CHAPTER NINETEEN

One afternoon in early 1985 I got a call from Bruce Lundvall. Bruce had brought me to Columbia Records back in the Mwandishi days, but he’d recently taken on the job of reviving Blue Note Records, which had fallen on hard times. Bruce was, and still is, one of the most connected, knowledgeable, and respected people in the jazz world, so a call from him usually meant something interesting was about to happen.

Bruce told me that a French filmmaker named Bertrand Tavernier was making a movie about jazz for Warner Bros., and that Dexter Gordon had been chosen to star in it. This was surprising, because Dexter wasn’t an actor; he was a saxophonist. In fact, Dexter had played saxophone on my very first record, Takin’ Off, back in 1962.

“I recommended you to do the score,” Bruce said. “Would you be interested?” Oh, man! I’m sure Bruce knew the answer before he even asked, but I said, “Absolutely!” So we set up a lunch for me to meet with the director.

About a week later I flew to New York and had lunch with Bertrand. He told me that the movie, Round Midnight, would be loosely based on a book called The Dance of the Infidels, by the French writer Francis Paudras. In the late 1950s Paudras had met the great jazz pianist Bud Powell, who was living in Paris at the time. Like many black American artists, Bud had moved to Europe to escape the racism and oppression of postwar American society. He was a brilliant musician but in a state of decline, as he suffered from alcoholism and had also contracted tuberculosis, which Paudras nursed him through.

Dexter Gordon was perfect for the role, because much of his life mirrored Bud Powell’s. He had moved to Europe in the early 1960s, for the same reasons Bud had. Dexter actually knew Bud during his time in Paris, and he’d even invited Bud to play on his 1963 record Our Man in Paris. So for Round Midnight, Dexter didn’t just understand his character’s life; in many ways, he had lived it himself.

Over lunch Bertrand explained to me why he wanted to hire musicians instead of actors for Round Midnight. He was a huge jazz fan, and the purpose of the movie was to bring attention to the art form. He intended the music in the film to be completely authentic—to be played and recorded live, rather than dubbed in later. For that reason he had to have real jazz musicians, rather than actors playing musicians. This was an audacious idea because of the technological difficulties involved, but Bertrand was determined to do it this way.

At the end of the lunch Bertrand said, “Herbie, I would like for you to do the score.” I was thrilled—what a fantastic opportunity! I thanked him and said I’d love to. And then, almost as an aside, he said, “Also, there’s a part for a piano player in the film. Would you be interested in playing the role?”

“There is?” I said. I mean, my eyes lit up like a kid’s at Christmas. Bertrand had been looking at me pretty intently over lunch, but I just figured he was an intense guy. Now it turned out he’d been trying to decide if I was right for an on-camera part. I told him I’d love to do it, even though I had acted only once before in my life, in 1981, on a TV show called Concrete Cowboys.

When the Head Hunters record became such a big success and I started getting interviewed on television, I was always really nervous. I’d start sweating, and my mind would go blank. I just couldn’t get comfortable. The first couple of appearances were agonizing, and when it didn’t seem to be getting better, I made a decision: The only way I could cure myself of being frightened on TV was to seek out more opportunities to be on TV. So I accepted every interview request I got and tried to get more relaxed in front of the camera.

Then, in 1981, I was asked to audition for a role in a TV show starring Jerry Reed. It would be a onetime appearance, and I’d be playing a musician who was leaving the music business to develop engines for hot-air balloons. I thought that sounded pretty cool, so I agreed to come in and audition.

I rehearsed my lines with my next-door neighbor, a saxophonist named Joe Miller. Joe was an aspiring actor in addition to being a musician, so I asked him for advice. “You have to really believe what you’re saying, so it doesn’t come across like you’re acting,” he told me. “Deliver your lines like you’re really talking to the person.” I wasn’t very good at first, and when Joe would run lines with me, he’d say, “I don’t believe you.” So I kept working on it, right up to the day of the audition.

I read for George Schlatter, a big-time producer who’d done shows like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and The Judy Garland Show. I was nervous, but George just asked me to read the lines in a few different ways, and then he said, “You know, I think I’d like to take a chance on you, Herbie. Who’s your agent?”

