My earliest exposure to jazz was on WGES deejay Al Benson’s radio show. Known as the Godfather of Chicago Black Radio, Benson spun records all day, mostly blues or R&B but with the occasional jazz cut thrown in. The first jazz performance I took notice of was “Moonlight in Vermont,” played by the guitarist Johnny Smith, with Stan Getz on tenor sax. It was a ballad, just a pretty song that I liked, rather than some kind of big epiphany about jazz. At the time it came out, in 1952, I mostly listened to R&B music, like the rest of the kids in my neighborhood.
We used to stand around on street corners and sing, imitating our favorite groups—the Orioles, the Midnighters, the Five Thrills, the Ravens. Later I heard the Four Freshmen, a vocal quartet that gained fame in the mid-’50s with songs like “Mood Indigo” and “Day by Day.”
The Four Freshmen sang harmonies that were beyond the four-part barbershop harmonies that had been popular in the ’30s. They sang more jazzlike harmonies, with major sevenths and even a few ninth chords, which mesmerized me and made me want to learn how to sing them myself. I also loved the Hi-Lo’s, another vocal group, whose piano player, Clare Fischer, arranged many of their songs. Fischer’s arrangements had a tremendous influence on my understanding of harmony.
I loved this type of singing so much that I even put together my own vocal group at Hyde Park. But even though I was interested in R&B and other musical genres, it never really occurred to me that I could play anything other than classical music on the piano.
I used to play for the high school orchestra’s rehearsals, to help guide the violinists and others who were struggling to learn parts. But the orchestra never performed with a piano, so in concerts I played cymbals and percussion instead. Hyde Park did have a dance band, but their piano player was a guy named Don Goldberg, who was in my class, though I hadn’t yet met him. Don was also in a student jazz trio, and when I finally saw them play one afternoon during my sophomore year, he did something that changed my life.
Every semester the senior class at Hyde Park put on a variety show for all grades. Don’s trio—piano, upright bass, and drums—took the stage, and as they started playing, I was of course watching Don. His performance absolutely floored me: He was improvising! I had no idea people our age could do that; I thought it was something only older players did. Mind you, “older” to me at age fourteen meant nineteen or twenty.
I had been playing classical music since I was seven, so I was pretty good at reading music, but Don could do something on my instrument that I couldn’t. He was creating the music himself, in the moment, rather than reading it off a page. My heart started beating like crazy, and as soon as the trio finished their three songs, I hurried backstage and found him. I quickly introduced myself, and then I couldn’t hold back.
“Man, how did you learn to play like that?” I asked him. “I don’t really understand what you did, but I liked it. I want to learn how to do it, too—how to play jazz.”
Don laughed and said, “Well, if you like what I did, the first thing you need to do is get yourself some George Shearing records.” He told me to listen to how Shearing played and then try to imitate the parts I liked. That was how he’d learned, and at age fifteen he was already pretty good at improvising.
As soon as the school bus dropped me off that afternoon, I ran home, burst through the front door, and said, “Mama! We’ve got to get some George Shearing records!” She looked at me like I had three heads. “Herbie,” she said, “you already have some.”
“No, Mama,” I said. “You don’t understand. We need George Shearing records. Not just any records.”
“Herbie,” she said, “do you remember last year when I brought you home some records, and you got mad at me because you wanted some other ones and said I’d gotten the wrong things? Those were George Shearing records. Go look in the cabinet.”
I crossed the living room to the cabinet, which was filled with 78s, and sure enough, there they were: a few albums by George Shearing and his quintet. I had never even listened to them. I’d always thought of jazz as older people’s music, something that had no relevance to me. But now that I’d seen someone my age improvising, making that kind of music exciting, I just wanted to do it myself.
I slid a record out of its sleeve and put it on the turntable. Don’s trio had performed three songs that the George Shearing Quintet played: “Lullaby of Birdland,” “I’ll Remember April,” and “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” I laid the needle down on “I Remember April,” and as I listened to Shearing play, it sounded like Don! That was it for me—if Don could do it, why couldn’t I? That afternoon I started trying to learn how.
My first attempts were terrible. I sounded exactly like what I was, a classical musician learning how to improvise. But then my love of science and mechanics kicked in, and I decided to approach improvising the same way I approached taking a clock apart: analytically. I’d find a phrase I liked, and then try to pick out the notes by listening to it over and over—even just to find a single-note improvisation on the right hand. I tried to listen past the melody to the improvised parts to figure out the individual notes I needed to play.
Once I found the right notes, I’d try to play along with the record, but in the beginning I couldn’t seem to make it sound the same. So I’d go past that phrase to get to the next one, learning longer and longer phrases until I could play them the way they sounded on the record.
I kept working to find the phrases I liked, and then I’d transcribe them onto music paper. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was also doing ear training—I was sharpening my relative pitch at the same time I was learning the phrases. I did this for hours each day, branching beyond George Shearing into other piano players, like Erroll Garner and Oscar Peterson. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn.
