CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Pointer Sisters burst out in the spring of 1973 with a self-titled debut album and a single, “Yes We Can Can,” that went to number 11 on the pop chart. This wouldn’t have meant much of anything to Mwandishi, except that David Rubinson was now managing the Pointers, too, and their success gave him an idea.

David had been trying to get our music played on black college radio stations, but that hadn’t led to significantly higher album sales. We were still playing small clubs and niche venues, so David decided to shake things up. He arranged for Mwandishi to appear at a weeklong stand at the Troubadour Club on Santa Monica Boulevard—with the Pointer Sisters opening for us.

If it had seemed strange for Mwandishi to play with Iron Butterfly two years earlier, this felt even weirder. The Pointer Sisters sang throwback harmonies blending jazz, bebop, disco, and R&B, and they wore 1940s hairdos and thrift-store styles as part of their act. We were a group of serious guys in dashikis and Afros, playing high-wire improvised electronic music where people sometimes couldn’t even find the beat. Any way you looked at it, this was one strange bill.

We were booked to play at the Troubadour two shows a night for a week, and on that first night the lines went around the block and way down the street—it was as if everybody in L.A. wanted to come to this show. David had hired P.R. people to get the word out, and the club was filled to capacity with jazz fans, agents, executives, actors, and other musicians. It was a scene.

The Pointer Sisters came out and did a half-hour set, and they just killed it. People had never seen anything like them! Here was this group of women cracking up and having a great time, one of them actually roller-skating around on that tiny Troubadour stage. Their music borrowed from the past, but it had a contemporary twist, so they were able to reach across all kinds of barriers. The Pointer Sisters were electric, and everybody in that building felt it. At the end of their set, they came offstage still laughing and carrying on as everybody was stomping and yelling for more.

Seeing the effect they had on the crowd just about turned my head inside out. The Pointer Sisters were fun. They were out there showing people a good time, lifting everybody’s spirits with their light, happy vibe. When Mwandishi took the stage, the vibe was very different, because although our stuff was great, it was serious. This gig put one thing into clear perspective for me: The audience at a Pointer Sisters show could let loose and have some fun, but the audience at an Mwandishi gig had to do some work.

And that work extended into listening at home, too. When people put on a Pointer Sisters record, they could either sit and listen or do things around the house—cook dinner or finish some housework or any kind of activity, really. If you put on a Mwandishi record, you couldn’t really do anything else but sit and listen, because you had to be concentrating to take it in. This wasn’t music you could just have on in the background.

I started thinking, Who’s got time for all that? People have things to do! We were putting out records with just three songs on them—three long songs that changed tempos and time signatures and keys and everything else. We were requiring a tremendous amount of attention and patience from our listeners, both live and on the records. No wonder our audience was limited.

That gig with the Pointer Sisters got me thinking in a different direction. I told David, “I want to reach people like that.” I loved Mwandishi’s music, and we had certainly been able to touch people with it. But I was beginning to understand why it was so hard to reach beyond the serious jazz fans who dug our style of playing. If we could find a way to incorporate the kind of excitement the Pointer Sisters brought without compromising who we were as a band, we might finally be able to break through.

Part of the Pointer Sisters’ appeal was their stage act, of course—the hairdos and costumes and roller-skating. But I had spent five formative years playing with Miles Davis, who wasn’t one for jumping around and acting out onstage, so I wasn’t interested in theatrics. We always let the music speak for itself, and I wanted to continue doing that.

What can we do with what we have? That was the question marinating in the back of my mind. I kept thinking about how we could redesign our music to make it more accessible, and just as I had before our gig with Iron Butterfly, I thought about contrast: loud to soft, high to low, simple to complex. I didn’t believe we needed a radical change, but there had to be something we could do, musically, to get the attention of a broader audience.

I talked to the guys in the band about my thoughts, but most of them were stewing over the fact that we’d played on a bill with the Pointer Sisters in the first place. They felt that Mwandishi’s music was “real” in a way that the Pointer Sisters’ pop stylings weren’t—but to my mind, this was just the same kind of musical snobbery that I’d exhibited when I first started with Miles. The Pointer Sisters were great at what they were doing, and rather than judging them, I wanted to learn from them. I was ready to move in a new direction, but not everybody else was, and that difference of opinion deepened cracks that had already formed in the band.

It was around the time of the Troubadour gig that the guys in the band rebelled: They wanted to get paid more money, and they wanted to be put on salaries.