My agent? For acting? I just started laughing. “I don’t have one,” I told him.

“Are you in SAG?” he asked. I told him I wasn’t in the Screen Actors Guild, and he said, “We’ll take care of that.” And they did. I acted in only one episode of Concrete Cowboys, but they got me my SAG card, which I still have. It was a lot of fun, especially one scene where I play in a jam session with Jerry Reed, who was not just an actor but a country music star, too—and a really good guitar player.

So that was all the acting experience I’d had before Bertrand Tavernier offered me the role of piano player Eddie Wayne in Round Midnight. But Bertrand didn’t mind. He hired a lot of other musicians for appearances, too, including Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, and Freddie Hubbard. I headed to Paris in the late spring of 1985 for filming, and although I had a lot on my plate between writing the score, arranging the musicians’ parts, and preparing for my role, I was really looking forward to spending a few months there.

Warner Bros. sent a car to pick me up at Charles de Gaulle Airport, and we rode to an apartment building on rue Vaneau, on the Left Bank. When I walked into the apartment the studio had rented for me, my eyes just about popped out of my head. It had three floors, and the living room ceiling was two stories high, with a balcony off the bedroom overlooking the living room. The place was lovely.

After the Warner Bros. people showed me around, we talked about what I would need while I was there. “We know you’re going to be very busy,” said one, “so we have arranged for you to have a housekeeper, to keep the place clean. He can also make breakfast for you in the mornings, if you prefer.”

I thought about that for a minute and said, “Well, you know, I don’t have a lot of time to write this score, so if I’m in the middle of writing, I don’t want to have to stop and go to a restaurant to eat. Can he make my dinners, too?” They conferred for a moment, and they said yes, that could be arranged. I just smiled. I was going to have it made here.

Warners hired an African student who lived nearby, a guy named Edouard Kouassi, to be the housekeeper, and we soon became friends. Edouard was young and from the Ivory Coast, but he knew Paris, and he knew the hot places to go. Now, for movies shot in the States, you often have to be on set at 6 a.m., which would put a damper on any late-night activities. But for Round Midnight we didn’t have to be on set until the afternoon—this was a film about jazz, after all, so a lot of it took place at night. The earliest Warners ever sent a car for me was 11 a.m., which meant Edouard and I could go out and explore the Paris nightlife, including the hottest club there in the mid-’80s, Les Bains Douches.

Because “Rockit” had been a big hit in Europe just the year before, I got the royal treatment in the clubs: We were swept into private areas and presented bottles of Cristal while gorgeous French models were ushered to seats beside us. I had never experienced this kind of celebrity treatment before. I might have been procrastinating a bit in writing the film’s score, but I was having the time of my life doing it.

Tony Meilandt came to Paris, too. He always had his ear to the ground for cool happenings that nobody else knew about, and one day he told me the Rolling Stones were in town. We went to the studio where they were recording, and I played around with them during one of their sessions, though they didn’t end up using the track. Another time I went to Studio Grande Armée, where Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, and Roger Taylor of Duran Duran were recording as a new band called Arcadia. I played on one of their tunes, and that did make it onto the record, which was called So Red the Rose. I got big points for that with Jessica, who was a big Duran Duran fan in the ’80s.

Sting was in Paris at that time, too, rehearsing a new jazz-oriented band for his first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles. Sting is an artist who’s always reinventing himself, exploring new musical styles. Like Madonna, he’s never been afraid to change direction completely, doing 180-degree turns even after very successful albums. In 1985 Sting had just left the Police, which was one of the most popular rock bands in the world. This was an audacious move, but not as audacious as what he did next, which was to put together a jazz fusion band, with Branford Marsalis on saxophone, Kenny Kirkland on keyboards, and Omar Hakim on drums.

Sting played at a theater in Paris for about a week. The place was always packed with young people digging him and his new hot band, and I was drawn to that energy. He was gracious enough to invite me to sit in, and from the stage I’d look out into the crowd and see all these beautiful young women dancing and screaming for Sting, who was not only a rock star but a movie star, too, having just appeared in the movie Dune. I loved sitting in and ended up doing it for two or three nights.

