CHAPTER TWELVE

One Thursday night in the summer of 1972 Mwandishi played a gig in Seattle. When it was over, we heard about some parties that were happening, so we all took off into the night to have some fun. The band didn’t always party after gigs, but on this night we hit the town hard. We went to as many different places as we could, and by the time we straggled back to our hotel the sun had not only risen—it was already beginning to set again. I was totally spent, but we had only a couple of hours before we had to get to our Friday-night gig.

I fell into bed and slept for those two hours, and when I woke up, my head was hurting and my mouth was dry. Oh, man, I did not feel like going to play, but I had to somehow find the energy. When the other guys came downstairs, they looked about as rough as I felt. But we managed to drag ourselves to the club, and because it was a Friday night, it was already packed. The audience was ready for a show, even if we weren’t quite ready to give them one.

As we came out of the dressing room and made our way to the stage I felt as if I were rising from a coffin, like a vampire. My body and mind and soul were just shut down, and when I looked out at all those people, with all that energy pulsing out of them, it was too much for me. I didn’t have enough juice to start the way I normally might, opening with a strong piano intro, and for whatever reason I also decided not to open with the drums. I looked over at Buster, our bassist, and said, “Toys.”

“Toys” was a medium-tempo tune off Speak Like a Child, and instead of starting with me, it starts with the upright bass, the softest, gentlest instrument in the band. I figured we’d let Buster ease us in, and I hoped we’d be able to find some energy somewhere.

Buster started playing, and what came out of him was amazing. Astounding! I was hearing notes fly all over the place, and wondering how in the world he could do all that on a four-stringed instrument. At one point I saw him do three different activities at the same time: The fingers on his left hand were somehow moving up and down simultaneously while two other fingers were trilling. His hand looked like some kind of crazy spider, crawling up and down the neck of the bass.

He finished up one progression, then paused for a moment and looked at his strings. I saw him nod, like “hmm,” and then he did the whole thing over again! I was flipping out, and so was everybody in the club. I could feel my energy rising, could feel myself waking up. I let Buster go for ten minutes or more, even though normally that intro would go for only a couple of minutes. Then, when the rest of the band joined in, the place exploded.

We had come onto the stage half-asleep, but Buster had lit a fire under us. The rest of that night was so beautiful, one of those gigs where everything just comes together. Afterward people came up to the stage, some of them crying, reaching out to shake our hands, to touch us, to hug us. A woman told me, “We didn’t just hear this music. We experienced this music.” I’d never heard anybody say that before, but it was true. All of us in that room had just shared a spiritual experience, and Buster was the spark that made it happen.

When we got back to the dressing room, I grabbed Buster and said, “Where did that come from? Whatever made you play bass like that, I want some of it!”

His eyes were so bright, it was like he was lit from within. He said, “Herbie, I’ve been chanting for a way to tell you about this.” And he started telling me about this Buddhist philosophy he’d just started practicing. During those two hours when the rest of us were sleeping off the previous night’s partying, Buster had been awake in his room, chanting the words Nam Myoho Renge Kyo over and over. He hadn’t slept at all, but when it came time for the gig, he had more energy than all the rest of us put together.

Now, this wasn’t actually the first time Buster had tried to tell us about chanting. About six months earlier his sister had come to a gig in Philadelphia, and he’d brought her into the dressing room after the show. “Hey, Toni,” he said to her, “do that cool thing you showed me.” And she started chanting. She chanted Nam Myoho Renge Kyo several times, and then she opened up a little book and went into some other kind of chant.

We were all mesmerized by what she was doing, mostly because of the sound and rhythm of it. I was thinking, Yeah, this is cool! because it was a rhythm I hadn’t heard before. Everybody in the band was always searching for new sounds, and this was definitely new and unusual. It was actually kind of hypnotic. But at the time I just thought it was something interesting we might explore for our music. It didn’t particularly register as a spiritual exercise.