I understood where they were coming from. By now we had been playing together for several years, and they’d never had any raises. We always split the take from each gig, but paying seven guys, plus our soundman, Fundi, meant there wasn’t much to spread around. Every member of the band was an amazing musician, and not only did they all put a lot into the music, but they had to pack up and carry all their own gear and the sound equipment, too.

I didn’t know all the details of the band’s financial situation, because David Rubinson handled the numbers. But because I paid all the expenses, I was pretty sure Mwandishi had been costing me money over the years. The guys seemed to think I was profiting from the band, so I asked David to run the numbers on what was coming in and going out, and we scheduled a meeting with everyone to discuss it.

Before that, I made them a proposal: “I will level with you about what we’re making, and if you want to split everything down the middle, we can agree to do that,” I said. “But if we’re losing money, then everybody will have to chip in equally to cover it.” Nobody wanted to promise to cover losses, so that conversation didn’t go very far. What it did was crystallize the difference between how I saw the band and how the band saw itself.

The typical setup for a jazz band is that there’s a leader and there are sidemen. The guys wanted to be paid as sidemen, at a level that matched their skills. But I saw the Mwandishi band as a collective: When we made money, we all made money, and when we didn’t, we didn’t. We were in it together. Otherwise I couldn’t sustain it with that number of people.

David pulled the information together, and we all met at my accountant’s office in New York, where most of the band members still lived. The numbers made it obvious that between all the expenses of flights, hotels, gas, rental cars, and food, I was losing a lot of money just keeping Mwandishi going. Not only was I playing for free; I was actually paying to play in my own band.

Now, I didn’t actually mind this, because I was still getting income from “Watermelon Man” and commercial work. I did have a family to support, but it wasn’t as if Gigi and I were living hand to mouth. Besides that, I honestly believed that playing this music, at this time, was necessary. The Mwandishi band was a beautiful experiment in expanding musical boundaries, and if it cost money to explore that, I was willing to take the hit.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to lose more than I already was losing. It didn’t make sense for me to lay out more in salaries for everybody, especially when we had no plan for how the band might actually become profitable. But the guys were still insistent that they needed to get paid more. In their minds I was the bandleader, and if I wanted to hire musicians of their caliber, I needed to pay for them. If there wasn’t enough money coming in, that was my problem, not theirs.

The guys started refusing to do interviews to promote our gigs unless they got paid for their time. They took the position that if they weren’t on salaries and their income was based on splitting up the proceeds from gigs, then the gigs were the only things they’d do. The amazing sense of camaraderie that had sustained us through that disastrous Europe trip was really fraying.

But in the end it wasn’t money issues that broke up the Mwandishi band. Ultimately it was the music.

From that initial gig in Vancouver when Eddie, Julian, Billy, Bennie, Buster, and I all played together for the first time, through the amazing London House experience, through Buster’s “Toys” gig, Mwandishi was capable of conjuring a truly magical musical experience. There were times we shared so much empathy and connection onstage that it really did feel spiritual. At our peak those experiences happened regularly. But when Mwandishi was off—when we didn’t connect—the experience wasn’t pleasant, and what we were playing just sounded like noise, even to us.

By the summer of 1973 we never knew if a gig was going to work or not. Any band has peaks and valleys, and while the peaks we continued to experience were high, the valleys were starting to feel uncertain and tiring. And we seemed to be ending up in the valleys more often than ever before.

Also, while the Mwandishi band had reflected the spirit of the times, those times were changing. As rock music had grown in popularity people’s musical tastes had turned to less demanding music, and a lot of jazz musicians were taking note. Jazz had become so complex, with the rise of free jazz and other avant-garde styles, that people were eager to embrace the simpler, more boy-next-door style of rock and roll. Anybody could relate to rock music, whereas jazz came from a more selective artistic standpoint.

But rock grew out of the blues, after all, and used electric instruments, both of which jazz drew upon. And because jazz musicians are curious by nature, many players began experimenting with jazz-rock fusion, from Wayne Shorter’s Weather Report to Tony Williams’s Lifetime to Chick Corea’s Return to Forever. It looked as if fusion would be the next wave in the jazz world.

All of these developments were percolating in my mind, but I still wasn’t sure what to do; the one thing I did know was that I didn’t want to feel so untethered anymore. When I started the sextet, I was eager to become untethered musically, and when we first did, it was thrilling. But Mwandishi’s music became so spacey, and so far out, that after a while it got exhausting. Now I wanted to make music that was more rhythmic, music that would connect me back to the earth. I wasn’t sure exactly what that music would sound like, but it was time to explore.

