Herbie Hancock

by Herbie Hancock

  We spent three days in Hollywood recording songs for the quintet’s new album, E.S.P. As always, Miles wanted to keep things fresh, so the first take where we made it all the way through the melody was the one that would go on the record. We recorded Ron Carter’s song “Eighty-One,” and afterward we went into the booth for the playback. Just as the song was fading out at the end, all of a sudden I heard myself playing the rhythm I’d written on the plane! “Wait!” I said to the sound engineer. “Roll that back—I want to write that down.” I had played the rhythm unconsciously, not even realizing it until I listened to the recording afterward.

  I didn’t originally intend to turn that rhythm into a jazz song—I actually needed it for a TV jingle. At the time I was doing some commercial work for a jingle house called Herman Edel Associates, and they’d hired me to create music for a TV ad for a Yardley men’s cologne. The ad was supposed to be set in a sophisticated jazz club, but I knew that if I wrote real jazz, it would be too much for the TV-viewing public. I needed to create a jingle with a rhythm people could follow, something closer to rock than to jazz.

  In most rock music there’s a backbeat, meaning the accent is on the second and fourth beats. When you’re listening to a rock song, those are the beats when you clap. I didn’t want to do a straight-up backbeat, but I needed to find a rhythm that was palatable to the average taste, and as soon as that rhythm popped into my head on the plane I knew it would work. It was slightly more complex than a simple backbeat but not so out there that people would get turned off.

  When I got back to New York, I started working on the jingle. I wrote the first chord, then the second, then the third . . . and then I got stuck. I couldn’t figure out where to go next. I kept playing the first three chords over and over, then trying out different chords for the resolving fourth, but no matter what I tried, nothing seemed to work. I stayed up late into the night, trying to hammer something out, but I just got more and more frustrated. I couldn’t seem to answer the question Where does the song go from here?

  I finally gave up and decided to sleep on it. But when I crawled into bed with Gigi, she said, “Did you finish?”

  “No,” I said. “I couldn’t figure it out. I’ll get up in the morning and do it.” The finished jingle was due to Herman Edel the next day.

  Gigi turned to me and said, “Herbie, get out of bed. You’re not going to sleep until this is done. Go! Finish it now!”

  I couldn’t believe Gigi was throwing me out of bed, but of course she was right—I’d always had a hard time waking up in the morning, much less writing music. So I went back to the piano, frustrated and tired, and tried to think of another way to approach the problem.

  At that moment something in my head told me to stop trying so hard and just listen to what the song was telling me. I played those first chords again—and suddenly I got it! The first two chords should also be the last two chords. So what would normally be the ending chord—the cadence—would actually be cycling back around to the opening. The song would be structured like a spiral.

  This seemed like a simple solution, but at the time you never heard jazz tunes where the chord structure didn’t land anywhere but just kept spiraling. Most songs end up settling in a home key, but this one never did. I loved that spiral structure, even though I’d only written it for a jingle.

  The agency ended up making some changes, stripping down the drums and changing the bass to something more tango-oriented. But the ad got made, and that might have been the end of the story for that jingle—except that I couldn’t get it out of my head.

  Throughout my time with Miles I continued to make my own records for Blue Note, and I was scheduled to go into the studio for a new one. I really wanted to turn that jingle’s rhythm into a jazz composition for the record, so I decided to reverse the changes the agency had made, taking out the tango elements and putting the drums back in. The song was a little more hard-core after that, with a totally different feel.

  In March of 1965 I went into the studio with Ron and Tony and also got George Coleman and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. We laid down five tracks, and that song was the first. But I wasn’t sure what to call it, so on the master we just labeled it “TV Jingle.” The song felt important to me, so it was worth searching to get the right title. Blue Note was eager to release the record, but I kept putting them off while I played the song for everybody who came over, asking them what they thought the title should be. But as the weeks kept ticking by, nothing felt right. Then one night my sister, Jean, came over for a visit with a friend of hers.

  Jean was in her early twenties now, working for American Airlines in the tariff office. For a short time she had been a flight attendant—one of the first black flight attendants—but when she developed late acne, the airline switched her to a desk job; this was back in the days when a company could hire and fire based on looks. Jean was living and working in New York, so we saw each other a lot.

  Anyway, I played the whole record for Jean and her friend, and when it was finished, Jean’s friend said, “It kind of reminds me of water.” And I thought, Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? Then she said, “That first song sounds like a voyage. Like a maiden voyage.” And I just screamed and clapped my hands. That was it! As soon as the words came out of her mouth, I knew that was the name.

  “Maiden Voyage” was a perfect, timeless image. And its ocean-based theme tied the whole record together, giving deeper meaning to other songs on the album, like “Eye of the Hurricane” and “Dolphin Dance.” I called the executives at Blue Note and told them the song’s title, and they used it for the album title, too. In May of 1965 Maiden Voyage was released, and the song, with its unusual spiral structure, ended up becoming a jazz standard.

  That song meant a lot to me, and it still does. Whenever I play solo piano, it’s my go-to song—if I’m playing only one, that’s the one I’ll choose. And of course it’s also kind of a dedication to Gigi, since she’s the one who made me get my ass up out of bed and finish it.

