CHAPTER NINE

In November of 1968 the Herbie Hancock Sextet made its debut with a three-week engagement at the Village Vanguard. Right from the start other musicians thought I was crazy—why a sextet? As a piano player I could have just hired two guys and gone out with a trio, which would have been much cheaper. The bigger the band, the more guys I had to pay. Even Miles Davis had only a quintet, so who did I think I was, hiring so many players?

But I wanted to continue exploring the three-horn sound I’d been able to develop on Speak Like a Child, so I hired saxophonist Clifford Jordan, trumpeter Johnny Coles, and trombonist Garnett Brown, and for the rhythm section I brought in Ron Carter and drummer Pete LaRoca. I knew it would be hard to make money, but thanks to Donald Byrd’s advice about publishing, I was getting royalties from “Watermelon Man,” which gave me a financial cushion.

During our run at the Vanguard, Ron Carter couldn’t make all of the performances because he was playing in a Broadway show. So I brought in the bassist Buster Williams, who’d been playing with the great jazz vocalist Nancy Wilson. Buster was a fantastic musician, and by the end of the gig we were really comfortable playing together, so I asked him to stay on. He was the first piece of the puzzle to fit—the only guy from that very first sextet gig who would continue with me into the Mwandishi era.

I had one more album to do under my contract with Blue Note, so I began making plans to record with the sextet. But I started to realize that even though Blue Note was the preeminent jazz label, and very good at marketing to jazz fans, they really weren’t set up to support music that went beyond those boundaries. I wanted to expand further, both musically and in terms of finding an audience, so I decided that after this final record was done, I would try to land a major-label deal.

The last record I did for Blue Note, The Prisoner, reflected the beginnings of my new musical directions. It was a concept album focusing on the struggle for civil rights. Like most black Americans, I was shattered by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April of 1968 and of Bobby Kennedy two months later. The Black Power movement was growing, and the U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos had raised their fists in a Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City that summer. Yet although I’d been emotionally invested in the civil rights movement, until now I’d never made any overt moves to get involved in it.

Most of the songs on The Prisoner were about Martin Luther King, Jr., including the fourth track, “He Who Lives in Fear.” But as serious as its subject matter was, that song, like “Maiden Voyage,” had actually started out as an advertising jingle.

I’d been hired to write music for a TV commercial for Silva Thins cigarettes. The ads featured a Mr. Cool−type character, a white guy in dark sunglasses and hip clothes who’s always snatching his cigarettes away from the beautiful girls hovering around him. In one ad he even throws the girl out of his sports car, because that’s how much he loves those cigarettes. Those ads would never fly today, but the Silva Thins print campaign was even worse, with the tagline “Cigarettes are like women. The best ones are thin and rich.” It’s no wonder that the late ’60s was a time of ferment not only for black empowerment but for women’s rights as well.

Anyway, the advertising agency wanted cool, Miles Davis−style music, so I wrote a few bars and recorded it with six horns and a rhythm section. I really loved the sound of that jingle—it was intriguing and mysterious—so I decided to repurpose it as a song. (This was something I did often, as I wrote original music for dozens of ad campaigns over the years, for products like Pillsbury’s Space Food Sticks, Standard Oil, Tab soda, and Virginia Slims cigarettes.) The agency didn’t much like the idea, but I changed the harmonies, title, and tone and created “He Who Lives in Fear.”

The Prisoner didn’t sell very well, but it’s a record that’s close to my heart, as it was the first one I made after leaving Miles and my first step toward a new, freer style of playing. I was soon able to land a new deal with Warner Bros., a big-label deal that I thought would help me in continuing to develop my own style.

Fifteen years had passed since I first learned to improvise by copying George Shearing records. From the beginning, the goal was to move beyond imitation and find my own voice, and I felt that that was finally happening. Miles had been the guiding light to my growth, encouraging all of us in the band to develop our own styles of playing, and during my five and a half years in the quintet I did start to develop my own sound. But it wasn’t until I got out on my own that I felt I could really explore it.

Now that I had my own sextet, I started thinking analytically about what actually goes on within a jazz group. At every moment onstage players are making choices, and each choice affects every other member of the group. So each player has to be prepared to change directions at any given moment—just as Miles did when I played that “wrong” chord onstage a few years earlier. Everybody in a jazz ensemble has learned the basic framework of harmony and scales and how they fit. They know the basic song structure of having the rhythm section—piano, bass, and drums—playing together while the horns carry the melody. But apart from those basics, jazz is incredibly broad. There are really uncountable ways of playing it.

