CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

In the late 1970s, as equipment got better and more advanced, Stevie Wonder and I got into a little competition. We’d see a prototype for a new kind of synthesizer, and we’d both tell the manufacturer, “I’ll buy two right now if you’ll give me Serial No. 1!” Each of us wanted to be the first guy to own whatever cool new thing was coming down the pike. I always bought two, to have a spare on the road, and Stevie bought two because he was building a museum-worthy collection.

In 1979 an Australian company called Fairlight put out a new kind of synthesizer, one you played by drawing waveforms on a screen with a light pen. I read about it in a keyboard magazine, and that light pen sounded like the coolest thing around, so I got in touch with the company and asked if I could see a demo. Fairlight had just one rep in the United States, and he was in Pennsylvania. He was scheduled to come to L.A. to show it to Stevie Wonder, but I convinced him to come to my house first.

These synthesizers cost around $25,000 each, which was beyond my price range, but I knew a couple of other guys who might be interested. I invited Quincy Jones and Geordie Hormel over to watch the demo with me. By 1979 Quincy was already a legend. He’d been nominated four times for an Academy Award, had won five Grammys, and had just won an Emmy for his work on the miniseries Roots. Geordie was an heir to the Hormel Foods fortune, and his passion was composing music. He owned a recording studio and had written music for such TV shows as Lassie, The Fugitive, and The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.

The rep showed up at my house in a Winnebago van that had synthesizers set up inside, so we stretched extension cords into my house to power them. When he showed us how they worked, I was mesmerized. The notion of drawing directly onto a screen, rather than flipping switches and patching in cords, was a radical idea at that time. With the Fairlight light pen you could draw a line where the horizontal axis was for pitch and a vertical for volume, but then you had to type in some technical wording to set the tempo. It was fascinating to watch, though not exactly what you’d call user-friendly just yet.

When the demo was finished, Quincy asked, “So how much are these things?” The rep told him the price, and Quincy just smiled and shook his head. But Geordie, who looked like a hippie with his long hair and granny glasses, reached into the pocket of his overalls and took out a wad of cash. “I’ll take two,” he said. I thought that rep’s eyes were going to pop out of his head.

I didn’t buy a Fairlight that day, but eventually I got two of them. My arsenal of electronic instruments just kept growing, and with computers now in the mix, the possibilities of how to make music seemed limitless. The first record we made after I got the Apple II+ was Monster; here’s the listing in Monster’s liner notes of what instruments I played:

Herbie Hancock: piano, E-MU Polyphonic keyboard, Clavitar, Waves Minimoog, Prophet-5, Oberheim 8 Voice, Yamaha CS-80, ARP 2600, Hohner D6 Clavinet, Rhodes 88 Suitcase piano, Steiner EVI, Sennheiser Vocoder, WLM Organ, Linn-Moffett Drum, Modified Apple II Plus Microcomputer, Roland CR-70.

To anybody not familiar with electronic music, this must just look like alphabet soup. The fact that I was playing so many different kinds of electronic instruments definitely irritated some jazz purists, who didn’t like that I was moving further and further away from classic jazz. They feared that with so many musicians branching out into fusion and other genres, classic jazz was in danger of dying out. After all, if even the guys who had played with Miles Davis—Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter, me—were moving away from traditional forms of jazz, what hope was there for the genre? Even Miles himself was moving away from that sound, pushing further into jazz-rock fusion. So, despite the fact that I was continuing to play acoustic music with V.S.O.P., people were still getting worked up over the Headhunters, electronic music, and the supposed death of jazz.

One of the most vocal critics was someone I started touring with in 1981—a guy who, at the tender age of nineteen, had bestowed upon himself the mission of saving jazz.