I hadn’t thought about chanting since that day in Philadelphia, but now that I knew Buster was doing it, and especially now that I’d seen the energy and focus it gave him, I was really intrigued. The truth is, if Buster had just told me about Buddhism, I would probably have just said, “Hey, great! Whatever works for you, man.” I doubt that conversation would have spurred me to explore it myself. But seeing firsthand what chanting did for him musically onstage—well, that got my attention.

Buster invited me to come to a Buddhist meeting the next night, and I told him I would. I needed to find out more about this phenomenon.

From the time I was young I considered myself to be somewhat spiritual. Even though my experiences in the churches of South Side Chicago hadn’t turned me into a churchgoer, I was always interested in different religions. I had never found what I was looking for in the Western religious tradition, though, so in the ’70s, like a lot of Americans, I began exploring Eastern religions.

In fact, everybody in the band did, especially after that otherworldly experience at our London House gig. In our spare time we’d hit the bookstores in various cities, reading up on all kinds of belief systems, from Transcendental Meditation to Sufism to Eastern mysticism and even the occult. We all wanted to discover whether we could somehow conjure up again what we’d felt that night onstage.

We were eager to find a way to connect like that more often, and finding a spiritual path seemed the way to do it, because the music itself felt so spiritual. While it was often wild and angry, relentless and visceral, at other times, when it was peaceful and calm, it had a strange, almost mystical beauty. In those moments we felt a power greater than ourselves, and we all spent a lot of time exploring what that power might be.

I did a lot of reading in the course of that search, but I always ended up with more questions than answers. It seemed to me that most of the books I read would be tough for ordinary human beings to understand, as a lot of them were written in a very intellectual way, which bothered me. If only intellectuals could understand a religion, then what was in it for everybody else? I was searching for a belief system that applied to everybody and could be understood by everybody.

When Buster started telling me about his Buddhist philosophy, a practice of Nichiren Buddhism adopted by Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a lay Buddhist organization, the first thing I noticed was how much it resonated with beliefs I already had. He told me that the purpose of chanting those words, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, was to fuse your life with the mystic law of cause and effect through sound. That surprised me, because cause and effect is a basic principle of science. Throughout my life, whenever I had taken apart a situation like it was a clock, what I was really doing was looking for cause and effect, for deeper ways of understanding events. So if that was also a tenet of Buddhism, then I was definitely interested in hearing more.

But at the same time I wasn’t sure about this idea that chanting certain words could actually cause something to happen. That sounded a little far-fetched. If Buddhism required me to believe that, out of the blue, I wasn’t sure I could make the leap.

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Buster. “Chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo works whether you believe in it or not.”

What? Now, this definitely didn’t sound like any religion I’d ever heard of. Every other religion I knew of depended on blind faith, and some of them required elaborate displays of it. But here’s what Buddhism did sound like: science. Because the law of gravity works whether you believe in it or not. And the laws of thermodynamics work whether you believe in them or not. Why would religion be weaker than natural laws? Shouldn’t it be even stronger? Then why should religion require a person’s belief for it to actually work?

Buster repeated, “Listen, this works whether you believe it or not—so you have nothing to lose by trying it.” And that made perfect sense to me. I liked the fact that, in Buddhism, human beings have the capacity to create their own destiny. They are not dependent on an external higher power to fix things; by chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, people could seize control of their own lives.

I had one more question for Buster: “Do you have to stop believing in other things to become a Buddhist?”

“No,” he said. “You don’t have to stop believing in anything you already believe in. If you just do this practice, the truth will reveal itself.” He told me that simply chanting those four words would help me achieve what I really wanted to achieve, because Nichiren Buddhism isn’t just theory; it contains documentary proof and real evidence of its validity in our daily lives. Followers of Nichiren Buddhism believe that when chanting helps people gain or achieve something in life, it provides a tangible affirmation of an intangible inner transformation—called Actual Proof—to themselves and to others of the power in their lives unleashed by their Buddhist practice.