Because of the way my mind works, I noticed patterns. I’d play a phrase, write it down, and think, Wait a minute—he just used those same notes in another phrase earlier in the song. I didn’t know how jazz was constructed, so I had to figure it out as I went along. To me, improvisation sounded like stream of consciousness. But at the same time I knew it couldn’t be, because it was so organized.
Despite the fact that I could play classical music well, my knowledge of other musical forms was pretty limited. I knew major chords and minor chords, but everything else I had to teach myself. I began to spend a lot of time talking to the few other kids at school who were into jazz, including Don Goldberg and a French horn player named Ted Harley. They were both good musicians; Don went on to become a professional composer and arranger, changing his name to Don James and working on big shows, such as the Ice Capades and Baryshnikov on Broadway. Talking with Don and Ted helped me to figure out more of the theory and structure behind improvisation.
Whenever people ask me how to learn to improvise, I tell them the same thing Don told me: Find a player you like, and then copy what he or she is doing. That analytical, mechanical approach will enable you to learn the basics, but then the trick will be to figure out how not to get stuck in copying. You have to start creating your own lines, to find your own voice.
If you’re playing a particular form—say, on a thirty-two-bar song—you’re playing the melody, the head of the tune, and then you improvise off that form’s particular chord structure. There’s a lot of freedom within that structure—space, rhythm, chords, shadings. Whatever you decide to play, whatever comes out moment to moment, is an expression that’s shaped by a combination of elements, which includes, if you’re in a group, what the other musicians are playing. You have to be fully present, because there’s a lot going on, and it’s happening so rapidly that you can’t get slowed down by thinking about it.
Improvisation—truly being in the moment—means exploring what you don’t know. It means going into that dark room where you don’t recognize things. It means operating on the recall part of your brain, a sort of muscle memory, and allowing your gut t
o take precedence over your brain. This is something I still work on every day: learning to get out of my own way. It’s not easy, but the times when you can do that are truly magical. Improvising is like opening a wonderful box where everything you take out is always new. You’ll never get bored, because what that box contains is different every single time.
Jazz is not something you can ever completely master, because it is in the moment, and every moment is unique, demanding that you reach inside yourself. Classical music seemed more cerebral, but jazz was both cerebral and intuitive. It pulled me like a magnet, and I couldn’t wait to learn more about it.
CHAPTER THREE
In the fall of 1956, I headed off to Grinnell College. Grinnell was a small liberal-arts school in Iowa, of all places, so it wasn’t the most obvious choice for me. But one of my parents’ closest friends, our South Side neighbor Mrs. Smith, had gone there, so I decided to apply. I won a Pullman scholarship and set out for Iowa at age sixteen, and what I found when I got there was a warm, welcoming campus with students from all over the world. Going to Hyde Park High School had opened my eyes to people from different walks of life, and my time at Grinnell would broaden my horizons even more.
Even before I set foot on campus, I started examining my options analytically. Should I major in music? Or in science? I loved them both, but I wanted to make the smart choice. So I asked myself: What are the chances you can make a living from jazz? Questionable. Now, what are the chances you can make a living from science? Probably really good. As much as I loved jazz, I decided to take the pragmatic path and major in engineering. I even promised my mother, who wanted me to get a degree in something useful, that I wouldn’t major in music.
I didn’t sign up for any music courses my freshman year, but I did take piano lessons and spent hours on my own studying jazz. My grades were just average, because I never buckled down that much to study my engineering classwork. Although there weren’t many other jazz musicians at the school, I did find a couple of guys who were pretty good, so I spent time playing and talking about music with them. There was a drummer from Denmark named Bjarne Nielsen, a bass player named Dave Kelsen, and two trumpet players who could play pretty well—John Scott and Bob Preston. John became a close friend; we even wrote a song together that I would later record for my second album, My Point of View.
Some professional classical musicians practice for eight or so hours a day, but not me. I never actually practiced at the piano for more than about an hour a day—but I spent untold hours studying, learning, and analyzing music. I’d talk endlessly with the other guys about structure, theory, and improvisation, and we’d swap notes until late into the night. I never got tired of it, and the more I learned, the more excited I got.
I continued to be fascinated by improvisation. When I’d listen to Oscar Peterson records, I’d think, How’d he do that? I loved playing and jamming, because it was a blank slate for expressing yourself. You didn’t have to just read the music someone else wrote; you could express yourself by creating your own music in the moment.
In my sophomore year I decided to put together Grinnell’s first jazz concert. How hard could it be, right? I’d just listen to a few big-band recordings, figure out what the other instruments were playing, and transcribe all the arrangements myself. Then I’d just have to find enough musicians who could play the various parts, show them how to phrase and use dynamics, and get them concert-ready. Somehow, in my seventeen-year-old head, this seemed an achievable goal.
Grinnell had only about twelve hundred students total, and it was smack in the middle of Iowa. Where was I going to find enough jazz musicians for a whole concert? I put up notices on bulletin boards all over school, seeking out anyone who had experience playing and especially anyone who’d been in a high school dance band. I knew that the University of Iowa, about sixty miles east of Grinnell, actually had a jazz band, so I borrowed some arrangements from them and from Iowa State. Somehow I managed to cobble together five saxes, three trombones, four trumpets, bass, drums, and a small vocal group.
