CHAPTER TEN

We took all the gigs we could get in the fall of 1970, and the more we played, the farther out the music got. Everybody in the sextet kept pushing boundaries onstage, and we started doing the same offstage, too.

Bennie was a vegetarian—a rare bird in those days—and once he joined the band, we all followed his lead and started eating vegetarian food. But we were on the road a lot, and it wasn’t easy to find restaurants that made dishes without meat. San Francisco was never a problem, because we could just go to the Haight, where the hippies and flower children hung out, and get whatever we needed, but everywhere else it was rough going.

Here’s how Bennie remembers that time:

We were into eating a really healthy diet, wheat germ and vitamin B, and a primarily vegetarian diet. We were just incorporating as many things as we felt would be beneficial to our lives.

We could buy certain things and keep them in our hotel rooms. I used to travel with a butane burner, the kind you use for camping. I’d get to the hotel room, and I’d have a bag of brown rice and a big Pyrex bowl, and I’d fix the rice and have it with pickled vegetables. We were all so skinny! We’d all bring our stuff, because we knew it would be difficult—you’d go to restaurants and say, “I’d like a salad,” and they’d bring you iceberg lettuce with French dressing and maybe a tomato slice.

At some point I bought a van from the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and all of us would cram into it for out-of-town gigs. We’d pack it up with our instruments, luggage, and bags of brown rice and dried seaweed and hit the road for weeks at a time. The six of us spent hours and hours together, onstage and off, and we started developing really strong bonds as a band and as people. Bennie taught us yoga, and we all tried to open our minds to whatever we might encounter on our shared journey.

And it wasn’t just our band that was exploring—the whole country was in a state of upheaval and discovery. The combination of the civil rights movement, young people’s anger, the Vietnam War, plus the excitement of rock and roll, avant-garde music, the sexual revolution, and psychedelic drugs—all these elements came together in a fantastic alchemy that resulted in far-out music, art, movies, and books. It was a time of beautiful ferment.

Just as with Miles’s band, all of us knew it was too much of a high-wire act to play on any kind of pharmaceuticals. On the bandstand we had to be at peak focus, because the music was constantly changing and swirling and unpredictable. I always preferred to play straight, but one time in San Francisco, in the summer of 1970, I popped a tab of acid into my mouth before a show without even thinking. As soon as it dissolved I thought, Oh, man, what have I done? I had never played while tripping before—in fact, this was only the fourth time I’d ever taken LSD. So I knew this night was going to be . . . interesting.

Even more interesting was the fact that I still had to drive to the show. My sister, Jean, had moved to Oakland, and I was staying at her apartment. The gig was at the Both/And club, on Divisadero Street in San Francisco, so it was not close by. I borrowed Jean’s car and set out for the city, hoping I could get there before the most intense tripping began. But when I got to the Bay Bridge, I started to sweat. All I could think was Oh, shit. That bridge is reeeally long.

I drove slowly and talked to myself all the way across, just saying, “You’re gonna make it, Herbie. You’re gonna make it. Just drive in a straight line.” It felt like hours, but when I finally got to the tollbooth on the other side, I thought, Okay, just give the guy the money and then ask for a receipt. Or, wait—No! Don’t ask for a receipt! Would that seem suspicious? Would it be obvious I was tripping? I was so frozen with paranoia, that tollbooth guy must have thought I was losing my mind.

Somehow I made it to the club and managed to park the car, and when I got inside, the colors and the lights were overwhelming. My feelings of paranoia were growing—I was really convinced something terrible was going to happen. I told the guys I had dropped acid, and none of them could believe it. This was just not a thing I ever did, at a gig or otherwise. But after they got over their shock, at least one person said, “Well, don’t leave me behind!” and took acid, too.

I don’t remember all that much about the gig, but I do remember that we played one song for nearly an hour before we even found our way to the melody. The six of us were just out there, creating this montage of sound that went in every kind of direction. Sometimes when you drop acid, you hear what I think of as “acid runs”: a kind of arpeggio up the scale, with a little trill at the end. That night I kept hearing them, even as the other guys were creating their own amazing palette of sound. The intensity of emotion in the room was profound, and even though I was in my own world, I believe that the audience could feel the emotion, too.