Soon it was time to settle down and write music. At my request, Warners had flown the arranger David Blumberg to Paris to work with me, and he assisted me throughout the process, giving me ideas and encouragement and making sure I had everything I needed on a day-to-day basis. Dave had a lot of experience writing scores, orchestrating, and composing, so he was an invaluable help to me during the composition of Round Midnight.

Early on I realized that even though the movie was about jazz, the music had to be palatable to the average American moviegoer. This was similar to how I felt when I started writing for Head Hunters: I wanted to broaden the audience, to make the music accessible even to non−jazz fans. But the songs still had to be authentic; they would have to be pieces that jazz bands might have played in the 1950s.

I didn’t want to copy the music from the ’50s, because anything that’s a copy is by definition not real. So the question I asked myself was, how can I, in 1985, write music that sounds as if it could be from the ’50s but is advanced enough that contemporary musicians—Wayne, Ron, Tony, Freddie—can freely play it without the restrictions of the period? In other words, could I write songs that were fresh enough that we would simply be musicians playing music, rather than musicians playing musicians who are playing music?

My mind went right to the harmonies of the great French composer Maurice Ravel. Over the years I had often used Ravel’s harmonies in my music, and they were also used in popular music of the early twentieth century. Musical styles were very different from decade to decade, of course, so I decided to construct the music for the film so it walked the tightrope between what harmonies were possible in the ’50s and what harmonies were probable. The songs incorporated harmonies that existed in the ’50s even though people didn’t really play them back then the way we’d be playing them now.

I took some existing songs—standards like “’Round Midnight,” “Body and Soul,” and “How Long Has This Been Going On?”—and reharmonized them, so the musicians would have something fresh to play. So even though many people knew these songs, they sounded new because of those harmonies. That’s how we walked the tightrope.

I also wanted to feature vocals, because I felt that non−jazz fans would respond to songs with lyrics. The very first song in the movie, which runs over the opening credits, is a vocal performance—though you might not realize it on first listening. The song is “Round Midnight,” and the singer is Bobby McFerrin, who sang the melody an octave higher than he normally would while making his voice sound like a muted trumpet. Bobby is the master of disguising his voice, and throughout the piece it’s hard to tell it was a human singing.

One of the most important songs in the movie, and one I wanted to make especially sure we got perfect lyrics for, was called “Chan’s Song.” In a key scene in the film Dexter Gordon’s character, near the end of his life, regrets not having been a real father to his daughter, Chan. He writes a song dedicated to her—a song that after his death continues to influence other musicians. Bertrand wanted me to write a piece that would plausibly be played for generations to come, which is not something you can just pluck out of a hat.

I started thinking about how to compose a song like that—something written by a musician in the ’50s, dedicated to his daughter, that would live on for decades afterward. I wanted a song that could be played instrumentally but that also had lyrics and a vocal. A song that would be timeless but that young people could relate to. I spent a few late nights trying to come up with the right melody and harmonies, and finally I hit on something I liked.

Stevie Wonder and I were good friends, and I decided to ask him if he’d write lyrics for “Chan’s Song.” When I had most of the music written, I called him up—and he said he’d love to do it. I was so happy! I made a tape and sent it to him and gave him the deadline we were working under. Stevie said he’d get something back to me as soon as he could.

Days went by, and then a couple of weeks . . . and nothing from Stevie. I didn’t want to push him, but we finally got to the point where we couldn’t wait any longer. I called him on the phone, and he said, “Oh, yeah! I have them right here.” And he started singing me the lyrics he’d written:

Never said, never heard / though within every word

Lives a heart / filled with love for you

They were perfect. Nobody writes better lyrics than Stevie Wonder, and he nailed this, capturing the regret a father feels at never having told his daughter he loves her. But unfortunately, it turned out to be too late to incorporate the lyrics into the movie. We used the song twice in the film, as an instrumental played at Birdland in New York, and also a version Bobby McFerrin recorded without lyrics, which played over the end credits, with Bobby’s muted-trumpet vocal.