Ever since the Newport retrospective in 1976, I had been touring off and on with V.S.O.P. The lineup had stayed the same—Tony, Ron, Wayne, Freddie Hubbard, and me. But I’d started getting frustrated with Freddie. He was a brilliant trumpet player, but he functioned on his own timetable, and more than once he came to shows so late that he left the rest of us hanging. As I said, I’m a guy who runs late a lot of the time myself, so if I was noticing it, it was bad.

Once, in Cleveland, Freddie was so late that he actually had to get a police escort to race from the airport to the venue. He came rolling in a couple of hours after our start time, but instead of apologizing, he seemed to have the attitude “Okay, I’m here now, so everything’s cool.” I’d known Freddie a long time, and we were good friends. But like me, he’s an Aries, and Aries people have a hard time apologizing, always finding excuses for mistakes. I recognize that trait in myself, and I struggle with it. But Freddie had it down to a science, and he seemed to have no desire to change.

It got to the point where I didn’t want to work with Freddie anymore, but we had a V.S.O.P. tour coming up, and I already knew Wayne Shorter couldn’t come because of a prior commitment. When people are expecting a quintet, it might be okay to give them a quartet, but not a trio. I needed to find a replacement for one or both of those guys.

Right about that time I got a call from a Columbia A&R man named George Butler. “Herbie, we have this new artist we’re excited about,” he told me. “He’s from New Orleans, a trumpet player, and he’s just phenomenal. His name is Wynton Marsalis.” Columbia was in the process of planning Wynton’s first record, and they wanted me to work with him, since I had a track record of selling jazz albums as both a musician and a producer.

“I’ll send you a recording he did with his teacher in New Orleans, a double trumpet concerto,” George told me. “Give it a listen, and let me know what you think.”

Well, I listened to that recording, and it about knocked me flat. How was a teenage kid playing like this? Wynton had amazing skills, well beyond his years. And that gave me an idea: Why not ask him to join Ron, Tony, and me for the V.S.O.P. tour? That way I could replace Freddie, Wynton would get some seasoning, and V.S.O.P. would get a little pop from having a trumpet prodigy on the road with us.

The only problem was, Wynton was pretty young for us to take him out on a tour like this. Ron, Tony, and I had been around the block a few times, and we knew each other really well. We were at a different stage of our careers, and our lives, than this young kid. Sure, it would be cool and interesting to play with Wynton, but did we really want to bring a teenager straight out of the gate on a multicountry tour?

Also, Ron in particular was really protective of V.S.O.P.’s legacy with Miles Davis. Whoever played trumpet with V.S.O.P. was literally stepping into Miles’s shoes—was that something we should just hand over to a nineteen-year-old? Tony was less bothered by that, maybe because he had been just seventeen when he joined Miles. Ron had a point, but I thought that in trying to protect the legacy of the quintet, he might ultimately do more harm than good.

“Look, man,” I said to him. “We can hold on to this and keep it for ourselves, but when we die, it will die along with us. Or we can share it with the younger generation, and they will carry it on beyond us.” If jazz is about anything, it’s about being open and sharing. We had been so lucky to play with Miles all those years, and Miles had generously shared his knowledge and experience with us. How could we now turn around and shut out another young player, refusing to share our knowledge and experience with him?

Ron understood, so even though he hadn’t heard Wynton’s recording, he said, “All right, Herbie. Let’s bring him in.”

Some young guys might have been intimidated, going on tour with players from Miles Davis’s quintet. And because Wayne wasn’t coming, Wynton would be the only horn, which was an even bigger responsibility. But from the very first show Wynton killed. He didn’t seem nervous at all onstage, and the audiences loved him.

Wynton had grown up in New Orleans, and he had a little bit of the showman about him. He was a great player, but then he’d add flourishes to the ends of his solos, adding a little razzle-dazzle to garner applause. Ron, Tony, and I had come up with Miles, who never did that kind of thing, so we didn’t love that part of Wynton’s performing. I found myself wishing he would just play, but I figured that maybe he was nervous and he’d tone it down over time. So, as Miles had done with us, I never said anything directly to Wynton about his playing.