I decided it was worth a try. At this point, I was searching for a way to have more nights when I was “on” musically, and if Buddhism could help me do that, I was ready to start. So I told Buster I would join him at the meeting.

Pretty much my whole adult life I’d been functioning on “jazz musician time,” which meant I rarely got to places on time and sometimes ran an hour late. Buster had told me where the meeting was and that it started at seven. Sometime around eight I made it to the address he had given me.

When I got there, I found myself in front of a big apartment building. The front door was locked, and Buster had forgotten to tell me the apartment number, so I had no way to get buzzed in. I stood there for a few minutes, not sure what to do. Then I thought, Well, Buster said chanting really works. Might as well try it now. I said Nam Myoho Renge Kyo—or something close to it, anyway—a couple of times, and just then a guy came up behind me and unlocked the door! He went in before I realized what was happening, though, and the door clicked shut behind him. I was still stuck outside.

I kept saying the words, and soon another man came to the door, this time from the inside. He opened it up and peered around, as if he were looking for someone, and when he went back in, I grabbed the door before it could latch shut. At least I was inside the building, but I still didn’t know which apartment the meeting was being held in.

As I stood there in the hall I heard this faint sound, like bees buzzing. I started following the sound, down the hallway and around a corner, and just as I stepped to the door where it was coming from the sound stopped. I knocked, and when the door opened, I saw a group of people sitting cross-legged on the floor. They had just at that moment finished their chanting and were wrapping up the meeting.

I apologized for being late, but everybody welcomed me warmly. Some people had to go, but a few stayed to talk to me about the practice, and their experiences, and what had happened in their lives as a result of it. We talked for fifteen or twenty minutes and then somebody said, “Okay, let’s chant three times, and then we’ll split.”

At the front of the room was a wooden cabinet with its doors swung open. Inside the cabinet was a scroll with Chinese writing on it. “That’s the Gohonzon,” somebody explained. “When you chant, keep your eyes open and look at it.” This was a serious-looking scroll, with its calligraphic Chinese lettering and that beautiful wood cabinet. I thought, Okay, this is no joke. This is not something to be played around with.

We chanted Nam Myoho Renge Kyo three times, and I kept my eyes trained on that scroll. The whole thing took about a minute, but I felt transported. I felt high! This was so unexpected—nobody had told me what it actually felt like to chant. I just thought it would be a simple recitation, a moment to get through. But my body, my mind, and my soul responded to it in a way I had never imagined.

The following week I attended another meeting. We were still in Seattle, because it was a ten-day gig, so some of the same people were there. I managed to arrive on time, so I got to hear Gongyo, which is the recitation of parts of two chapters of the Lotus Sutra. This was what Buster’s sister had chanted a few months earlier in Philadelphia. The minute everybody started chanting it I was drawn deeply into the rhythm. I tried to follow along in a little book someone handed me, and even though I had trouble with the Japanese words, it was so exhilarating to chant together with this group of people that I didn’t want it to end.

I still wasn’t sure what exactly Buddhism held for me, but I wanted to pursue it further and see what would happen. Like Buster had said, what did I have to lose? And I might just have something to gain.

Gigi and I both loved New York, but now that we had Jessica, I started thinking about moving our family out to Los Angeles. The weather was gorgeous all year round, and unlike in Manhattan, we could actually have a yard and maybe even a pool. A lot of the record companies were based there, and David Rubinson was in San Francisco. And you could actually park in L.A.! In Manhattan we could never find parking. We’d double-park and then listen for people honking in the morning, so we’d know to go move the car.

“Let’s move to L.A.,” I said to Gigi.

“No way!” she replied without any hesitation. New York was the only U.S. city she’d ever lived in, and it was perfect for her work and her lifestyle. She had no interest at all in moving.