I wish we could have gotten Stevie’s lyrics into the film, but in the years since, other artists have recorded the song, including Dianne Reeves. So it lives on, just as Bertrand wanted.

Bertrand’s insistence that the music be recorded live, as the cameras rolled and we were in character, required some creativity. The makeup and costume people would dress us like 1950s musicians, and we’d get up onstage at the “club” that had been built on a soundstage. We had to use microphones of the period, for the sake of authenticity, but those older mics weren’t as good for recording—so the sound engineers took them apart and hid modern equipment inside, so we’d have the look we wanted without sacrificing sound quality.

Many people had told Bertrand it would be impossible to record the music live, because of camera noise and other acoustic factors. But he used any methods he could to deaden extraneous sound around the set, and whatever noise did manage to creep in would just have to be there.

One afternoon we had played for about nine hours straight and the guys were all exhausted. But just as we were about to quit for the night, somebody pulled me aside and said, “Chet Baker is here.”

A few weeks earlier I had invited Chet, who was living in Europe at the time, to sing and play trumpet in the movie. Chet was a brilliant musician, and I knew he’d come across as authentic to the era. But he also had a well-known problem with heroin, as well as a reputation for not always showing up, so even when I asked him, I knew there was a chance it wouldn’t work out.

Instead of giving Chet a specific time and date, we told him to come at any time in the next two weeks, and we would accommodate him. Unfortunately Chet happened to show up right at the end of a long workday. I thought, How am I gonna get everybody pumped back up for this? We couldn’t just tell him to come back at another time, but the guys were already packing up their stuff. So I hurried over to them and said, “Hey, guess what! Chet Baker just showed up! Let’s record him while we can!” I tried to turn it into the most amazing opportunity ever, and somehow it worked.

We all gathered back on the stage, and I put sheet music on everybody’s stand. I sat down at the piano, and just as I was about to count off I remembered that Chet couldn’t read music. Oh, shit! I didn’t want to embarrass him, but how was I going to fix this? Everybody was waiting for me to begin, so we could get the song done and get out of there.

Just then Chet said, “Why don’t you guys play it first, so I can listen to it?”

“Okay!” I said, and so we did. The song we chose, “Fair Weather,” is a complicated ballad, with unexpected chord changes—not the kind of piece you can just hear once and then jump in and play. But Chet did exactly that, and on the next take he sang it and played a beautiful trumpet solo, finding notes, common tones, and phrases that connected the chords. He was in his fifties at the time, and not in the best of health—just three years later he would be dead. Yet that day he showed all of us the great talent that made him so special.

Around that time I got a call about possibly doing another movie score for Warner Bros. I didn’t really have space in my schedule to do it, but I couldn’t bear to pass it up, either. Clan of the Cave Bear was an adaptation of the popular novel about an orphaned Cro-Magnon girl raised by a Neanderthal family, and I was really intrigued by the notion of writing music for a movie about prehistoric man.

I had a brief window of free time toward the end of shooting Round Midnight, so I turned my attention away from 1940s jazz and started thinking, What kind of music and sounds would be appropriate for the Neanderthal period? I wasn’t sure, but I figured that getting in touch with some really ancient part of the earth might help me figure it out. As it happened, I was scheduled to play a gig in Iceland, and I wondered if there was a particular place there where I might be able to get close to something ancient. I did a little research and discovered a glacier called Snæfellsjökull, which was also said to be a vortex, a kind of focal point of spiritual energy.

I decided to visit the glacier, or to get as close to it as I could, anyway. I wasn’t sure how to do that, but once I was in Reykjavik, I asked around and ended up meeting this redheaded Icelandic guy who knew it well. “You can only fly over the glacier,” he told me. “There’s no place to land, and no other way to get there.” Incredibly, this guy actually had his own plane, a little four-seater, and he offered to take me to the glacier the very next day.

We picked up two other people, and the four of us took off. I was sitting right next to the window, and I practically had my nose pressed to the glass, hoping to get a good feel for it. Suddenly the glacier came into view, a sprawling mass of ancient ice. And as we flew directly over it, I suddenly started sobbing for no apparent reason. I was completely overcome with emotion.

