And that day we just did it. We laid down tracks for the record Seven Steps to Heaven, and it was an amazing session. Everybody, especially seventeen-year-old Tony Williams, was killing. It was so much fun playing with these amazing musicians, I wanted it to last forever.
At the end of the sessions, I smiled and asked Miles again, “So am I in the band now?”
“You made the record, didn’t you?” he asked. I had my answer.
My last gig before going full-time with Miles was at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village, where I was playing sideman for Judy Henske. Judy was a husky-voiced, six-foot-tall brunette who sang bawdy blues and backroom ballads, and she was opening for Woody Allen during his stand at the Village Gate. I was scheduled to play with Judy for a couple of nights, and after one of them Miles showed up at the club.
“You need a lift?” he asked me.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I just bought a car, and I drove it down tonight.”
Miles eyed me for a moment. “But it ain’t a Maserati,” he said. Miles was, of course, known for his beautiful cars, clothes, and women.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “But it’s kind of cute.”
We walked up the stairs and out onto Bleecker Street, and my Cobra was parked right in front. I pointed it out to Miles, and he said indulgently, “Aw, that is cute.” He went off down the street, and I got in my car, pulled out, and turned right on Houston, then right onto Sixth Avenue for the straight shot north toward Ninety-Third Street, where I had recently gotten my own apartment.
Miles came gliding up beside me at a stoplight. He looked at me, I looked at him, and we both knew what was going to happen next. As soon as that light turned green, we both floored it.
We flew up Sixth Avenue, where the lights all turned green at once rather than being staggered. My Cobra just dusted his Maserati, and by the time Miles caught up to me at a red light about twenty blocks away, I’d had time to light a cigarette. I looked over at him, feeling just as smug as could be. Miles rolled his window down and said, “Get rid of that car.”
“What?” I said. “Why?”
“It’s too daaaangerous,” he rasped. And right then, as if he’d planned it, the light turned green and he shot off into the night.
In the beginning, the quintet was Miles, Tony, Ron, George, and me. When George left the following year, Miles brought in Sam Rivers to replace him, but it wasn’t until Wayne Shorter replaced Sam toward the end of 1964 that the quintet really became complete. Wayne brought his artistry not only as an amazing saxophonist but as a composer, writing songs that were ideal for what we were trying to accomplish. The addition of Wayne is what ultimately turned the group into the Second Great Quintet.
The beauty of playing with Miles was that he gave us so much freedom. He never told us what to do or how to do it—he just gave us a platform to explore. We would start playing a song, and the deeper we got into it, the more each player would branch out into new improvisatory places. No song ever sounded the same twice, and often they wouldn’t even be recognizable by the time they ended. Even the most familiar jazz standards became swirling, unpredictable explorations—“controlled freedom” was what we called it.
Every player took turns soloing, and that was when we really took off in unknown directions. Miles didn’t put any limits on us, always encouraging us to be as adventurous as we could. Sometimes we would get so far out in our explorations, we’d almost lose track of the original song, but then Miles had the ability to step in and play a solo that somehow brought everything back together again.
Each night was a high-wire act, and every once in a while even Miles lost track of where we were. My brother, Wayman, tells a story from one of our gigs in Chicago:
The band started playing up onstage, and they sounded great. Miles would play for a while, and then he would leave the stage, pass through the audience, and go outside to smoke a cigarette while the other band members went through their respective solos. They always started off with some song everybody would recognize, but by the time everybody had finished their solos, you knew they were all just jamming and riffing.
One time Miles finished smoking a couple of cigarettes and sauntered back in, and when he got to my table, he said, “I forgot what tune we were playing.” I told him what it was, and he went right back up and finished.
We never rehearsed in the traditional sense, though sometimes we’d get together for a kind of brainstorming session. Miles might say, “We’re going to record next week. Bring your tunes.” And we’d toss around ideas for how to develop them on the stage.
Miles never said much about our playing. He just wasn’t the kind of leader who gave notes or made suggestions unless we asked him to. Even then, he usually responded with cryptic comments, almost like little puzzles we had to solve. And Miles never talked about the mechanics of music, the notes and keys and chords of it. He was more likely to talk about a color or a shape he wanted to create. Once, when he saw a woman stumble while walking down the street, he pointed at her and told us, “Play that.”
While Miles preferred to talk about music in metaphors and images, after each performance Tony, Ron, and I would stay up late into the night deconstructing what we’d played. We’d spend hours talking about what had gone down that night, and about the “what ifs” of what we might play the next night. I loved discussing music with those guys, and I learned so much in those late-night sessions. I just drank it in, eager to learn everything, because I knew that being in Miles’s quintet meant being a part of a legacy, a bloodline that reached back through some of the greatest jazz players in history. And maybe somehow down deep, I didn’t want to let them down.