That said, Wynton, even at nineteen, was quick to criticize other musicians. Because he was so young he got a lot of attention and did a lot of interviews, and he was more than willing to share his negative opinions about some of the jazz greats who had come before him. I couldn’t understand it—why would a celebrated young player feel the need to tear others down? But Wynton considered himself a jazz purist, and anybody who didn’t meet his standards would feel the sting of his words.

A couple of times, after I heard about Wynton’s harsh assessments of other players, I said to him, “What are you doing, man? Jazz music has a hard enough time finding an audience. We should be helping each other out, not tearing each other down.” And Wynton would say, “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry! I got carried away.” To hear him apologize afterward, you’d think he really just couldn’t control his tongue. I heard that one time he called Miles to apologize for having criticized him in the press. Miles, who was so often gracious to younger players, said, “Oh, man, don’t worry about that shit. I did the same thing to Dizzy.” Miles was being kind to Wynton, because he had in fact never done that to Dizzy Gillespie.

A few years later, though, Wynton pushed Miles too far—and he did so in public, at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. Miles came onstage with his band at the time, which was heavy into electric music. Right in the middle of their set, Wynton walked out onto the stage, trumpet in hand, completely uninvited. It looked like he wanted to challenge Miles to some kind of musical duel, but Miles wasn’t having any of that. He tried to wave Wynton off, but when Wynton didn’t leave, Miles stopped the band.

Wynton was an amazing player, but that kind of competitiveness was, to me, his weakness. From a very young age he behaved with a kind of entitlement, and he never seemed content to let players play and keep to his own business. He seemed driven to make comparisons all the time, to put down whoever wasn’t playing at a level or in a style he approved of.

But we all have our weaknesses, and if I’m honest about it, I had some of the same failings Wynton did. I had been a jazz elitist for many years, turning my nose up at rock and pop music until Tony Williams and Miles taught me otherwise. I’d also turned my nose up at electric pianos until Miles taught me otherwise. Nobody’s perfect, and it’s certainly not fair for me to sit here and criticize a guy for criticizing other people.

The truth is, Wynton’s positive contributions to jazz have far outweighed anything negative he’s done. Wynton reenergized jazz for a lot of young musicians, and he’s brought thousands of new fans to jazz through his talent and charisma. He co-founded Jazz at Lincoln Center, he created television and radio shows educating people about jazz, and he’s even written books on the subject. He’s full of positive energy for the music he loves, and he’s doing more than just about anybody else to make sure it thrives.

When I think about why, with all that positive energy, Wynton might have felt the need to tear others down, I remember a strange incident that happened when we were on tour in Japan. It was the second V.S.O.P. tour with Wynton, and Wayne Shorter was able to come on this trip, so we had a full quintet. Late one night after a show, Wayne called me in my hotel room.

“Hey, Herbie,” he said. “I think we should go to Wynton’s room. Something strange is happening.” I asked what was up, and Wayne just said, “He seems really depressed. I’m a little bit worried about him.”

We went to Wynton’s room and knocked on the door. He opened it to let us in, and I saw that his window was open. This was a little strange—you don’t normally open a window in those high-rise hotels. I didn’t say anything, though, and once we were in the room Wynton went over and sat on the windowsill.

“You okay?” I asked him. He didn’t say anything at first, and he wouldn’t look at me but just stared out the window for a bit. I wasn’t sure what to do, but finally he spoke.

“I hear something in your playing, and Wayne’s playing, and Ron’s and Tony’s—I hear something that I don’t have,” he said.

“Come on, man,” I said. “What are you talking about?” I wasn’t just trying to make him feel better—I genuinely believed that Wynton was a gifted trumpet player. What did he think we had that he didn’t? I wanted to help him out of his funk, but I was also really curious.

“I just think something’s missing in my playing,” he said.