For the pianist alone there are so many choices to make: what pitch, how many notes, whether to play a chord or a line. I have ten fingers, and they’re in motion almost all the time, so all of those decisions must happen in an instant. I’m reacting to what the rest of the band is playing, but if I’m only reacting, then I’m not really making a choice; I’m just getting hit and being pushed along. Acting is making a choice, so all the players must be ready to act as well as react. The players have to be talented enough, and confident enough, to do both.

I had watched Miles surround himself with amazing musicians and then give them the freedom to act. I wanted to do the same—but I also wanted to push beyond what we’d done in the quintet, into uncharted musical territories. In the quintet we had played with “controlled freedom.” Now I was ready to cut loose some of that control, but in the summer of 1969, in the midst of touring and playing and trying to manage all the details of the sextet as well as commercial work and possible new movie work, I needed help doing that. So I made a call to Bill Cosby.

I first met Bill back in the spring of 1963, when I played the gig with Judy Henske at the Village Gate. Bill is a huge jazz fan, and he’d heard that Miles had hired me, so he came up to me after the gig to congratulate me. “Man, you’ve made it!” he said, clapping me on the back. “I’m so happy for you. I hope I get a break like that someday.” Bill had been doing stand-up comedy all over the country, including New York dates at the Bitter End, across the street from the Village Gate, but he hadn’t yet made it to the big time.

Two years later, when I was in San Francisco with the quintet, I was standing on a corner near Union Square when a red Mercedes 300SL Gullwing pulled up. To my surprise, Bill Cosby stepped out with a big grin on his face.

“Hey, man!” I said. “Whose car is this?”

“It’s mine!”

“No fucking way!” I just started laughing. That car was gorgeous.

“Herbie, you won’t believe this,” he said. “I just got back from shooting in Hong Kong.” He told me he’d been hired to co-star with Robert Culp in a television show called I Spy—the first time a black man would be starring in a TV drama. In the two years since I’d seen him, Bill had been on The Tonight Show, released a comedy album with Warner Bros., and landed this TV role. He had gotten his big break, all right.

And it just kept getting better for Bill. By the time I was touring with the sextet, in the spring of 1969, he had won three Emmys for I Spy and four Grammys for his comedy albums; he’d even charted an R&B song he recorded. Playboy magazine ran a long interview with him in May, and as I read it, one other detail caught my eye: Bill had a management company—and I desperately needed a manager.

So I decided I’d give him a call. Even though the sextet wasn’t making any money, Bill loved jazz, so I hoped he’d agree to take us on. But when I reached him, he had another idea instead.

“Listen,” Bill said, “I want you to write the music for this cartoon special I’m doing. It’s about Fat Albert, a kid in Philadelphia.” I mean, I didn’t even hesitate. A prime-time cartoon starring black characters? Created by a black comedian? This was a really big deal for 1969, so I jumped at Bill’s offer.

I figured that if Fat Albert was from Philly, the music should be more R&B than jazz. And because I hadn’t been listening to much contemporary R&B, the first thing I did was go to a record store. I bought about fifteen James Brown−type records and then spent a couple of days listening to them over and over again. And then I started writing some music.

We were scheduled to record in Los Angeles, so I asked around to find some funky musicians to add into the mix with the sextet. We went heavy on the electric instruments, with me playing the Fender Rhodes and Buster Williams playing electric bass, and we added Eric Gale on guitar. After we’d laid everything down for the TV show, I asked Bill whether he’d mind if I put some of those songs on an album for Warner Bros. Bill was fine with the idea, so I brought back just the jazz musicians and recorded some of the songs again, leaning more toward R&B flavor than funk. I wanted to have some fun with it, so we called the record Fat Albert Rotunda, as a play on “rotund,” and the cover art was a drawing of a refrigerator with a bunch of food stuffed inside.

The TV special Hey, Hey, Hey, It’s Fat Albert aired on November 12, 1969. It was just a one-shot deal, although three years later Bill Cosby would use those same characters to develop the Saturday-morning cartoon series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, which ran for thirteen years. Our record Fat Albert Rotunda sold about seventy-five thousand copies, which wasn’t bad for a jazz band but pretty small potatoes for Warner Bros.

I was excited when Hey, Hey, Hey, It’s Fat Albert aired, but the real excitement had come the day before, when Gigi gave birth to our daughter, Jessica. We had been taking Lamaze classes together, learning all the breathing exercises, and the instructor told us we’d eventually be so familiar with what was going to happen in childbirth that when the time came, it would feel like we’d already been through it. That was true, but still, nothing can compare with what the mother experiences.

When Gigi went into labor, I drove us to Woman’s Hospital at St. Luke’s, and the nurses got us situated in a delivery room. In the Lamaze class they’d taught us that the partner should deep-breathe along with the mother, to help her stay on track. Unfortunately that can lead to hyperventilation, so you’re supposed to have a paper bag with you to breathe into. I was breathing right along with Gigi, trying to help her out, until I got so dizzy, I had to breathe into that paper bag. I didn’t pass out, but I was definitely feeling woozy.

