he’d also been suspecting for a while that I was planning to leave the quintet, so now he decided to make sure he had another piano player lined up.

The truth was, I hadn’t made any plans to leave the quintet. I had been with Miles for five years, but I was still learning and still really enjoying playing with the guys. Being in the Miles Davis Quintet felt like the gig of a lifetime for a jazz player, so why would I quit? But Miles had noticed the work I had done on Speak Like a Child and Blow-Up, and he could see that I was developing my own style. I guess he figured it was just a matter of time before I realized I had to branch out, so he decided to beat me to it.

The quintet played a couple of gigs while I was still in Brazil, and Miles hired the hot pianist Chick Corea to take my place. The next time I called Miles, a few days after those gigs, he just said, “Call Jack.”

I called Jack Whittemore, Miles’s agent, and he said, “You know, Herbie, Miles is aware that you, Wayne, and Tony are all thinking about leaving the band.” He went on to explain that if all three of us departed at once, Miles would have to start another band from scratch, since Ron Carter had recently left. But if Miles could replace us one by one, he could integrate each new player into the existing sound and then continue uninterrupted from there. He wanted to take control of the situation.

“Chick played a couple of gigs,” Jack said, “and he was good.” Not every piano player could step into the Miles Davis Quintet and hold his own, but Chick was more than capable. “Miles wants to bring Chick on while Wayne and Tony are still there,” Jack said, “but if you really object, if you really want to stay, Miles will consider it.”

Well, I wasn’t too happy about getting pushed out of the quintet. On the other hand, I had my pride, and I wasn’t about to crawl to Miles and beg him to let me stay. My brain was racing, going through the scenario that Jack had presented me and considering my options. What should I do?

I had been making my own records since 1962, and most of them were doing very well. The new music I was writing didn’t really fit the direction that Miles was going in, so it wasn’t right for the quintet. And with Speak Like a Child I had hit on a combination of instruments and a sound that I really wanted to explore. I suddenly realized that there were all kinds of reasons why it made sense for me to go out on my own, but I had never allowed myself to see that. I might have just stayed in the band forever if Miles hadn’t given me that push. Suddenly I was grateful for it.

“Okay, Jack,” I said. “Tell Miles I’ll leave.” I hung up the phone and looked at Gigi.

“That’s it,” I said. “It’s time for me to put my own band together.”