“Come on, let’s just try it for a year,” I said. “If you really don’t like it, we’ll come back to New York.” Gigi fought the idea for months but finally gave in. We found a renter for our apartment, but even as Gigi was packing she was still pissed off about the move, throwing stuff into boxes and yelling, “I don’t know anyone in L.A.! All my friends are here!” She was so convinced this would be a mistake that we left most of our furniture in New York, in case we decided to come back.

I wasn’t sure how long this experiment would last, so we rented a little house on Dorrington Avenue in West Hollywood. And our first week there, as Gigi watched three-year-old Jessica run around naked in the backyard in the middle of December, she changed her mind. In New York at that time of year Jessica would have been bundled up in six layers, plus a hat and mittens. I was away for a gig, but Gigi called me on the road and said, “Okay. Let’s buy a house.”

We looked at a few places over the next month or so, and in the end we had to decide between one in Laurel Canyon and one on Doheny Drive, just north of the Sunset Strip. The Laurel Canyon house was beautiful, in perfect condition, and ready for us to move in. The Doheny one was really neglected, with musty carpeting and contact wallpaper, and it smelled like cat pee. But there was something about that second house—it definitely had possibilities, if we had the patience to fix it up.

We couldn’t decide between them, so I went up to the second floor of the house on Doheny Drive and sat down to chant. I had been practicing Nichiren Buddhism since those meetings in Seattle, chanting twice a day, doing morning and evening prayers. I had also gotten into the habit of chanting whenever I needed clarity, as it always seemed to clear my head and help me see situations in a new light. I chanted for about ten minutes, and even though that room was in terrible condition, being there just felt really right. I went back downstairs and said to Gigi, “I want it to be this house.”

Gigi was respectful of my chanting and of my opinions, but she knew how much work it would take to fix the place up, so she wasn’t quite convinced. “Let’s flip a coin,” she said. We did, and the Doheny house won. We bought that house for $72,000 and have lived there ever since. And to this day I still chant on the second floor.

In the six months I’d been practicing I had also begun studying and learning more about Nichiren Buddhism and its history. It was founded by the thirteenth-century Japanese monk Nichiren Daishonin, who concluded that the Lotus Sutra, which was taught thousands of years ago by Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, was his highest teaching and contained the essence of all his sutras, or teachings. Nichiren revealed that the essence of the Lotus Sutra is hidden in its title, Myoho Renge Kyo, literally “the wonderful law of the Lotus Sutra.” On a deeper level it means “The Mystic Law of Cause and Effect through Sound,” the one universal law contained in the life of the universe itself. The Daishonin inserted the word Nam, which means devotion or dedication of one’s life, to this universal law.

Nam Myoho Renge Kyo: These may sound like four random words, but in a way you can compare saying them to saying a person’s name. If someone says the word “Jessica” to me, it’s not just a word; it brings to mind an image of my daughter, and of everything she means to me. When someone speaks my daughter’s name, it releases feelings and emotions in me. Likewise, when we chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, we’re not just saying idle words; we’re invoking the meaning of those words from our life, the law of the universe within all life. When we chant those words, we are awakening the Universal Law within, the awakening of our own inherent Buddha nature, our true self. By chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, we are polishing our life, aligning ourselves with the rhythm of the universe.

Nichiren Daishonin said that this should be taught life to life. Doing this practice is the practice of polishing our life just as we are. When this transformation awakens our highest condition of life—our Buddha nature—synchronizing with the life of the universe, it brings forth a state of compassion, wisdom, and courage from within. This in turn fuels our desire to move ourselves and others toward an indestructible happiness that cannot be defeated by suffering of any kind.

Now, I know that this all sounds pretty far out. But at a more basic level, Buddhism taught me a very important lesson about human life and human beings: It showed me how to turn adversity into opportunity. We believe that obstacles are a means for our growth.

When he first told me about chanting, Buster said, “You practice for yourself, and you practice for others.” Buddhism is a compassionate practice. It’s about respecting and caring for others, sharing the practice as a means to relieve them of their sufferings. Shakyamuni said, “How can I help people to find the Buddha way?” The Daishonin taught the true intent of the historical Buddha’s teachings.