  In December of 1965 the quintet was flying to Chicago for a gig at the Plugged Nickel nightclub. Miles had spent much of the summer and fall recovering from hip surgery in April, then a broken leg in August, but by late fall we were back on track, playing gigs in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., before heading to Chicago for the holidays.

  By now Miles, Ron, Tony, Wayne, and I had been performing in the quintet for more than a year, and we’d gotten so cohesive as a band that it had become easy to play together. We had figured out a formula for making it work, but of course playing by formula was exactly the opposite of what we wanted to do. We needed to put the challenge back in, to figure out ways to take more risks. I had noticed that our playing had gotten a little too comfortable, but on the flight to Chicago it was Tony who started the conversation.

  “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Let’s play some anti-music.” He wanted us to promise that during our sets at the Plugged Nickel, whatever anybody in the band expected us to play, we would play the opposite. Some people have suggested that Tony was trying to sabotage the band by doing this, but really he was only trying to sabotage our comfort level, to break us open again. It was just another step in trying to push our boundaries as musicians and as a band.

  When we walked into the club, I saw that they were set up to record us. “Oh, shit,” I said to Tony. “Should we really do this now?” We hadn’t said anything to Miles about our experiment, and I was worried we weren’t going to sound very good. But Tony, always fearless, said, “Hell yes. Let’s do it.”

  Just before the first set, we told Ron and Wayne—but not Miles—what we were up to. They were both down with it, so from the moment Miles counted off the first song, I started focusing on how I could play against expectation. Whenever a song would build up, getting to a natural peak, the natural inclination would be to push it over the top—but instead I would suddenly bring it down with one quiet note. Tony did the same,
building up his playing in volume and intensity, and then, instead of hitting the bass drum, he’d gently tap the cymbal. We did the opposite, too, suddenly ratcheting up the intensity just as a tune was winding down. I couldn’t imagine that it sounded very good, but it certainly made us challenge our thinking and our choices.

  We knew we were using the audience as guinea pigs for our experiment, but this was a way to break the habits we had formed—by destroying the structure, then picking up the pieces and building something new. Whenever I glanced out into the audience, I saw what looked like confusion on people’s faces. They knew something was happening, but they weren’t sure what. So they just kept on drinking cocktails and smoking cigarettes, and we kept on playing as the recorders rolled.

  And you know, Miles never said a word about it. He knew better than anyone that something strange was going on, but he never asked us, and we never told him. He just went with it. And he was brilliant! Wayne was, too. I actually felt as if I were fishing throughout those sets—I had some moments here and there, but I didn’t shine the way Miles and Wayne did. In fact, at the end of the first night, when the soundman asked us if we wanted to listen, I said, “No way!” I thought it would sound like a disaster. I figured, we’d done it, we’d carved out some new territory, and now it was time to move on.

  Seventeen years later, when Columbia released some of the recordings as Live at the Plugged Nickel, a friend called me to ask if I’d heard it. “No,” I said. “And I don’t think I want to hear it.” He told me I should, because there was some good stuff on there. But I still resisted.

  Finally, a couple of weeks after the record came out, I mustered up the courage to give it a listen. There was so much going on, and it sounded so little like what I remembered, that I was shocked. I really liked it, but I’m not even sure I could explain why. I would call it profound, except that the word “profound,” to me, implies something that’s deep and elegant. This was not elegant. This was naked and had guts. It was raw. To this day, when I hear recordings from the Plugged Nickel, I’m knocked out by their sheer raw intensity and honesty.

  In early 1966 I got a call from Lionel Hampton. He told me that Benny Goodman was doing a couple of gigs and he wanted me to play piano for him.

  My first thought was that Benny Goodman was famous for swing music from the ’30s. He was a legend, but did it really make sense for me to go backward in that way? But another voice in my head said, How cool is that! I knew Benny was a great clarinetist, and I was curious about how I’d respond to his kind of music. I told Miles about the offer, and he just said, “Take it. He’s a great player.” So I agreed to do it. The band consisted of Benny, who was fifty-seven at the time, eighty-year-old trumpeter Doc Cheatham, guitarist Les Spann, drummer Morey Feld, bassist Al Hall, and the vocalist Annette Saunders.

  And I’ll tell you something—Benny could play. I threw a couple of curves in there, nothing out of context but not your usual rhythms, and he just tore right through them. Every time I’d push a little bit to the edge, Benny would run with it, sometimes doing things I’d never heard a clarinetist do. I had judged him based on the kind of music he usually played, but his scope was much greater than I ever expected. He surprised me, and we had a really great time playing those gigs. It was cool.

  I wasn’t completely sure how Benny felt about my playing, but a week or so later Lionel Hampton called me again, to try to convince me to quit Miles’s band and join Benny’s. I was really flattered to get that call, though of course I didn’t want to leave the quintet. But the whole experience of playing with Benny and getting that offer was so much more than my young mind had imagined. I was really glad I’d taken the leap despite my misgivings.