Right from the start of the sextet I had hoped we could move beyond the “control” in “controlled freedom.” I wanted to set everybody loose, to explore more deeply the avant-garde side of jazz music. In the beginning we were even more controlled than the quintet had been, partly because we had to find the right personnel and establish a level of comfort and trust together. But now, with these six guys, we were finally arriving at that place. The music was becoming more than just free; at times it felt transcendent.

That was especially true at one surprising gig in November of 1970, at a buttoned-down steak-and-cocktails place in Chicago called the London House.

The London House was an old-school jazz club on North Michigan Avenue, just a few blocks from the Chicago Harbor. It was the kind of place where mostly older, white audiences showed up in suits and dresses to sip martinis and listen to classic jazz. The music was very good, but it wasn’t what you’d call avant-garde. George Shearing and Oscar Peterson and Dave Brubeck played there, and the lineup was usually trios or quartets. The jazz there could be described as calmly exciting, not extremely challenging to the ear.

For whatever reason, London House owner Oscar Marienthal decided to book the Herbie Hancock Sextet for four full weeks, the longest gig I had ever played. I think he thought he was going to get straight-up tunes like “Speak Like a Child,” “Maiden Voyage,” “Dolphin Dance”—our more melodic, gentler pieces. He didn’t realize that the band that had started out so gentle and controlled had evolved into this ferocious beast from outer space.

We were hired to play one short set during the dinner hour and then a longer set later in the evening. I told Oscar, “I really don’t think you want us to play during dinner.” I couldn’t imagine how the clientele would respond to our tripped-out vibe while they dug into their filets mignons. But Oscar insisted, so we played a couple of spacey, funked-up tunes. And that was all it took. He came up to us afterward and said, “Thank you very much, but we’ll just have you do the late sets from now on.”

We played the first week, and the audiences were just not into us at all. Oscar was irritated, telling us we were playing too loud and “too strange” for his clientele. The guys in the band weren’t happy, and they started grumbling about not finishing out the rest of the gig. But I was convinced we could win over the crowds. We had three more weeks to go, and I was determined to turn this thing around.

Meanwhile, there was a guy we met named Jerry who was such a big fan that he came to all the gigs. Jerry was totally into the band, and he hung out with us a lot while we were in Chicago. He was also a self-styled mystic who was into astrology and numerology, and in our state of spiritual exploration we were getting into those kinds of alternative thinking. Everybody wanted to hear what Jerry had to say about the band, so he started looking at our numerology and found out some really cool things.

Jerry discovered that four guys in the band—actually, three players plus our soundman, Billy Bonner (who went by the Swahili name Fundi)—were born on the twenty-ninth of their birth month. And their four birth months represented the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. Buster and I were both Aries, and Mars is the fourth planet, which was another number four. So the number 429 became the magic number for the band, because it connected with all of us.

This may sound kind of far out, but as soon as Jerry had identified 429 as Mwandishi’s number, we started seeing that number everywhere. I can’t tell you how many times we were booked in room 429 in hotels, or I’d look at my watch and it was 4:29, or a cashier would ring up a check that totaled $4.29. It blew our minds how often those numbers appeared—we even made up a logo that incorporated 4, 2, and 9. Something very unusual was coming together within the band, and all of us could feel it.

In our second week at the London House, the audience began to change. Now younger black patrons started coming in from the South Side. Word had gotten out that the sextet was playing different music from the usual London House jazz fare, and people came wanting to hear something far out. The energy in the room was changing, and one night in the middle of that second week it entered the realm of the mystical.

We played the first set, and it was on. It was happening. Our friend Jerry had been coming for every show, but he missed the opening set that night. When he arrived, I told him, “Hey, man, it’s too bad you missed that first set!” We thought he’d missed out on the magic. But the magic hadn’t even started yet.

The second set was even better than the first. We were so tight, so attuned to each other, that it began to feel as if we weren’t even playing the music anymore—it felt like the music was playing us, coming down from somewhere above, and we were just the vessels. We were on some other plane, all of us together, but that still wasn’t the peak of the evening. Because the third set . . . the third set was transformative.

