Herbie Hancock

by Herbie Hancock

  I observed him as he put the powder in a spoon with a little water, lit the lighter, and heated the bottom. The powder turned into a black liquid, which he then poured into the syringe. He wrapped his arm with a piece of rubber and tapped his vein, just like in the movies, and then he shot up. His wife was shivering because she was coming down from a high, but when he offered her the syringe, she took it, too. I could hardly believe I was sitting here watching them shoot up; watching their faces to see if anything changed, I started feeling nervous. Were they about to get weird? There was only one bed, after all. But evidently they didn’t think much of the heroin, so after complaining for a little bit, the guy said, “We’re just gonna go to sleep.” And I thought, Okay, but where the hell am I supposed to sleep?

  I ended up lying on one side of the bed, with the guy in the middle and his wife on the other side, and I was so nervous I don’t think I closed my eyes the entire night. They didn’t seem all that high to me, but I’d never been with people shooting up heroin, so what did I know? I was a complete novice when it came to any kind of drug use, though I had recently started drinking. But this was a completely foreign world to me. I hadn’t been tempted by drugs at all, though that would change.

  In 1960 I left Grinnell and returned to Chicago, one credit shy of graduating because I had flunked a course in my junior year. I wanted to get my degree, but I wanted even more to start playing jazz seriously, and Grinnell wasn’t the place to do that.

  So I moved back in with my parents and took a job with the post office while I sought out work as a pianist. I delivered mail five days a week, and whenever I had gigs, I’d play music from nine p.m. until four or five in the morning. The hours were just brutal—I had almost no time left over to sleep. And I often had to take the train to and from the gigs, so I’d be slumped over in exhaustion on the “L” as it shuddered down to the South Side in the early-morning hours.

  But until I could make enough money playing piano, I needed that post office job, so I was still delivering mail in the fall of 1960 when I got a call to play with Coleman Hawkins. Hawkins was a legendary saxophonist, the man who brought the tenor sax to prominence in jazz. He’d been playing since the early 1920s, when he started with Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds, and in the four decades since then he’d played with all the big names: Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt, Miles Davis, Benny Goodman, Thelonious Monk, and Oscar Peterson. I mean, I would have been excited just to be in the same room with a player like Coleman Hawkins, much less actually get to play with him.

  To keep his costs down, Hawkins usually worked with pickup bands, which meant he hired local musicians—a pianist, drummer, and bass player—in each city he played. For this gig in Chicago, the first-choice pianist, a guy named Jodie Christian, wasn’t available, so Hawkins’s drummer, Louis Taylor, suggested he give me a try. I was pretty green at that point, but I’d played with Taylor a few times, and he thought I deserved a chance.

  Coleman hired me to play with him at the Cloisters nightclub for a fourteen-day stand. He was the first internationally known musician I had ever worked with, and his recording of “Body and Soul” was considered the ultimate saxophone solo of that classic song. I felt honored to share the stage with him and excited at the thought of what I might learn, but I was also nervous, hoping I could hold up my end of the bargain. He encouraged me and tried to make me feel comfortable onstage, and I think he was pleased with how I played.

  I never got much of a chance to talk to Coleman, because I always had to hurry home after the last set. The hours were crazy—four sets a night, and five on Saturdays, with no days off—so I was playing music into the wee hours every night and then trying to deliver mail all day. By the third day I was a complete wreck. That morning I was standing in front of somebody’s apartment, thumbing through the mail, and I actually fell asleep standing up—which wasn’t good, because the apartment was at the top of a concrete staircase. I was really dragging, and not surprisingly, I got sick, too.

  Louis Taylor, the drummer who had gotten me the gig, said, “Herbie, that post office job is interfering with the music. You’ve got to quit.” I knew there was no way for me to keep doing both, but I was scared to quit the post office, since it offered me stability and a steady income.