Then I started figuring out the arrangements from a few Count Basie records, just as I’d worked out those George Shearing songs: by listening to the record, then writing down the various instrumental parts on blank music paper. This was complicated and time consuming, but I learned a lot doing it.
Once the parts were ready, I started section rehearsals for each instrument of the band. What I discovered was that while everybody could play the notes, only two people knew anything about jazz phrasing. I didn’t want to go through all this trouble to put on a mediocre concert, so I personally conducted every section rehearsal—the saxophone players, the trombone players, the trumpet players. And because nobody knew how to solo, I had to write those parts out, too. For the whole semester I spent all my time teaching these players, trying to get them ready for the show. I was so consumed by preparing for the concert that there was no room for anything else in my mind, and I began flunking all my courses.
This was the second semester of my sophomore year, and the concert was scheduled just before finals. As the date drew near I stopped going to classes altogether—there was too much to do! I was working with the musicians day and night, hardly sleeping at all. But when the big day arrived, we were ready. Or as ready as we’d ever be, anyway.
The concert was held in May of 1958 in the Alumni Recitation Hall auditorium. People had never thought they’d get to hear a jazz concert in Grinnell, Iowa, so, given everyone’s low expectations, we sounded fantastic. With every song, the audience was clapping and cheering like crazy. I loved being onstage improvising with a group of jazz musicians, just letting loose in whatever direction I felt like playing. The whole night felt magical.
But then came the nasty wake-up call: I had ignored my classes so completely that, unless I aced my finals, I was in danger of flunking out of school. For the next week, all I did was study. I crammed everything I could into my brain, and when I showed up for the finals, some of my professors—who hadn’t seen me in weeks—seemed surprised. I knew how crushed my parents would be if I failed, so I was desperate to do at least well enough to stay in school.
And somehow I did. I aced all my finals, which enabled me to pass the semester with three Cs and a D. One professor was so shocked that he even thought I had cheated. He called me into his office and demanded to know how I could have been failing all semester, only to come in and do so well on the final exam. He began firing questions at me, trying to see if I really knew the material or not. When I was able to answer all his questions, he had to back down.
After that I went back to my dorm room, completely exhausted, and stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot, and I looked like hell. “Who are you trying to kid?” I asked the face in the mirror. I’d tried very hard to fit myself into the engineering box, but it was obvious where my passion was. At that point it was no longer even a choice. That day I decided to switch my major to music.
When I started taking music classes my junior year, I was happy to find that I already knew a lot of the material we were covering. I’d spent so much time studying theory and harmony and structure that I was able to skip most of my classes and just show up for tests.
To bring in extra money, I had a job at the restaurant in the student union, taking orders and serving food. But one weekend I got a gig playing piano in Des Moines, and to my shock I got paid more for that one night than I did for a week of working at the union. That realization just turned me upside down: The idea of logging all those hours slinging food in a restaurant when I could make so much more doing something I loved made it impossible for me to keep doing that job. So I quit.
The funny thing was, the Des Moines trip wasn’t actually all that pleasant. The gig was okay—but a strange thing happened afterward.
I was only eighteen or so at the time, but somehow these guys who were playing at a nightclub had heard about me. I had agreed to g
o to Des Moines to play with them, and then, to save money, I was planning to go right back to Grinnell in the early-morning hours instead of paying for a hotel room. But one of the musicians told me I could just stay at his house with him and his wife. I thought, Cool! An adventure! This guy was a real working musician, and I was going to get to hang with him.
The gig wrapped up at about two in the morning, and as the guy and I walked to his car, he said, “I gotta make a couple of stops before we get to my place.” I said, “I don’t mind!” I didn’t care where we went—I was just happy to be along for the ride.
Another couple of people were waiting at the car, and we all piled in. The guy pulled out of the parking lot, and after driving for a while we ended up outside a house. As soon as we pulled up, all the lights in the house went off. I thought that was a little weird—were they not expecting us?—but someone hopped out and went up to the front door, and then came back to the car with a little paper bag. We then drove to another house and picked up the guy’s wife, and I noticed with bewilderment that even though it was pretty warm out, she was shivering.
We made a few more stops to drop off the other people in the car, and then it was just the musician, his wife, and me. He drove us to their building, and we climbed some back steps to get into their apartment. When he opened the door, my mouth fell open: It was one tiny room, with one bed in it. The guy and his wife lay down on the bed and gestured for me to join them.
“Do you want to get high?” he asked me, and then emptied the contents of the paper bag onto the bed. I looked at the hypodermic needle that had tumbled out, and the baggie of powder, and said, “No, thank you.” I had never gotten high before, on anything, and I had no intention of getting into that stuff. But I was curious, so I said, “Can I watch?” As long as I was there, I wanted to see how it was done.
Herbie Hancock Page 3