As we started that set I watched my fingers as I played. To my shock, they seemed to be moving by themselves. I wasn’t controlling them; they were just playing of their own accord. Yet everything my fingers played was connecting perfectly to everything Buster was playing, and Bennie was playing, and Billy was playing. As we got deeper into the music we became one big, pulsating creature—all of those guys somehow became me, and I became all of them. It was as if we were inside each other, in a way I had never felt before and have never felt since. It was a deeply spiritual experience.

I didn’t speak between tunes—we just went from one to the next. And when we finished, the club was absolutely silent. Not a soul moved. I felt totally euphoric, like I was floating on air. And then the applause started. It just rose and rose, the loudest ovation I’d ever heard. People were shouting, laughing, crying.

I tried to stand up from the piano, but I couldn’t feel my feet. I looked down, and I swear they were ten feet below me, as if I were floating above my body. I hadn’t taken any drugs or had anything to drink that night—none of us had. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t process what was happening. Somehow I managed to move off the stage and make my way back to the dressing room, still feeling outside my body.

When all six of us were back in the dressing room, we looked at each other in shock. “What just happened?” somebody asked, but none of us could answer that question. We started talking about it, laughing in wonderment and shaking our heads. Then, after about ten minutes, somebody from the club came in and said, “They’re still applauding out there. Come out and take a bow.”

I said, “I can’t, I’m sorry.” And I really couldn’t, physically—I don’t think my legs would have carried me. The audience clapped and clapped for about a half hour, but we never did go back out onstage. We just stayed where we were, trying to process the amazing experience we had all just shared.

Buster remembers a patron in the club being overcome that night:

We were playing, and someone in the audience near the front just fell out. Just passed right out. After the gig we were over at a friend’s house and he was telling us he saw us levitate. “I swear, I saw the band levitate!” he said. “The band left the floor!”

I didn’t see the guy in the audience faint, but the person who said he saw us levitate was our friend Jerry. And then Jerry actually had an episode himself, after we left the club and all went to the house of one of my high school friends. Fundi, our soundman, always made tapes of every gig, so we were all really eager to hear what had gone down that night. We sat in Jerry’s living room listening to the tape, and even though nobody was having a drink or a smoke or anything, we all felt really high listening to it.

We were all listening intently, and then suddenly Jerry, who’d been sitting in a chair, just keeled over. I mean, he fell right onto the floor, curled up like he was still sitting in the chair. “Jerry!” I said. “Are you okay?” But he was just lying there, as if in a catatonic state. And then, after a minute or so, he came to. He just got up and sat back in his chair as though nothing had happened. Strange!

That London House gig became part of the legend of Mwandishi, but there was another element of it that almost nobody knows.

Whenever we played in Chicago, I would stay with my parents. So after all the crazy experiences of that night, I finally made my way back to their apartment on the South Side. By the time I got there the sun was coming up—it must have been about six in the morning. I fell into bed, exhausted, but an hour or two later the phone rang. My mother answered, and it was for me.

It was the mother of a young lady who had come to all of the Mwandishi band’s shows in Vancouver—the place where we’d had that first magical gig, the very first time that Eddie, Julian, Billy, Bennie, Buster, and I played together as a unit. Vancouver was the only other place where we had experienced anything like what we felt at the London House, and this girl had sort of been our muse for that time period. She loved the music of the band, and she came to hear us every single night in Vancouver. She was a beautiful girl, and she played music herself, I believe violin or viola. During the short time we were in Vancouver we hung out a lot with this girl, and all of us in the band grew really close to her. She just had a special way about her.

She was also studying to be a mime, and she’d gotten a scholarship to train with Marcel Marceau that fall. She’d gone to Paris, and we hadn’t heard from her since. But now her mother was calling me to let us know that the night before—the night of our transcendent experience at the London House—the girl had died in Paris. She had wanted to run a bath at a friend’s apartment, since her own apartment didn’t have one, and when the friend told her how to turn on the water heater, she misunderstood how to do it. She turned up the gas but didn’t realize she had to light the pilot, too, and she was overcome by the fumes, passed out, and died.

When I told the rest of the guys in the band, we all had the same feeling: that she had been there with us at the London House, and the magic we felt was her farewell. I always think of that night as her night, and her memory touches me still.