Gigi was in the final stage of labor for two hours, which is longer than normal. The doctor told us that our baby was on her back instead of her belly and that if she didn’t turn over by herself, they’d have to use forceps to turn her. They gave Gigi a caudal block, which numbed her enough to endure the pain from the use of forceps, then Gigi pushed as hard as she could—and out popped Jessica, all purple. I couldn’t tell what was what, and at first I thought the afterbirth was Jessica! You can’t really distinguish one thing from another, because everything’s pretty much purple, but the nurses cleaned Jessica up, and she started crying.

As I watched my daughter come into this world, I was struck by the realization that this was exactly the same way I had entered it. For a moment I felt as if I were watching my own birth, and it was such a surreal experience, it nearly overwhelmed me. There was something so phenomenal about it, so profound, that I felt bonded to Jessica immediately. It’s a bond that has only grown stronger with time.

Shelly’s Manne-Hole was a club in Hollywood named after its co-founder, the drummer Shelly Manne. In its first decade all kinds of jazz greats came through that club, including Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Miles. And in the spring of 1970 the sextet was booked there for a few nights.

Our drummer at the time was Tootie Heath, and as we were doing our sound check before the first show, Tootie’s nephew James Forman came down to the club to see us. James was the twenty-three-year-old son of the saxophonist Jimmy Heath, and he was a musician and composer himself. But his main focus now was the cause of black empowerment. He was a member of the militant black nationalist group U.S. Organization, a rival group to the Black Panthers that was headed by Maulana Karenga and Hakim Jamal, a cousin of Malcolm X’s. James had recently discarded what he called his “slave name,” and now he went by the Swahili name Mtume.

That afternoon, as we were doing our sound check, Mtume was berating us for not understanding black history and for not doing more to further the cause of black Americans. “You guys have no respect for your heritage,” he said. “You need to take a stand. The time is now.”

Mtume was on fire for the cause, and his words had an effect on us. From the time I was young I had always made a point not to give in to any victim mentality—but that didn’t change the fact that racism existed and affected us all. Sometimes it came in small acts, like the looks Gigi and I would get when we’d check into hotels together. Sometimes it was more serious, like the time I got arrested in Washington, D.C., for jaywalking. I wasn’t carrying any kind of ID, and despite the fact that Gigi was, the police hauled me downtown and put me in a jail cell. It took a white friend coming down to the station and apologizing profusely for me before the police would let me go.

But I knew my experiences were mild compared with what others had gone through before me, including my parents, who had grown up in Georgia in the early decades of the 1900s. I had heard stories of Klan rallies and lynchings, and as a child I had seen that photo of the horribly disfigured face of Emmett Till. My feeling had always been, Who am I to complain? I was enjoying my life, making music and touring the world. Yet as the Black Power movement grew stronger throughout the late ’60s, I felt the stirrings of wanting to do more, if not for me, then for others. Making The Prisoner was my first step in trying to get involved. But now, as Mtume spoke so passionately, I realized it was not enough.

Mtume told his uncle Tootie that he was going to give him a Swahili name. Right away, the rest of us in the band said we wanted Swahili names, too. We didn’t know any Swahili, so Mtume came up with names that were appropriate for each of us. Tootie’s was Kuumba, which means “creativity,” Buster’s was Mchezaji, or “skilled player.” Mine was Mwandishi, which means “composer” or “writer.”

From that point on, the nature of the band started to shift. Technically we were still the Herbie Hancock Sextet, but soon people started calling us the Mwandishi band. We called each other by our Swahili names, and over time we started embracing other visible symbols of the black diaspora. I had never spent much time thinking about my African roots, but all of us became increasingly influenced by African culture, religion, and music. We started wearing dashikis and African talismans, and I began to feel more connected than ever to the civil rights movement and to our shared, collective past as black musicians. This was a powerful transformation, and of course it affected our music.

Mtume was an angry young man, but unlike him, I didn’t come to this place out of anger. I wasn’t militant and had never been that kind of person. I just realized that because I believed in human rights, and this was the big issue of the day, and it happened to pertain to my own ethnicity, then I needed to be involved in it. This was my way of becoming part of the black civil rights movement, by embracing my identity as a black man, a part of the African diaspora. It was my way of being politically involved without actually getting into the politics of the movement.

Adopting Swahili names helped draw us closer together, and the sextet kept getting tighter. But in the summer of 1970 we were still struggling to book gigs and broaden our audience. I hadn’t been able to get a management deal with Bill Cosby’s company, and we needed help. So I turned to a guy who’d been a classmate of mine at Grinnell, Lee Weisel, to manage the band.