I thought about the fact that Wynton felt compelled to add those little razzle-dazzle moments onstage, and I wondered whether he did that to compensate for whatever deficit he felt he had. I wanted to ask him about that, but how could I? He and I had never had a conversation about those moments, because I hadn’t wanted to step on his toes. Especially in a young player, you have to be really careful not to stifle creativity or style but encourage the person to just play. Wynton was obviously really down on himself, and I wanted to be careful not to make the situation worse.

“Wynton, I don’t know what you’re hearing,” I told him. “But you’re playing great. You’re playing with heart.” I urged him not to beat himself up and reminded him that none of us ever stopped trying to play better. In my head, though, I kept wondering—what was in this young man’s life that made him so uncertain of himself? So uncertain, in fact, that he felt he had to tear down others to boost himself up?

I never did find out exactly what set Wynton off that night, because we never talked about it again. It was the only time I ever saw him express that kind of vulnerability, but I never forgot it.

There’s one other story from that V.S.O.P. tour that’s worth telling. Wynton had decided to bring his brother Branford to Japan. Branford was an up-and-coming saxophone player, but of course we had the great Wayne Shorter playing with us. We were scheduled to record a live album on that tour, and Wynton was pushing hard for us to include Branford on two songs on the record. He was the one who’d taught Branford how to play jazz, and he wanted to give him this opportunity.

Now, this was a pretty bold move, having the new guy in the band ask if his brother could replace one of the greatest saxophonists of all time, and not surprisingly some others in the band and crew thought this was a bad idea. He won’t be as good as Wayne! It’s going to hurt the record! It’s going to hurt Wayne’s feelings!

But when I went to Wayne to ask what he thought about it, he just chuckled.

“Okay, explain this to me one more time,” he said. “There’s Wynton’s brother, who he loves, and Wynton wants to let him play. And I’ll still get paid the same, and I still get my song on the record, and I don’t have to work as much.” Wayne just looked at me, deadpan. “Why does everybody think this is bad for me? I’m not getting it.”

I laughed and said, “Well, because you’re the sax player, and he’s not.”

“One more time,” Wayne said, slowly. “Why is this bad for me?”

And that was quintessential Wayne Shorter. Branford ended up playing on two songs on that album, and Wayne just told him, “Have a great time! I’m here if you need me!” He was nothing but happy for Branford, who went on to launch a great jazz career of his own.

We had nicknamed Bryan Bell’s friend Keith Lofstrom “The Universal Patch Cord,” because he could plug anything into anything else and make it work. But Keith’s wizardry extended beyond music. He designed and made computer chips at home, and wrote software and built hardware for all kinds of applications. To a gadget freak like me, Keith was a kind of superhero. So in early 1981, when Bryan told me, that Keith was on a team that was helping to design software for the brand-new space shuttle, Columbia, I flipped out.

Ever since I was a boy in Chicago I was fascinated by the idea of space travel. I may not have paid a lot of attention to the news when I was in New York in the sixties, but I definitely paid attention when Soviet and U.S. astronauts started going into orbit, and when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969 it blew my mind. The idea that now, with a space shuttle, we could just fly into space and then return? This was the future coming to life.

So when Bryan told me that Keith could get us passes to watch the first space shuttle launch in person, I was as excited as a little kid. I couldn’t believe I was going to get to watch, close up, as this amazing vehicle soared into space. The launch was set for April 10, 1981, at Kennedy Space Center. Bryan and I flew to Florida together, and in the predawn hours we settled into the viewing area to watch history being made.

As the countdown was happening I could feel my heart pounding. But at about nine minutes to go something went wrong. We all held our breath, waiting for the launch, but after a while an announcement was made that the mission was being scrubbed. There was a timing discrepancy between the computers at Kennedy and in Houston, and even though it was a very tiny one, the computer engineers needed a day to correct it. So the launch was postponed two days, to April 12.

No biggie, I thought. We’ll just stick around in Florida for a couple of days and watch the launch on the twelfth. Even better—April 12 was my birthday! What an amazing birthday gift this would be.