The London House gig was a turning point for the Mwandishi band. We played two more weeks there, and although we didn’t have the same out-of-body experience, the music kept getting freer and farther out. We kept listening to the tapes Fundi had made of that magical night, and we still couldn’t believe what we heard. It was like we were listening to someone else play, not ourselves. We were mesmerized by the music and listened to it constantly for inspiration.

When the London House gig ended, we drove to Detroit for a stand at the Strata Concert Gallery. Those performances were as magical as the London House shows, and we made tapes there, too. Finally, after the Strata, we were scheduled to appear at the Village Vanguard back in New York. Fundi drove the truck to the club to set up our sound system, and he parked it right out front so he could carry in our equipment. But while he was in the club, someone broke into the truck and stole all the tapes we had inside.

When Fundi told the guys in the band, we all had the same reaction: Oh, no, no, no! Equipment you could replace, but those tapes? They were the only ones in existence, and now they were gone! All of us just felt despair that we’d never be able to hear that gig again. We’d felt transported listening to that music—the up-tempo moments were so powerful, and the peaceful moments were undulating, almost meditative. Those tapes were treasures. And now they were gone. Why did this happen? How could this be?

We all agonized for a few days, but I finally had to conclude that losing the tapes was a blessing in disguise. The truth was, we were revering what we had done on that one night in November. We were stuck in a time warp, worshipping an event that had passed, and doing that was counter to the very nature of the Mwandishi band. Mwandishi was all about exploring, pushing forward into the next moment—what sense did it make for us to listen over and over to an old gig? Wasn’t that just hindering our ability to move forward?

In the end, I believe it was good that we couldn’t keep listening obsessively to those tapes. Still, for years afterward I thought about them, wondering if they still exist and if whoever took them understood what they were. Yet if those tapes suddenly reappeared somehow all these years later, I think I’d be afraid to listen to them. I’d be afraid that they wouldn’t sound the same to me, because I’m not the same person I was then. Maybe parts would feel magical and other parts not, which would be a disappointment. I’m a little bit curious, but maybe it’s better never hearing them again, because my memory of that night is so perfect and beautiful.

Playing onstage with Mwandishi meant treading a fine line between brilliance and chaos. Everything was intuitive, in the moment. Nothing was planned. We might start with a fragment of a structure, but the sounds we produced on any given day came out of our synchronicity on that day—our shared experience. When it worked, it was so, so powerful. When it didn’t, it was truthfully kind of a mess. Making music like this was not for the faint of heart, but we kept pressing outward, looking for weird sounds and unexplored paths, always in search of new experiences onstage.

I think of Mwandishi as an R&D band—research and development, trying new things. It was all about discovery, uncovery, exploration, the unknown, looking for the unseen, listening for the unheard. The Mwandishi palette was an intergalactic palette, with emotions and shapes and colors that felt out of this world. Sometimes we didn’t even have a beat to hold on to—we would just play moment to moment, going with the temporal flow, relying on intuition to keep ourselves together. Everything was up for grabs as far as creativity was concerned. Everybody accepted whatever anybody else played, and the goal was always to respond without thinking. The music was visceral, emotional, and raw, more so than any music I’ve played before or since.

We didn’t play songs as much as we created a sonic environment. The elements of traditional songs were there—melody, harmony, and rhythm—but we incorporated them in nontraditional ways, using nontraditional instruments. In fact, as the Mwandishi band evolved we started using pretty much anything as an instrument. A table, a lamp, a rock—whatever was on hand, somebody would tap it, slap it, shake it. We were open to any kind of sound from any kind of source.

For a while we got really into flutes. Bennie knew a guy who made all kinds of flutes, and he started collecting them. He had wooden ones, bamboo ones, all sizes from a piccolo to a didgeridoo. And everybody was really into percussion, partly because it sounded good but also because we wanted something to do when the solos were happening. It’s a little dull watching five guys standing around onstage while one of them goes off on his solo, so we’d pick up anything we could find and bang on it.

The guys would develop patterns of rhythmic interplay, point and counterpoint, and every night was a new exploration of all the ways we could create music no one had ever heard before—and would never hear again. That was the only rule: never to repeat what you’ve played before. The goal was always to create, create, create. Buster liked to quote Duke Ellington’s reply when someone once asked him, “What’s your favorite composition?” Ellington said, “The next one.” That’s how we all felt, every gig, every day.