  But on the fourth day, dragging myself home at four a.m. from that night’s gig, I knew I had no choice. That morning I told some of the guys at the post office that I was going to quit. A lot of them were musicians themselves, and they urged me not to do it. More than one guy said, “Man, you’re going to lose your health insurance!” I knew that if I did leave, I’d never get hired back there if music didn’t work out, but that was a chance I had to take. So I walked into my supervisor’s office and told him I was done.

  After I finished that two-week gig with Coleman Hawkins, I just waited by the phone, hoping someone would call with another one. It was strange not to have a steady job, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make enough money playing piano. But my parents took care of me, letting me live at home rent-free and feeding me dinner every night. I felt very lucky to have their support as I kept trying to make my dream of being a professional jazz musician come true.

  In December of 1960, a couple of months after the Coleman Hawkins gig, I got a call from John Cort, the owner of the Birdhouse, a small club in a second-floor walkup on Dearborn Street, on the North Side. “Donald Byrd and Pepper Adams are playing in Milwaukee this weekend,” he told me. “You want to play with them?”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “Yeah, I want to play with them!” I couldn’t believe it—I’d just been invited to gig with one of the best jazz trumpeters around. Donald Byrd was a veteran of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and he’d earned a master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music. He’d performed with many of the jazz greats over the years, including John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, and in 1958 he’d started a quintet with the baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams. That was the group I was being invited to play with.

  “Well,” John said, “put on your maroon jacket and get on down here!” I’d played several times before at his club, so he knew my maroon jacket—the only jacket I had for playing gigs. I hurried down to the Birdhouse as quickly as I could get there.

  As it turned out, Donald had hired another piano player, but a blizzard was blowing through the Midwest and the pianist had gotten stranded. So they just needed me to fill in for the weekend gig at Curro’s in Milwaukee, and then on Monday they’d have their regular guy back. I met Donald and Pepper and the other guys at the Birdhouse, and we all went downstairs to pile into a car for the drive. But by now the blizzard was howling, and we didn’t get very far before realizing there was no way we could make it to Milwaukee in time for the gig.

  I was disappointed, but then Donald said, “Well, are there any jam sessions happening in Chicago tonight? Maybe we could at least hear you play.” I knew of one, a loose gathering led by the trumpet and sax player Ira Sullivan, so I gave Donald directions, and we made our way there. As we walked into the club all I could think was Herbie, don’t screw this up! This was my big chance, an audition of sorts for Donald Byrd. He was sharply dressed, highly educated, and a really charming guy, and I wanted so badly to impress him that my hands were shaking when I went up onstage to take my turn with the other musicians.

  And I guess they never really stopped shaking, because I sounded terrible. I was so nervous that I couldn’t play anything right. After struggling through one tune, I knew I was done. I slumped off the stage and back to the table where the guys were sitting, my head hanging down in embarrassment.

  I turned to Donald and said, “Well, I want to thank you for this opportunity. I’m sure after that you’re not going to want me now, but I appreciate the fact that you gave me a chance.” Donald just started laughing and clapped me on the back. “Come on, Herbie!” he said. “We’re taking you to Milwaukee tomorrow. I figured you’d be nervous—don’t worry ab
out it!” Relief flooded through me. I hadn’t blown it after all, and I’d have a chance to show Donald what I really could do.

  We drove to Milwaukee the next day, and that evening I played a lot better than at the jam session. But I did have trouble with one song, a jazz standard from the ’30s called “Cherokee.” I knew the chord structure, but Donald’s quintet played it really fast, and although I usually did pretty well with ballads and medium-tempo songs, I always struggled with soloing on faster songs.

  After the gig I decided to bring it up with Donald. “I know I didn’t do so well on ‘Cherokee,’” I told him. “I always have a hard time with fast tempos. Do you have any tips that might help me out?”

  “Barry Harris gave me a tip a long time ago,” Donald said, referring to a piano player from his hometown of Detroit. “He told me, ‘The reason you can’t play fast is ’cause you never heard yourself play fast.’” And then he explained to me how Barry suggested overcoming that problem.