That emphasis on others really struck me. I had never spent a lot of time thinking about how to help other people. I wasn’t a bad guy, but I had never been a particularly empathetic person, either. I pretty much focused on music, and that was that. But hearing Buster talk about focusing on other people and helping to make their lives better really affected me.

Ever since I was seven years old, music had been the number one thing in my life. If anyone asked me how I would describe myself, I would have said without hesitation, “I’m a musician.” But as I got deeper into the practice of Buddhism, a new realization began to form inside me. I began thinking of myself as a human being first, removing any sense of separation between myself and others.

I started to see music differently, too. Before, I played music for the sake of playing music; my focus was on tunes, harmony, rhythm, and melody. Now I began trading my musician’s ear for the larger purpose of using music to address issues in our daily lives. My desire turned to seeking ways to create music to serve humanity, to contribute something empowering and potentially transformative to the people of the world.

At the time I first started practicing Buddhism, though, my live music was attracting primarily a small number of hardcore avant-garde jazz fans. How could I expand that audience, providing a doorway to their appreciation of the new direction of our music? I began chanting about it.

After doing three records with Warner Bros.—Fat Albert Rotunda, Mwandishi, and Crossings—I knew we weren’t cutting it with them. WB was a big label, and our records just hadn’t been reaching a wide-enough audience. And instead of moving in a more commercial direction, Mwandishi’s music was just getting weirder and more far out.

With each new record David Rubinson was like Houdini, pulling rabbits out of a hat to convince the executives that we had sales potential. My reputation as an artist was still intact, but for commercial reasons we knew it was only a matter of time before Warners dropped me. So David said, “Let’s make a move before that happens.” He knew it would be easier to get me in at another label if I didn’t have the taint of being released by Warners.

Bruce Lundvall was the vice president of Columbia Records, and fortunately he was a huge jazz fan. He pitched Clive Davis, the president of the label, to sign me. I’m not sure whether Clive was all that keen on the idea, but Bruce really went to bat for me. We agreed to a deal, and David told Warner Bros. we were making the switch. I suspect they were relieved, since they seemed eager to move away from this new nexus of funk, jazz, and rock. In fact, around that same time they also let go of another band that, like Mwandishi, was pushing boundaries but hadn’t yet found a wide audience: Earth, Wind & Fire. It wouldn’t be long before they wouldn’t be feeling quite so relieved about losing either of us.

For the new record, which we called Sextant, we still had only three songs. But this time I changed up how they were constructed. I wanted there to be more contrast, more compelling arrangements, to draw in more listeners. And for the first time we had synthesizers throughout the whole record. The songs and arrangements were complicated, so we rehearsed for months before going into the studio. One song, “Hidden Shadows,” had a time signature that changed from bar to bar, over four bars, and then repeated, so we practiced it over and over again until we got to the point where we could just feel it without having to count in our heads. I wanted to use that pattern as the platform and then construct the solo improvisations on top of that, but it’s hard to improvise when you have to focus on counting the beats.

After weeks of rehearsal we finally got it down to where we could play it in our sleep. Then we started playing it faster and faster. We’d be doing improvisations and not even have to think about where the patterns were, but then they’d end up with a bap! from the drummer, signaling the end of the pattern. And then it felt so second nature that we started adding more percussion, wood blocks and shakers. It was a beautiful structure of sound.

The whole record was like that, which I hoped would appeal to a wider audience. Mwandishi incorporated different kinds of beats, some of them African based, some of them backbeats. At this point our music still required pretty active listening, but there were other avant-garde jazz bands way farther out than we were that had no real beats at all, just raw free jazz. Compared to them, we were more mainstream. But even though I had high hopes for Sextant, it still didn’t reach the kind of sales the record label was hoping for. I began to wonder if it was possible to break through that ceiling we seemed to have reached without compromising myself as an artist.

And then I found some inspiration from a very surprising source: the Pointer Sisters.