Lee was a lawyer by training, but he had somehow become the manager for the rock band Iron Butterfly, even though he admitted to not knowing much about music. “Herbie, I’m tone-deaf,” he told me. “But I helped these guys get their contract, and now they’ve got a big hit. I can help you, too.”

Iron Butterfly’s big hit was a song called “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida,” a free-flowing, seventeen-minute jam on their album of the same name. (Rumor had it that the song was actually titled “In the Garden of Eden,” but the singer was drunk and slurred the words.) Now that Iron Butterfly was a major draw, Lee thought we might be able to piggyback onto their success, so he booked us to play on a bill with the band at the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park.

Boy, was that a stretch. Iron Butterfly was heavy metal before heavy metal, and the audience in Central Park that day was basically a crowd of young white guys wanting to rock out. When a group of black musicians in Afros took the stage, a lot of the audience just started streaming out. Nobody was there to see us, so I tried to think of how we might get the crowd’s attention. And the one way I could think of was contrast: We would have to play loud and soft, high and low, fast and slow, long and short.

We played a funked-up version of “Fat Albert Rotunda” and the ballad “Maiden Voyage,” but we weren’t getting any traction at all. I didn’t hear any boos, but I didn’t hear much cheering, either. It was a strange afternoon, and frustrating for the guys in the band, who were used to a more attentive audience. Buster in particular was really unhappy. “Why are we even here?” he asked me. “This is just a waste of time.”

In a way, Buster was giving voice to a much bigger question: Who were we as a band? The sextet had been in existence for a year and a half now, and its personnel had changed several times. We had made two records, very different from each other. We were taking on a new identity as the Mwandishi band, but what did that really mean? Developing the band’s voice felt like a puzzle that we hadn’t quite figured out yet.

Luckily, just two days after the Central Park show another piece of the puzzle fell into place. And soon after that the whole thing would come together completely.

The Iron Butterfly show was tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson’s last one with the band, but we had a gig lined up at the Embassy Room in Baltimore two days later, on August 2. We needed a new reed player fast, so Buster said, “Call Bennie Maupin.”

Everybody knew that Bennie was a great musician. He had played with Horace Silver, Lonnie Smith, and McCoy Tyner, and he’d also played on Miles’s masterpiece, Bitches Brew. And on top of his musical skill, Bennie had a whole arsenal of woodwind instruments: He played every kind of saxophone, plus clarinet, bass clarinet, and flute, and he also played “bastard” instruments like the saxcello and the curved soprano sax. With Bennie we could get all kinds of different textures and colors, far beyond just the sounds of the standard saxophone and clarinet.

I didn’t really know Bennie, and we didn’t have much time for him to learn the sextet’s music before our show, so I told him, “Let’s drive down together. I’ll talk you through the music in the car.” It’s about a three-hour drive from New York to Baltimore, and I talked Bennie’s ear off. But he remembered everything—it was as if he could picture the music in his head as soon as I described it to him. At our gig that night he played like he’d been playing with us for years.

A few weeks after that the final two pieces of the puzzle came along: trombonist Julian Priester and trumpeter Eddie Henderson. Tootie Heath had left earlier in the summer, so our drummer was now Billy Hart. Those three guys, plus Bennie, Buster, and I, would form the Mwandishi band.

The magic of this particular combination was evident the very first night we played together. We had gone to Vancouver for a gig, but we’d never even rehearsed as a unit. Buster, Billy, and I played that first afternoon as a trio while Bennie, Julian, and Eddie stayed in the hotel to go over the music. They were having a cram session just like the one Bennie and I had had on the drive to Baltimore, but none of us knew how we’d sound when we actually played as a group.

That night, for our first set, the six of us started slow, kind of feeling each other out onstage. Very quickly we started to get comfortable . . . and just like that the music started to flow. We started out with “Fat Albert Rotunda,” but that wasn’t the heart of it. As we moved into “Speak Like a Child,” a mellower piece, everybody started to open up, like a flower blossoming. We got freer and freer up there onstage, exploring musical avenues and rhythms with no fear or hesitation, as if we’d been playing together forever.

How was this happening? The six of us had never even played as a group before, but this was turning into one of the most sublime nights of my life. We played for nearly two hours, riding along on this river of gorgeous sound, and when it was over, we just looked at each other in awe. We walked back to the dressing room, and nobody said a word. What was there to say? We had experienced something very deep out there, and words would have felt inadequate.

From that very first night there was a rare, beautiful unity among the six of us—some kind of underlying connection that wasn’t apparent before we played, but the minute we started playing, it was there. Now the question was, could we sustain it?