  Barry’s tip was to start with a particular form—either a twelve-bar blues or a rhythm form (based on the chord structure of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm”), which are the only two true traditional forms in jazz—and then work out choruses. If it’s a blues form, you write out the twelve-bar structure and then an improvised solo on that structure for several choruses. Then, once you’ve written out the whole structure, you just practice what you’ve written on the page, playing it over and over again, and then doing it faster.

  The next day I did exactly what Donald had told me. I didn’t worry about playing the piece exactly as it was written; the important thing was just getting used to playing and hearing myself do it quickly. That night at the second gig in Milwaukee, when Donald called “Cherokee,” I played it fast! This was the first time I’d been able to solo really well on a fast song, and it was amazing to feel my fingers flying over the keys like that.

  After the gig Donald and I talked again. He knew I had a lot to learn, but he’d obviously taken notice of the fact that I’d paid attention to his advice and worked so hard, because he said, “Herbie, I’ve been talking it over with the band, and we like the way you play. We want you to join the band.”

  “But you already have a piano player,” I said, confused.

  “We’ll fire him,” Donald told me. “We want you. But you’ll have to move to New York. What do you think?”

  I wanted to go, of course, because New York was the center of jazz, the big time. Chicago was a great jazz town, and there were amazing pianists there, guys like Ahmad Jamal and Ramsey Lewis. But I’d felt all along that Chicago was just the stepping-stone to get to New York, where the real action was happening. I just hadn’t imagined I’d be taking that step so soon.

  “I would love to,” I told Donald. “But you’ll have to ask my mother.” Even though I was twenty, my mother was still the one in the family who did all the decision making. My whole life, I’d heard my father say, “Go ask your mother.” And now that there was such a big decision on the table, it would have felt wrong to make it myself without talking to her.

  Donald just smiled and said, “Of course.” The next day he called my mother from the club and asked permission to take her younger son to New York City to play in his band.

  My parents had always said they’d support all of us kids in whatever we wanted to do, but my mom wasn’t too sure about this particular move. She expressed concern to Donald about my age and my safety in New York, and Donald, who was all of twenty-eight, said in his inimitable style, “Have no fear! I will take care of Herbie and make sure he’s fine.”

  So it was that, less than a month later, in January of 1961, I took my very first airplane trip, from Chicago’s Midway Airport to New York’s Idlewild. I arrived with three bags and a couple hundred dollars in my pocket, and I took a bus into Manhattan to start my new life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Riding the bus into Manhattan, I couldn’t stop staring out the window at all the skyscrapers. Even though I had grown up in Chicago I hadn’t spent any time downtown, and there were no skyscrapers on the South Side and in Hyde Park, so I was as green as any tourist. I just couldn’t believe I was really in New York City, right here in the Mecca of jazz and on my own for the first time in my life.

  I got off the bus in Midtown Manhattan, not far from Times Square, and lugged my three overstuffed bags to the curb. Bags didn’t have those little wheels back then, so I had to somehow drag or carry them to the place where I was staying: the Alvin Hotel, on Fifty-Second Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. The Alvin was cheap, and I’d heard that a lot of musicians stayed there. It was also just around the corner from Birdland, and that was a place I knew I wanted to be.

  Birdland was a legendary jazz club, where all the greats had been coming to play since 1949. There was a sign out front calling it THE JAZZ CORNER OF THE WORLD, and it really did feel like that, with musicians like Count Basie, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, and Art Blakey making regular appearances. Miles Davis was a regular, too, although just five months earlier he’d been beaten up by police outside the club for the crime of walking a white woman to her car. Birdland was where everything was happening, and “Lullaby of Birdland,” the George Shearing song that was one of the first jazz tunes I ever tried to copy, was actually named for the club. So it felt only right that my first few nights in New York should be in the shadow of this great jazz venue.

  I couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel—even a cheap one—for long, so when Donald’s bass player, Laymon Jackson, asked if I wanted to get an apartment with him, I jumped at the chance. We found a dirt-cheap place in a sketchy West Side neighborhood, a tiny walkup on West Eighty-Fourth with no furniture but plenty of cockroaches. There was only one bed, a mattress on the floor, so Laymon and I shared it. We didn’t have enough money to buy another one, even if there had been room for it. But we did manage to find a couple of chairs on the street, so at least we each had a place to sit.