Except . . . Oh, no! I had completely forgotten that Gigi was planning a big party for me on that day. It was a Sunday, and she had pulled out all the stops, inviting a huge crowd of people to celebrate my forty-first birthday. Quincy Jones was coming, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Billy Dee Williams, and all my family and tons of musicians I’d played with over the years. Gigi had been organizing this event for months, and before Bryan and I left, she’d said, “Have fun, Herbie, but you’d better be back by Sunday.”

I couldn’t believe it. There was nothing I wanted to do more than watch the first space shuttle launch that day. I didn’t care about celebrating my birthday! But I did care about Gigi, and I knew she’d be hurt if I didn’t come home. More important, I knew she’d be angry, and she might take my head off. So reluctantly I flew back to L.A. on Saturday, so I’d be there for the party.

On Sunday the twelfth I turned on the TV and watched the launch, and I just felt sick to my stomach. But I also chanted that morning, and I looked for a way to find peace with the fact that I’d missed seeing it in person. This almost worked until I was actually at the party and I made the mistake of telling a few people I’d flown home rather than staying to watch the launch. “What the hell are you doing here?” my friends asked me. “Are you insane?” I felt about two inches tall. As grateful as I was to Gigi for loving me enough to have thrown me a wonderful party, I just couldn’t get over missing that launch.

The shuttle was scheduled to be in orbit for two days, then land at Edwards Air Force Base in central California. Of course, nobody knew for sure what would actually happen when it reentered the atmosphere and landed, because this was the first time it had ever been tried. The day after the launch Bryan and I were in the recording studio, busy pretending we didn’t mind the fact that we’d missed it, when all of a sudden I said, “Do you think those passes might work to get us in for the landing?” All of a sudden we were like a couple of kids again, hurrying to make plans to get to Edwards on April 14.

Keith Lofstrom was there for the landing, too, and he invited us to sit in the seats where members of his space club, L5, were sitting. But I walked up to a guard and said, “I’m Herbie Hancock, with Columbia”—Columbia Records, not Columbia TV and radio, but he didn’t know that! Presumably thinking I was a reporter, the guard escorted us right down to the front row. After feeling so disappointed at missing the launch, I was really happy to see the landing, which happened as smooth as silk, right in front of me.

In late 1981, I noticed something strange going on with my left hand. My pinky finger was swelling up at the joint between my finger and palm, and it hurt whenever I’d hit the keys on the piano. For a while I tried to ignore it, but soon the swelling and pain were bad enough that I had to get it checked out because it was affecting my playing.

I went to an orthopedic hand specialist named Dr. Charles Lane, who I’d been told was the best in the business. As he poked and prodded my hand, he said, “It looks like you have a tumor in your finger.” Well, that certainly got my attention. I was forty-one at the time, and cancer had been just about the furthest thing from my mind. “It doesn’t act like a malignancy,” Dr. Lane continued. “But we’ll need to remove it surgically anyway, and then I’ll have it examined.”

Of all the places on a piano player’s body where a tumor might appear, the finger is pretty much the worst option. While it might not be a big deal if you lose a little bit of nerve sensitivity in another part of the body, if you lose it in your fingers it can seriously hinder your playing ability.

I knew Dr. Lane was a very skilled surgeon, but it would be no easy feat to cut a tumor out of my little finger without damaging the nerves. As he explained to me, nerves also have tiny hairlike extensions that are numerous and difficult to see, and it was inevitable that he’d end up damaging or removing some of them during the process. The worry was that the damage would be extensive enough that the feeling in my finger would be impaired.

We scheduled the surgery to take place a couple of days later, and I began spending hours chanting in preparation. With the help of two friends, Susie Sempers and Kathy Lucien, I even chanted for ten hours straight in one stretch, with just a five-minute break every hour. Having Susie and Kathy chant with me helped give me strength, and when it came time for the procedure, I felt ready.

