Herbie Hancock

by Herbie Hancock

  Bryan was a little taken aback, but he said, “Well, I enjoyed your performance.”

  To which Tony replied, “That, you can say.”

  Whenever Tony would get irritated with one of us in the quintet, he’d punish us by refusing to play when we soloed. He’d just drop right out, leaving you hanging, to teach you a lesson. Tony could be very temperamental and moody, but whatever problems his moods created were more than offset by his monstrous skills. And because he was so young, we gave him slack. He was a teenager playing with arguably the hottest band on the scene, and being thrust into that position puts a lot of pressure on a person. I’m not sure what Tony’s problem was, but I suspect at least part of it was the insecurity of having so much attention on him at such an early age.

  Tony and I became really close during our years with Miles. Before Wayne came along, he was my buddy in the band, the guy I talked most with about life, music, and everything else. He pushed himself relentlessly to become a better player and composer, and I learned as much from him as I did from anyone during that time. And as much as Tony believed in his own skills, I never knew him not to have a teacher. He was always studying, always learning.

  When Tony was composing songs for his first album, Life Time, he would sit at the piano and plunk out tunes with the index finger of each hand, like a kid learning to play. But he didn’t want to become a pianist—he just needed a way to work out melodies. I’d spend hours helping him, transcribing the melody he was playing and then using trial and error to figure out what harmonies he was looking for. Tony’s songs were complex, not like pop songs and not particularly singable.

  And Tony helped me by opening up my mind about other kinds of music. The age difference between us was only six years, but they were six crucial years, because like everyone born after 1945, Tony had grown up in the age of rock and roll. By the time rock music became really popular, I was already steeped in jazz, and jazz and classical were the only genres of music that I would listen to. I was a terrible music snob, and Tony—and Miles, who listened to everybody from Janis Joplin to James Brown to Cream—helped me get past that.

  Tony also taught me a lot about the cutting edges of jazz. He got into the avant-garde scene before I did, and he was more comfortable with the direction that music was heading in. I used to ask him a lot of questions, just to find out what influenced him. He had this ability to come up with new stuff, to draw sounds out of his drums that nobody had ever heard before. He was absolutely fearless when it came to music, and that fearlessness infused the rest of us in the quintet, too.

  One evening in Chicago, after we’d played a show at the Lyric Theatre, George Coleman came into the dressing room and said, “Hey, man—Billy Eckstine’s in his dressing room with some cats, and he’s been drinking. He’s saying some shit about Miles.” Eckstine was a legendary singer and the leader of the Billy Eckstine Orchestra, a seminal big band. He’d had some of the greatest musicians of all time in his band, including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, and Dexter Gordon—and years before, Miles had played in his band, too. What in the world was he saying about Miles now?

  “Come on,” George said, and he and I went down to Eckstine’s dressing room to see what was happening.

  Eckstine was really drunk, and he was going on about Miles—I can’t remember exactly what he was saying, but none of it was flattering. I guess someone told Miles, because a couple of minutes later he suddenly walked in the door. And Eckstine looked at him and blurted, “Hey, Inky!”

  Oh, my god, I thought, Miles is gonna go nuts! Eckstine was a light-skinned black man with light-colored eyes, considered a heartthrob—and of course Miles was famously dark-skinned. Calling out a darker man’s color like that was just not done, unless it was meant to provoke. I knew Miles had been a boxer, so I figured he was about to drop Eckstine to the floor. Some poor janitor was going to have to clean up Billy Eckstine’s blood tonight.

  But Miles didn’t say or do anything—he just let the comment go by. I couldn’t believe it! Someone insults Miles to his face, and he doesn’t even defend himself? I felt disappointed in him.

  The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized how much strength Miles had shown in that moment. Billy Eckstine was Miles’s elder, and he had given Miles a job back when he was just starting out. Miles was capable of breaking all kinds of rules, but he had a real code of ethics when it came to dealing with people. And the fact that he stood there and took it when Eckstine called him “Inky”—in front of a roomful of people!—was evidence of Miles’s strength, not of weakness. On the other hand, it was a good thing Eckstine wasn’t white, because Miles would have knocked him out.