  Those first weeks in New York were rough. Before I moved there, I had no idea what life was actually like for New York musicians. I knew Donald had a successful jazz career and that his records sold all over the world, so I figured that as regulars in his quintet we’d make plenty of money. But I soon discovered that the reality was very different. We played fewer gigs than I thought and got paid less than I expected. Laymon and I were sharing the cheapest apartment we could find, in a neighborhood of poor black people and Hispanics, and we still could barely afford it.

  We got to know the handful of other musicians who lived in the neighborhood, including a vibes player named Jinx Jingles and his wife, who was a singer, and they were usually broke, too. The worst it got for me was a month or so after I arrived in the city, when I emptied my pockets to find just twelve cents to my name. But we all looked out for each other, so that afternoon we pooled our money together and for a little more than a dollar we bought a loaf of Wonder bread, a soup bone, a potato, and some flour. Jinx’s wife made soup, which we sopped up with the bread, and I was so hungry that it seemed absolutely delicious. We had to ration the bread, because it had to last us until someone could scrape together a little bit more money.

  I called my parents every few weeks, and though I never told them how bad things were, they still seemed to know. “Do you want to come home now?” my mother would say, and of course I always told her no. I’m sure they would have sent money if I had asked, but I was determined to make it on my own. I had my pride to consider.

  My first New York gig with Donald Byrd’s group was at the Five Spot, a cabaret-style club on Cooper Square in the Bowery. Since opening in 1956, the club had become a magnet for artists and writers like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Willem de Kooning, as well as famous musicians like Thelonious Monk and later Joni Mitchell. Before the gig, Donald gave me a little pep talk. “Listen, Herbie,” he said. “When we play at the Five Spot, there’s going to be some other piano players there,
people whose music you love.” He told me Horace Silver might show up, or Bill Evans, and that if I saw them there in the audience, lined up like a jury to check out the new kid, I should try not to let it worry me. “Don’t get nervous, okay?” he said. Yeah, no pressure.

  Well, of course I was nervous. But I must have managed to do okay, because soon after that I started getting calls from other musicians about gigs. Everyone knew I was Donald’s pianist, but the quintet wasn’t always working, so I had plenty of time to play on other dates and work on recording sessions with guys like Jackie McLean, Kenny Dorham, and Lou Donaldson. Once that started happening, I began making a more reasonable income, to my great relief.

  One afternoon shortly after the Five Spot gig, Donald drove down from the Bronx to my place on Eighty-Fourth Street for a visit. He pulled up in a Jaguar, with his girlfriend in the passenger seat, and I thought, All right, Donald must be doing really well! He parked the car and came up to the apartment, and after having a look around, he said, “Herbie, you’ve got to get out of here. I’m going to take you up to the Bronx. You can share my apartment with me.”

  I could only imagine what kind of luxury Donald must be living in, so I eagerly accepted his offer. But when I moved into his apartment a few days later, after lugging my stuff up five floors, I was surprised to see that his place was a one-bedroom. There was a hideaway bed in the living room, so that’s where I would stay. Oh, and it turned out the Jaguar wasn’t Donald’s, either—it belonged to his girlfriend, but he would never let her drive it.

  Donald had three rules for the apartment: First, everything had to be really clean, to cut down on the ever-present cockroaches. Second, I had to make up my bed every morning. And, third, if anybody rang the doorbell before nine a.m., I had to wake Donald up first before answering the door.

  I had no idea what that third rule was about, but one morning I found out. The doorbell rang just before nine a.m., and I went into Donald’s bedroom to let him know. He was groggy, but he jumped right out of bed, opened the window, and hustled out onto the fire escape. He told me to shut the window behind him and then go and see who was there. When I opened the door, it was an investigator with the Internal Revenue Service, coming to talk with Donald—just as he’d known it would be. I guess Donald hadn’t paid any taxes in a while, but as long as he could avoid the IRS agents, he could stay a step ahead.