  In the meantime, back with the quintet, Miles kept pushing me to explore my limits. One day, as we were getting ready to record the album Miles Smiles, he rasped, “Herbie, stop using your left hand.”

  What? I only had two hands, so to stop using one was a pretty drastic step. But Miles must have had his reasons, so I dropped my left hand to my side. Now it would be me playing one line with my right hand, Ron Carter playing another line on bass, and Tony playing the percussion. Normally I used my left hand to impose a harmonic structure on the song, but one-handed I couldn’t do that. And that opened up a lot of space within the song, which was exactly what Miles was looking for.

  At first my left hand constantly wanted to jump in to cover up space. It was hard to get used to, but playing differently made me hear the song differently, and my right hand responded with new lines. I hadn’t even realized it, but I had been staying glued to more standard rhythmic and harmonic placement, because my right hand had been leaning on my left. But now my right hand had all this free space to work with. It was a revelation.

  When Miles made that suggestion, I’d thought it was just random. But looking back, I believe he actually could tell that my left hand was holding back my right. Yet he knew that if he said it to me like that, it would have affected my confidence, so he spoke to me in a way that allowed me to figure it out for myself. And he did it, as usual, in very few words.

  This was such a liberating experience that even after we recorded Miles Smiles, I kept playing one-handed at gigs, my left hand just hanging at my side. There seemed to be no end to the ways in which we could shake things up in that band, and we never got tired of exploring them.

  One weekend Gigi and I drove to Long Island to hang out with some friends. When we got back, I called my phone service and was told that someone from England was trying to reach me. The person had left a number, so I tried calling back, but somehow I never could get through. It was pretty unusual to be getting random calls from Europe, so I was curious as to what it was about.

  A couple of days later a secretary at the publishing company 3M Music called. “Oh, we’ve been trying to reach you, Mr. Hancock,” she said. “Mr. Michelangelo Antonioni is doing a movie, and he’d like to know if you’d be interested in doing the score for it.”

  “Who’s he?” I asked. She said that he was a big-shot Italian film director and he was making his first movie in English.

  “Are you interested?” she asked, and I told her yes, absolutely. I couldn’t believe an Italian director had even heard of me, much less asked me to score his film—I was just a sideman in Miles’s band, and sidemen almost never got offered this kind of work. But it turned out that Antonioni was a big jazz fan. He knew my records, and he wanted me, even though I’d never done a movie score before.

  So 3M Music bought me a first-class ticket to fly to London for a private screening of the film. I had never flown first-class, and it was really nice: tablecloths, beautiful silverware, Beluga caviar, Dom Pérignon champagne, incredible service. I was feeling pretty good by the time I got to the screening, which was to be the first time any of the executives had seen the film. Antonioni had complete artistic control over the movie, so the execs were eager to see how it looked.

  I walked into the screening room and saw the tall, slim, elegantly dressed Antonioni. I introduced myself, but we didn’t have time to talk before the lights went down and the screening started. Everything was beautifully shot, but I had no idea what I was looking at. There was a series of events involving a hotshot young photographer and some beautiful women, but there didn’t seem to be a standard plot or traditional narrative storytelling. There were scenes from London in the swinging ’60s—rock and roll, people smoking weed, wild parties. And the end of the movie was puzzling, a very long scene in a park with a bunch of mimes playing imaginary tennis.

  I’m sitting there in the dark thinking, Oh, shit. What is this about? I didn’t understand this movie at all—how in the world could I write music for it? When the lights went up, I did the diplomatic thing, just smiling and nodding my head a lot. The one comfort was that nobody else in the room seemed to have a clue what was going on, either, but we all looked very happy.

  The production company
got me a suite at the five-star Berkeley Hotel, near Hyde Park, and I lived there in luxury for the next few weeks. I worked hard, but I had swinging London right outside my door, so I played hard, too. I went to parties with royalty and hung out with a guitar player who knew all the hot places to go. We’d sometimes play sets at parties, surrounded by girls with very nice luggage. I was in love with Gigi, but I was also a twenty-six-year-old musician on the road, so I didn’t mind checking out the local “birds,” as everybody in London seemed to call them.

  In the meantime, I spent hours trying to create the right music for the film, which Antonioni titled Blow-Up. Antonioni had told me he only wanted source music, meaning music that has an actual source in the film. So if a character turns on a radio, or is standing in an elevator with music piped in, or is watching a live band in a club, there’s music. But I wouldn’t be writing any purely atmospheric or background music.

  I asked some of the crew members what they thought the movie was about, and I got a lot of different answers. I wanted to ask Antonioni himself, of course, but he was too busy to meet with me. By then I understood that even though the average American moviegoer didn’t know Antonioni yet, in Italy he was as revered as Fellini, so I was even more eager to get his thoughts. Finally, a few weeks into my stay, Antonioni invited me to have dinner with him in his suite at the Dorchester Hotel. His English was good, but he brought an interpreter so we could have a more detailed discussion.

  I got right to the point. “You know, people on the crew are all coming up with different ideas about what the film is about,” I said. “So I want to be sure exactly what you have in mind.” I told him a few of the theories I’d heard and asked him which one was right, hoping his answer would guide me in writing the score.