Early on I was trying too hard. In my efforts to show Miles what I could do, I was doing too much. Miles would be playing an intro, and I’d practically concertize behind him, filling up the space with flourishes and thick chords. A couple of times he walked over to the piano and mimicked cutting off my hands, to get me to shut up. I figured this was just Miles being Miles, but later I found out there was more serious intent behind it.
I kept filling up the space, always thinking about how I could enhance the song or push my limits further outward. But there were some moments when I wasn’t sure how to do that, or what was expected of me. So after a show one night, I decided to ask Miles about it.
“Miles, sometimes I just don’t know what to play,” I told him.
“Then don’t play nothin’,” he replied, not even looking up. Simple as that.
I had never thought of just not playing during a song. But as soon as Miles said the words, it made perfect sense. I realized that this was why he’d joked about cutting off my hands: The absence of an instrument changed a song’s sound as drastically as—if not more than—simply changing what that instrument was playing. This was classic Miles, teaching me something profound about music in just a couple of words.
The bassist Buster Williams told me about a similar experience when he first played some gigs with the quintet in the late 1960s:
The first week I’m with him, Miles is making me feel so comfortable. In intermissions, he’s spending the time talking with me about cars, clothes, that kind of thing. And then, when we were onstage, he’d just say, “Play your ass off, muthafucka!” He’d make me feel confident.
I had questions, so I decided to ask him one. I said, “Miles, everybody is so free on the bandstand. Herbie just lays out, and Tony looks like a big ball of smoke. And then you’re playing, and every now and then, something comes through heaven, through your head, and down through your horn. What do you want me to do? When everyone is playing so free, and the form is there and the changes are there, but you only know that because you know it. Nobody is locked into anything, so I’m not sure what to do. Should I stay with the changes? Should I be describing the foundation? Or can I be as free as everyone else?”
And Miles just looked at me w
ith that big smile. He said, “Buster, when they play fast, you play slow. And when they play slow, you play fast.” And somehow that actually cleared everything up, even though he still didn’t really tell me what to do.
This, too, was quintessential Miles: answering a question with a puzzle, and counting on you to figure it out. He would never hand out a pat answer when he could make you think instead. That’s the mark of a great teacher.
Once he was in a club listening to a group of young musicians play. They knew he was there, so naturally they wanted to impress him. When they finished, one young man walked over to Miles and said, “Mr. Davis, what did you think about the way I played?” Miles just looked at him and said, “Do you dance with your girlfriend like that? Do you kiss her like that?” The kid hadn’t played with any passion, but Miles would never say that directly. Instead, he wanted the kid to think about what passion was and to connect that feeling with what he should be doing with music.
Miles was always trying to stretch himself, too. Once when we were playing at a club in Detroit, he turned to Tony and me and asked, “Why don’t you play behind me the way you play behind George?” He had noticed that we tended to mix up the rhythms when George Coleman was soloing, and that our playing sounded freer as a result. We would “break up the time,” playing displaced rhythms, which tended to push the soloist into a freer interpretation of the song.
The reason we did that was because George was influenced by John Coltrane at the time, and Trane’s band was really out there in terms of rhythm and meter. George liked it when Tony and I played more unconventionally, because it opened him up, too. Then, when Miles came in to solo, Tony and I would revert to a more familiar path for whatever song we were playing. I’d been listening to Miles’s records for so many years that I assumed he’d want us to play like what we heard on the records. But it didn’t work like that. Miles wanted Tony and me to help him challenge himself.
When Miles asked us why we played differently behind George, Tony and I looked at each other in surprise and then promised him we’d mix it up behind him, too. And that night in Detroit, we did. I started creating different approaches, different atmospheres, than what Miles was used to. At first he struggled. He’d play a short spurt of a phrase—just start and stop—because Tony, Ron, and I were breaking up things underneath him. The palette he was accustomed to hearing wasn’t there, and it threw him off—I could tell by the way he was moving his shoulders, contorting his body to try to get on top of the rhythm.
Miles didn’t complain, so we just kept laying it down like that all night. His solos sounded kind of erratic, but the next night he told us he wanted more. We played even more unpredictably, but Miles handled it better and was able to play longer phrases. He was starting to get into it now. And by the third night he was tearing it up and I was the one jumping and jerking, trying to keep up with him. That night I realized we’d hit a whole new level, and that my function in playing was going to be different than what it had been before.
This was a step forward but, true to form, Miles wanted to push us even further. Mixing up the rhythm led me to play more open harmonies—but why couldn’t I play those anyway? Miles liked it when I played unconventional chords and harmonies, freeing up options for the soloist, regardless of the rhythm.
Playing in the quintet meant we were stretching and learning every day, but sometimes you could get into a rut. The solution was usually just to play through it, but one night as we were playing at the club Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike in Peabody, Massachusetts, I was really struggling, feeling like everything I played just sounded the same. Sensing my frustration, Miles came up behind me onstage and whispered five words into my ear: “Don’t play the butter notes.”