I kept staring out the window, trying to hide the fact that I was crying, because the whole thing felt so weird. Tears were streaming down my face, and my shoulders were shaking—but then, as soon as we passed over to the other side of the glacier, it stopped. I instantly went back to feeling normal, and I had no idea what had happened. I wiped the tears off my face and tried to pull myself together, but finally I couldn’t help myself—I turned to the others and said, “I just cried like a baby when we passed over it, and I don’t know why!”

And the redheaded Icelandic guy said, “Yes, you felt it. That’s the power, that’s why they call it a vortex.” He wasn’t surprised at all, which surprised me even more. Even now I really can’t explain what happened to me over that glacier—it was one of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever had.

Clan of the Cave Bear was about indigenous people, so after the glacier visit I decided to make one more trip, to the Gambia, on the west coast of Africa, to spend some time with an African tribe. I had recorded a song for the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo with a Gambian musician named Foday Musa Suso, so I got in touch with him and asked if he could help me set things up.

Around the time I left for Iceland, Jim Henson’s company asked if I’d be willing to make an appearance on The Muppet Show. They were planning an episode about Muppets and technology, and since I had developed a reputation as a musician interested in science and had actually made an appearance on Sesame Street a couple of years earlier with the Fairlight synthesizer, they wanted me to demonstrate new musical uses of technology.

I needed to do more research for Clan of the Cave Bear, so I thought, Why not kill two birds with one stone? I asked the Henson people to fly me to the Gambia, and I told them that if they could send some Muppets there, I could demonstrate a new kind of portable sampling keyboard in a remote African environment—maybe even on a boat, floating down a river.

I had no idea if they’d go for it, but they said yes. They flew one of their puppeteers to the Gambia with the Muppet characters Miss Piggy and Kermit, and in the meantime I called the Ensoniq Corporation, a musical equipment maker based in Pennsylvania, and asked to borrow their newest product, a battery-powered portable sampling keyboard called Mirage. The Mirage wasn’t on the market yet, so I needed to get one directly from Ensoniq—but it would be amazing exposure for them, of course, to have Kermit and Miss Piggy showing off their brand-new keyboard while floating down a river in West Africa.

And that’s when Ensoniq told me they had only one prototype, and it wasn’t available. Oh, no! We had made all these arrangements, and the Muppets were on their way to Africa, and now I had no keyboard to show off. I panicked and said, “Listen, you’ve got to send me one, because Miss Piggy and Kermit are on their way here!” But they needed the prototype for a meeting with potential investors that week, to show them the technology. They promised to ship it as soon as the meeting was finished, to wherever I needed it, and with any luck it would arrive in time. So I gave them Sosu’s address.

That’s how I ended up on a boat in the Gambia with Miss Piggy and Kermit, playing a portable keyboard as we floated on a river, looking for sounds to sample while I improvised a casual conversation with the Muppets, explaining the technology of sampling sounds to use for music. I couldn’t believe how well it worked out, and that I was able to shoot scenes for The Muppet Show while I did my Clan of the Cave Bear research.

After all that, the Muppets clip never actually aired—and I didn’t get hired to write the score for Clan of the Cave Bear, either. But the Gambia trip was an amazing convergence, of the kind I seemed to experience more and more often since I’d started practicing Buddhism.

In my Buddhist belief, whenever we’re faced with challenges, we can transform them into opportunities, which strengthens our resolve and builds confidence in our ability to overcome obstacles that will surely arise in the future. Joy and suffering are a part of life, but we can transform suffering into joy through the power in our own life that awakens through our Buddhist practice. Every obstacle contains within it a jewel, and my life felt so filled with jewels right now, I could hardly believe my good fortune.

I went back to Paris to finish up final details for Round Midnight, and then, at long last, it was time for a vacation. V.S.O.P. had a gig coming up in Athens, so Gigi and Jessica flew from L.A. to meet me for a week on the Greek island of Corfu. I couldn’t wait to see them, couldn’t wait to share all the wonderful things that were happening. We scheduled a celebratory dinner for August 2, 1985.

But before that dinner was finished, all our lives would be turned upside down.