  This was the thing about Miles: He looked so fierce, and cared so little about what others thought of him, that people didn’t see his softer side. I was intimidated by Miles at first—everybody was. But whenever we were in a hotel on the road, he’d call and invite us all up to his room, and we’d find a table loaded with food. He’d order up all kinds of dishes, and then he’d never touch them himself—he just wanted to make sure we were well fed. He cooked for us at his house, too. Once he sautéed dinner for us while wearing a tuxedo—no apron, no nothing. He had two kitchens in his house, and he was a great cook.

  There was a real lightness to Miles, especially when he was playing music. He loved to play, and he played like a stone skipping across a pond. It never felt like work to him, and he didn’t want it to feel that way for us, either. And it didn’t. It was too much fun to feel like work.

  CHAPTER SIX

  On Halloween night in 1964 my friend Larry Willis and I headed to the Village Gate, where the trumpeter Hugh Masekela was performing. Hugh was a friend of ours, but seeing him wasn’t the only reason we were going. On the way to the club I said to Larry, “Let’s pick up some girls.”

  I was twenty-four years old, playing in Miles Davis’s band, and had a hot car and my own apartment now, so picking up girls was the name of the game. Since moving to New York, I’d had a few girlfriends, but mostly I was having fun and sowing my wild oats. I was making up for lost time, really, because in high school and college I wasn’t exactly a ladies’ man.

  Although I’d dated a couple of girls in high school, I was still a virgin when I got to college. At Grinnell I went out with a few women, but the dating pool at a school of twelve hundred students in the middle of Iowa was a whole lot smaller than in New York City, which was filled with beautiful, interesting women. Now I was having way too much fun to settle down with anybody.

  So that Halloween night we were looking for some pretty girls to “talk to.” But Hughey came over to our table after his last set, and we got into a conversation and lost track of time. When we finally wrapped things up with him, the waiters were sweeping the floor and putting the chairs upside down on the tables, and all the women who’d been in the club were gone.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. And we started to walk out of the club.

  Except . . . there was one group of people left. A guy I knew named Bobby Packer, who was actually a waiter at the club but had taken the night off, was sitting at a table with three women. “Come on, Larry,” I said. “Bobby doesn’t need all three for himself. Let’s get over there.”

  As we walked up to the table I could see that two of the girls were pretty but one of them was really fine. She had jet-black hair, pale blue eyes, and an amazing figure. And there was something about the way she carried herself, a self-confidence, that was really sexy. Her name was Gigi, and I knew right away she was somebody I’d like to get to know.

  Unfortunately, she didn’t have the same feeling about me. I thought I was looking pretty sharp that night, in a gray silk suit and a leather jacket, but I also had a brand-new Nikon camera hanging on a strap around my neck. That summer I’d toured Japan with the quintet, and I guess I was still in tourist mode. As Gigi told me later, she looked at me and thought, That one’s kind of cu
te, but what a square!

  The six of us left the Village Gate and went to a bar called the Red Garter, where we had drinks and played cards. And even though Gigi wasn’t all that interested in me, one of the other girls, Effie, said, “Gigi’s having a dinner party at her place on Monday, and you’re all invited.” I said I’d go, mainly because I wanted to see Gigi again.

  What was it about Gigi? She was different from other women I’d met, so much more intriguing. She was gorgeous, but it wasn’t just her looks. She seemed feisty and strong, like my mother. She was brutally honest, no matter who she was talking to, and so full of energy and life that I couldn’t imagine there would ever be a dull moment with her around.

  Gigi had grown up in East Germany, and she didn’t know anything about jazz, a fact I liked. That first night, when I told her I was a musician, she said, “Ah, that’s nice. But what do you do for a living?”

  “That,” I said.

  “You play in a band?”