In the meantime, I got a call about a movie. Ever since doing Blow-Up in 1966, I had wanted to write more soundtracks, but the only film I’d gotten since then was the TV movie Hey, Hey, Hey, It’s Fat Albert. So I was really excited when a producer got in touch to tell me about a new movie called The Spook Who Sat by the Door. And I was even more excited that it was being made by an African American production company.

The story, which was based on a controversial novel by Sam Greenlee, follows the first black CIA agent, a guy named Dan Freeman. The CIA trains Freeman as a spy, but unbeknownst to them, he’s actually a black nationalist. After he leaves the CIA, he turns around and uses his training to lead a black nationalist revolution. The title is brilliant, as it has several meanings: “Spook” is a nickname for spies, but it can also be a slur against black people. And the “spook who sat by the door,” in the sixties and seventies, meant the black secretary who was hired to sit near a company’s front door, to show everybody who came in that the company didn’t discriminate.

The producers didn’t have much money, but I didn’t care—I really wanted to do the music for this film. I wrote songs that were heavy on electric instruments and synthesizers, which excited me and reinforced my feeling that it was time to move on. The movie came out in 1973, and that soundtrack was the last recording I did with the Mwandishi band.

After Gigi and I moved to Los Angeles, I started going to Buddhist meetings just about every night. During the meetings people would offer testimonials, talking about the amazing things their practice of Buddhism had brought—everything from a new job to a new car to finding a spouse. People were eager to share the good things that were happening to them, the outward and visible signs of Actual Proof.

But in those first few weeks I found myself thinking, Well, I already have those things. I couldn’t really relate to what people were saying, because I already had a wife, a house, a daughter, loving parents, and enough money to put food on the table and pay my bills. If the practice of Buddhism was about filling some kind of void in your life, did I really need it? Still, something kept me going to those meetings and kept me practicing and studying through that time of doubt. Even though I had so much good in my life, I knew there might be something missing that I just wasn’t aware of yet.

A couple of weeks went by, and I kept practicing. Then one day something changed. Rather than feeling outside of what other people were saying at the meetings, I was feeling their joy, as if I were sharing their experiences with them. At that moment I knew there was more to this Buddhism than what I could see on the surface. I realized that what I’d thought was the Actual Proof—those tangible things people talked about—was really just the outward evidence of a deep inner transformation. I finally understood that the transformation was what Actual Proof was all about.

Practicing Buddhism created that transformation in me, too, though it took many years to unfold. In the beginning of my practice all I knew was what I read and what I learned through other people’s experiences. I chanted and studied, but it’s not so easy to immediately grasp lessons that have been handed down from a thirteenth-century Japanese monk. Fortunately the president of SGI, Daisaku Ikeda, has provided books and lectures that translate Daishonin’s writings into concepts that are applicable in today’s world.

President Ikeda, who joined SGI the same year I started playing piano—in 1947—is an amazing writer, lecturer, poet, and peace activist. He is a preeminent educator, having established the Soka school system and Soka universities in Japan and the United States, and he has received more than three hundred honorary degrees. I can honestly say that his example as a human being helped me understand life in a way I hadn’t before. He became my mentor, a concept I wasn’t even aware of until I started studying his writings.

Growing up in Chicago, I always thought the American dream was about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, succeeding through your own hard work and effort. The term “mentor,” meaning someone who guides you to realize your own potential, was new to me, but as I learned about it I realized to my surprise that I’d already had a mentor in music: Miles Davis. I had never thought of him as a mentor, but as I reflected on his behavior as a musician and a teacher, what he represented to me musically, and how he affected my own vision of music, my eyes were opened to the concept.

Miles was my mentor for music, and President Ikeda was becoming my life mentor. The more I studied and learned, the more I saw President Ikeda’s dreams as similar to my own: I want people to become awakened, to be more compassionate, to respect one another. To exhibit wisdom on a global scale. Yet, as I said, all these realizations didn’t happen at once; they took many years to develop. But it all started with those first few weeks in Los Angeles, as I began to understand what the practice and chanting were really about.

When I first started chanting, I focused on the survival of Mwandishi. A year later, as Mwandishi was unraveling, I started focusing on what was coming next. The problem was, I knew more about what I didn’t want to do than what I did. I didn’t want to give up the freedom we had developed, but I wanted to ground myself—to look at some other musical territory rather than up into the sky all the time. But what was that territory?