Dr. Lane had explained that this was an outpatient surgery, which meant I’d have just a local anesthesia and be awake the whole time. “Can I watch?” I asked him, half joking. I thought it would be interesting to see the process, but he just smiled and said, “No, Herbie. Because if you flinch at anything, you could lose the finger.” The nurse put up a partition so I couldn’t see what he was doing, and she gave me a sedative, which settled me. The ten hours of chanting made me feel confident and even, oddly, lighthearted, and before I knew it the procedure was over.

Normally, Dr. Lane would slice the skin down the finger in a straight line right across the middle of the joints—but because he was concerned that the healing process at the joints might make it difficult and painful to bend my finger to play the piano, he decided that day to do it a different way. He cut a zigzag W-like pattern from the top of my palm up through my little finger, the scalpel tracing a path through the edge rather than the center of each joint.

When the surgery was finished, he told me, “Herbie, I think this is the best of this type of procedure I’ve ever done.” He said he’d taken out the tumor without too much nerve damage and would send it right away for a biopsy. In the meantime, he told me, “Sometime during the week, you should regain feeling in the finger.” The nurse dressed my hand and I went home.

As he predicted, the tumor turned out to be benign, which was, of course, a huge relief. But a week after the surgery I still had no feeling in my little finger. I decided to give it more time, but at the end of the second week I still couldn’t feel anything. Now I was getting really concerned. I called Dr. Lane and asked him, “When will the feeling come back?” He explained that while normally the feeling would have come back already, we still had every reason to believe it would—though he couldn’t say when that might happen. “It’s not within the realm of science for me to make that prediction,” he said.

My finger still had the dressing on to protect it, so I really couldn’t do anything but wait and chant. By the end of the third week, when it still had no feeling, I couldn’t stand the waiting anymore. I carefully peeled off the dressing and sat down at the piano. I knew my little finger wasn’t working—it wasn’t even moving. I thought, What if it never wakes up? What will it feel like to play with only nine fingers?

Very gently, I started to play. And then something really strange happened. My ring finger started sliding over to play the notes my little finger would normally play! I wasn’t doing this consciously—my ring finger just naturally compensated by playing the lower notes. It was an amazing thing to witness, but it didn’t change the upsetting fact that my finger still wouldn’t work.

At that moment I knew I needed to prepare myself for the possibility that I would never play with all ten fingers again. This was a sobering thought, but now I had my Actual Proof that I could do it. I had a gig coming up about a week later, the first since my surgery, so I decided to practice gently and play, even if I only had nine working fingers. I might as well get used to it.

The gig was an unusual one, a concert organized by the well-known jazz writer Conrad Silvert. Conrad was in his early thirties, but he’d been diagnosed with testicular cancer and knew he had only a short time to live. One of his dreams was to organize a concert featuring some of the greatest jazz players in the world, and because so many players loved and respected Conrad, he was able to book an incredible group. The concert was scheduled for February 22, 1982, at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, and the featured musicians included Jaco Pastorius, Tony Williams, Bobby Hutcherson, Wayne Shorter, Wynton Marsalis, Pat Metheny, Sonny Rollins, and Carlos Santana.

The night before Conrad’s concert, I sat down at the piano for the rehearsal . . . and just then I felt a tiny tingling at the base of my finger. I actually gasped. I wondered whether I was just imagining the feeling, but as I started to play the tingling became stronger. I could finally use my little finger, and by the end of the song the complete feeling was back. I could hardly believe the irony—that my own cancer scare would find its ultimate resolution in playing for a friend who was fighting cancer.

The concert the next night was amazing, with so many great musicians playing and the hall filled with emotion for Conrad. We played for three and a half hours, and by the end everybody was emotionally and physically spent. Conrad had given us all a rare and special night. He’d fulfilled his dream, and just a few weeks later he died at age thirty-four.