  “Yes, with Miles Davis.”

  “Who’s he?” she asked. She had never heard of Miles—and in fact, that night was the only time she’d ever set foot in a jazz club. She obviously wasn’t bowled over by my looks or my job, so I was going to have to find another way to make an impression. But at least I knew that if she did end up liking me, it wasn’t just because she was some kind of jazz groupie.

  That Monday I went to Gigi’s apartment for the dinner party. I got there a little late, and Gigi was tied up in conversation with another guy. I kept looking for a moment to approach her, but she always seemed to be talking with someone else. After a while I just gave up and started paying attention to her roommate, a woman named Kristin.

  Kristin was nice, but at a certain point, having failed to get Gigi’s attention throughout the party, I’d had enough. “I’ve got to go,” I said. “Thank you for dinner.” Kristin got up to walk me out, and just as we got to the door I heard Gigi’s voice from inside the apartment: “Kristin! You have a phone call!” Kristin went back inside to take it—and Gigi instantly appeared at my side. She walked me to the elevator, and I knew it was now or never. “I’d like to see you again,” I said. “Do you want to go to the movies sometime?”

  “Okay,” she said. “How about Wednesday?” And we made a date.

  When I stepped into the elevator, I was floating on air. All right! I said to myself. Thank goodness for the perfect timing of that phone call.

  But of course there was no phone call. Gigi had made it up to distract Kristin so she could walk me out herself. Sometime during the evening she had decided I was worth getting to know after all, so she had to act quickly when I started to leave unexpectedly. As I would soon learn, Gigi is not a woman who hesitates when she wants something.

  We started dating, and from the very beginning it was unlike any other relationship I’d ever had. Gigi always spoke her mind, and we challenged each other, like sparring partners. On one of our first dates we went to a bar and ended up in a heated disagreement. I don’t even recall what it was about, but I do remember the passion we argued with, and the exhilaration I felt just being with her.

  On another of our early dates Gigi invited me to dinner at her apartment. She was preparing coq au vin, but because she didn’t have the right wine, she ended up making “coq au whiskey.” It was delicious, and I thought, Wow—all this, and she can cook, too! But by the third or fourth time she made me dinner, it was still coq au vin, and she finally had to admit that it was the only dish she knew how to make.

  Gigi could always make me laugh, but she taught me a lot, too. She ran the film department at the American Federation of Arts, and she was well versed in visual arts, such as painting, sculpture, and photography—none of which I knew anything about. I had always been focused exclusively on music. But she introduced me to the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and other Pop artists of the sixties, as well as filmmakers like Fellini, Bergman, and Truffaut. In our relationship she was the eyes and I was the ears, and we never got tired of talking about our respective passions.

  There was so much I liked about her. We could talk for hours, and I always felt comfortable with her, right from the start. Our budding relationship wasn’t built on just sexual attraction, or on our comfort level together, or even on mutual admiration, though it had all those elements. It was the balance of them all that made me want to keep seeing her. And she made me feel special, too, because women loved her, men loved her—everybody loved her. But she was dating me.

  From the time I started playing with Miles, he had one rule when it came to women: “Don’t bring no bitches to the gig,” he said. “Everybody plays different.” We knew what he meant: Whenever a guy brings his girlfriend to a gig, he ends up playing to impress her. Miles wanted us to be completely free in our playing, not worrying about what somebody else might think.

  Every once in a while Miles could sense when one of us had a girlfriend in the room. “Where is she?” he’d say. “I know she’s here. Too much sugar in the music.” And he was always right. I wanted Gigi to hear us play, though, so I told her she could come to a gig but that I couldn’t bring her. We’d have to arrive separately, and I wouldn’t acknowledge her while I was playing.

  One night a few weeks after we started dating Gigi was supposed to come see us play at the Village Vanguard. I tried not to look for her, but of course I couldn’t help myself—I scanned the crowd throughout the first set and didn’t see her. When I couldn’t find her during the second set, either, I wondered what had happened. So during the break, I went to the club’s pay phone and dialed her number.