I had no idea what he meant, but I knew that if he’d bothered to say it, it was important. So I started to mull it over. What is butter? Butter is fat. Fat is excess. Was I playing to excess? Butter also could refer to something easy, or obvious. Like butter. Was there something obvious about how I’d been playing? If so, how could I change it?
Harmonically, the most obvious notes in a chord are the third and the seventh. Those are the notes that tell you whether it’s major or minor, and whether it’s dominant or tonic. So I started to think, What if I left out the third and the seventh? Just didn’t play them at all? It would certainly open up more possibilities. And because I wasn’t used to playing that way, it could lead me somewhere else entirely.
I decided to try it, not only on chords, which would be hard enough, but with improvised lines on my right hand, too. This would be really tricky, because it went against the grain of how I’d always played. But I was determined to do it. And because Miles always gave us free rein to try whatever we wanted, I knew he wouldn’t mind. In fact, I figured he’d be glad I was working on something new.
Because the quintet never rehearsed, I just began my experiment right up on the bandstand one night. I had to focus so hard that it was more like an exercise, like doing scales, than playing music. Everything I played was very erratic, and I had to stop myself frequently, because my fingers inevitably wanted to go to those third and seventh notes. I thought I sounded clumsy, but that night I got bigger applause than I had all week. People could feel that I was stretching, trying something new, and they liked it.
Normally a chord has three basic notes. When I took out the “butter notes,” instead of playing a full chord, I’d play one or two notes. Sometimes I’d play two notes right next to each other—seconds. But I never played the third and the seventh, so my chords left a lot open. This gave the soloist more room, giving him a lot more choices of direction. It sounded minimalist and unusual; more important for me, it opened up a whole new way of looking at music and the compositional element of improvisation.
Once I got accustomed to playing without butter notes, I could start playing them again. Because now they were no longer butter notes: I wasn’t playing them because I had to, like before. I was playing them because I wanted to. And that changed everything for me. All because Miles spoke those five little words.
The funny thing is, many years later I heard a rumor that Miles actually had told me, “Don’t play the bottom notes,” but I misheard it! Whatever the case, the five words I heard—or thought I heard, anyway—changed my life.
Tony Williams was just seventeen when he started playing with the quintet, and that posed a problem: He was too young to be in the clubs where we played. Miles told him to grow a mustache, but even then Tony still looked like the teenager he was.
Club owners tried a few tricks to make it legal. They’d rope off a section of the club for underage patrons, where people could only drink sodas. Or they’d stop selling alcohol altogether when Tony was onstage. We played one gig where Miles brought in another drummer for the first set, so people could get some booze into their systems, and then when Tony came on for the second set, the alcohol sales stopped. Some people at the no-alcohol gigs assumed it was because Miles took the music so seriously and wanted the room quiet, without the tinkling of ice in highball glasses. But it was really only because of Tony.
Miles loved the way Tony played, so he made other concessions for him, too. For the first couple of years we played all our tunes up-tempo, just flying through them, even ballads—everything was just boom-boom-boom, sometimes triple the normal tempo. This was exciting but exhausting, and one day we’d finally had enough, so we staged a revolt. Ron went to Miles and said, “It’s too much to play so fast every time. We need some slower-tempo numbers, and to play some ballads as ballads.” After that Miles started mixing it up a little bit.
At first I couldn’t figure out why Miles always wanted us to play so fast. But as I thought about it, I decided it was for Tony. In those early days of the quintet Tony wasn’t as comfortable playing medium and slow tempos, and because he was such a major component of the quintet’s sound, I think Miles wanted to play to his strengths while the rest of his
skills caught up. I never did ask Miles about it, so I could be wrong. But that’s the only conclusion I could come up with.
Miles and Tony had an intense relationship, both personally and professionally. Tony actually lived in an apartment Miles owned, a couple of floors above where Miles lived, and they’d sometimes get into confrontations over rent or loans. Tony could be a hothead, and he’d bump up against Miles like a young buck testing out his antlers. Sometimes they even stopped speaking to each other, and each would grumble about what the other had done. During those times Miles would snap, “Don’t ask me, ask him,” whenever we wanted to discuss something. But I wouldn’t have gotten in the middle of those two for all the tea in China.
Tony even dared to get on Miles about his playing, something I didn’t hear about until much later. Tony would study obsessively, learning everything he could about different styles, even to the point of memorizing all the parts of particular songs. He’d suddenly launch into a lecture on the “modal period of European harmony, going back to the twelfth century,” as if it were a topic we all had on the tips of our tongues. He worked so obsessively that he’d get irritated with Miles, who didn’t share his interest in rehearsing and studying.
“Man, why don’t you practice?” Tony would ask, as if there was nothing strange about a teenage drummer lecturing the greatest jazz trumpeter of his generation, a man old enough to be his father. Tony’s sole criterion for whether a person could critique another person was talent—not age, not experience, just talent. Years later, when Bryan Bell, who created and built much of my electronic music technology, told Tony he was a great drummer, Tony replied, “Bryan, you’re not good enough to make that judgment.”
Herbie Hancock Page 7