I had a lot of questions swirling in my head, and very few answers. So I did what I’d learned in my practice: I chanted for a specific answer. What do I want to do musically? I spent hours at my Gohonzon, seeking an answer to this question and trying to keep my mind open for some kind of direction.

And then, one day as I was chanting, I heard it.

I want to thank you . . . falettinme . . . be mice elf . . . agin.

It was that great funky groove by Sly and the Family Stone ringing in my ears as I chanted! I kept going, but the song stayed right where it was, playing over and over as if it had been planted in my head. Then suddenly I saw an image of me sitting with Sly Stone’s band, playing this funky music with him. And I loved it!

But then the image changed, and it was my band playing that funky stuff, and Sly Stone was playing with me—and that felt strange and uncomfortable. That upset me, because my discomfort felt like an expression of jazz snobbery, where funk was somehow lower on the food chain. Meaning, while I didn’t mind playing funky music with Sly’s band, I didn’t want that to be my band. It was more of the same old musical elitism I had been fighting against, in both myself and in others, and here it was popping up in my subconscious.

So, just as I’d done all those years ago with “Watermelon Man,” I decided to ask myself a few simple questions: Was there anything wrong with funky music? No. Was it somehow worse to play funk with my own band than with someone else’s? No. Then why was I feeling dismissive of the idea? I had certainly been listening to a lot of funk music, including Sly Stone. And funk was related to jazz, and it was related to the black experience as a whole. I had to face my own prejudice—or as Buddhist practice says, face the negativity of my fundamental darkness—and defeat it.

And that’s the moment I decided to start a funk band.

Switching to funk felt like a big gamble, because even though I liked listening to it, I had no idea if I could make it happen myself, to my standards. I had actually tried once before, recording some funky tunes back in the ’60s for Blue Note, but that had been a disaster. I was too far removed from that sound, and the songs never really came together, so the record never even got released. I didn’t want to make a record that combined jazz and funk—I wanted pure funk. Because I wasn’t a funk musician and I hadn’t really played with funk musicians, there was no guarantee that would work out. But the message had been clear, so I decided this was a risk worth taking. It was time to funk out.

And that meant it was time to disband Mwandishi. I knew that most of the guys wouldn’t be interested in this new musical direction, partly because they were in the thrall of that same musical elitism I had felt. Going from Mwandishi to a funk band probably wouldn’t seem like progress to them as much as a regression.

Also, regardless of how they might feel about funk, people don’t like change in general. It’s just human nature: It’s easy to become comfortable with what works and feel “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Audiences in Europe had booed Mwandishi because they didn’t want change. Critics and fans had freaked out when Bob Dylan went electric, because they didn’t want change. One of the hardest things to do in life is to judge events for what they actually are, rather than giving in to the discomfort we naturally feel at losing something familiar.

Human beings start out with a youthful spirit that lends itself to exploration, but over time we lose that. We find our comfort zone, and we don’t want to leave it. Change means subjecting yourself to challenge, scrutiny, self-criticism, and disappointment, so it’s hard to embrace, especially if you like where you are.

So most of the guys in Mwandishi were pretty upset when I told them I was breaking up the band. But it just made more sense to me to start fresh. I’d be going in a new direction, playing a different kind of music, and I wanted to bring in some new energy. Besides that, I was still thinking about that Pointer Sisters show, and I knew the new band would need a different kind of stage presence.

I decided to take a practical approach: If I wanted to do a funky record, I needed some funky players, because that style fell more toward the entertainment side of music than the art side. Jazz was a “listening music,” while rock and funk were performative. Rock and funk audiences were used to a more animated visual presentation, and pure jazz musicians tend to be very cool when they play—eyes closed, not moving much.

The most animated person in Mwandishi was our reed player, Bennie Maupin. More important, he seemed the most open to change. As it turned out, he’d been paying close attention to the same musical shifts that I had. Like me, he was going home after Mwandishi gigs and listening to a completely different kind of music—Luther Vandross and Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye and of course Sly Stone. Bennie was really into exploring new musical directions, so I invited him to be in the new band.

I asked around about other players and ended up hiring drummer Harvey Mason, the brilliant Latin/African percussionist Bill Summers, and bassist Paul Jackson, who, unlike Buster, played the electric bass as his primary instrument. I had learned enough from Pat Gleeson to take on playing synthesizers myself, so they would definitely be part of our new sound. But the band’s overall instrumental makeup—a four-player rhythm section plus one horn—was totally different from Mwandishi.

The five of us hit the ground running, but where exactly we were going, none of us knew.