  She picked up, and her voice sounded husky, as if she’d been crying. “What happened?” I asked. “I thought you were coming tonight.”

  “Herbie,” she said, “I have to tell you something. We can’t see each other anymore. I’ve gotten engaged to someone else.”

  I don’t know what I expected to hear, but that wasn’t even on the list. I had no idea she had been seeing anybody else, but apparently she’d been dating a handsome, wealthy Persian businessman named Hamid, who lived in Paris but also had a place in New York. They would see each other when he came to town, and when he came that weekend, he asked her to marry him—and she said yes. She knew she’d have to tell me tonight that she couldn’t see me anymore, and she’d gotten upset. When I called, she was sitting in the bathtub, trying not to cry.

  I didn’t know what to say. Gigi and I had been seeing a lot of each other, but we hadn’t yet slept together or said “I love you.” I had to assume she loved this guy, and although I was really disappointed, I certainly didn’t want to stand in her way. So I just said, “Well, I wish you all the luck.” And I hung up.

  As I walked back onstage for the next set, my mind was a jumble. I tried to clear it out so I could play, but one thought kept popping back into my head. Despite feeling upset and disappointed, I realized that I wanted Gigi to be happy, whether that included me or not. If this other guy made her happy, then that’s what I wanted for her, because at that moment her happiness meant more to me than mine did. I had never felt that way about anyone before, and the feeling surprised me.

  Somehow I made it through the set. Mercifully, the evening was soon over, but as I walked back to the dressing room someone said, “Herbie, you have a phone call.” I went to the phone, and it was Gigi. She was crying.

  “I broke off the engagement,” she said. She told me that as soon as we’d hung up earlier, she had realized her mistake. “I don’t love him,” she said. “I love you.” This was the first time she’d said that to me, and I thought my heart might fly out of my chest. A few weeks later she moved in with me.

  That same fall Wayne Shorter joined the quintet. I had met Wayne back in 1961, when Donald Byrd invited us both to play on his record Free Form. Since then Wayne and I had run into each other from time to time. I knew he was a brilliant musician, but I didn’t know him very well
personally when he replaced Sam Rivers in September of 1964. Tony Williams and I had been scheming to get him in the band for months because of the way he played.

  Wayne was scheduled to join us for a two-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl called “Modern Sounds ’64,” where the quintet was playing as part of a lineup that included the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, João Gilberto, and Nina Simone. Miles flew Wayne out to Los Angeles, and we had just one rehearsal together before playing that first show. But it didn’t matter: From the minute Wayne stepped in, the magic started to flow.

  The beauty of Wayne was that he was just out there, as both a composer and a player. His mind works differently than anybody else’s I know, and he has a playfulness and curiosity that shine through in his music. Wayne was never afraid to break the rules and experiment. He’d do it just for fun, to keep things lively, but then he’d hit on something so brilliant you couldn’t imagine how he came up with it.

  Once we were all up onstage, just firing away—notes flying everywhere, Tony playing as if he had eight arms. I mean, we were really cooking. We got up to Wayne’s solo, and he was about to do what we called strolling, which meant that all the rest of us would drop out and he’d be playing completely alone, with no accompaniment. And suddenly Wayne started playing these weird, ghostly tones, blowing into the horn so you could hear the air going through with just the faintest suggestion of a note. When he started doing that, Tony and I just looked at each other like, Whoa! Where did that come from? It was strangely beautiful, almost like a whispering. I’d never heard anything like it.

  Miles loved it, of course, because he always wanted us to experiment and push the limits of our playing. He expected all of us to continuously create, without having to lean on him or anyone else. The one thing none of us ever wanted to hear was “Oh, that guy’s skating”—when you were playing with Miles, the word “skate” was not in the dictionary. Wayne really responded to that creative autonomy, because the band he’d just left, the Jazz Messengers, was more tightly run. He loved the freedom of being able to push boundaries.