But Antonioni said, “All of them. I just put the events together, and the viewer can make his own interpretation of what it is.” I wasn’t sure that his answer would help me much, but I did think it was bold of Antonioni to throw his movie so wide open like that.
A minute later Antonioni looked across the table intently and asked me, “’Erbie—what is art?”
I thought, Well, I’m done for now. The master is asking me, What is art? I was intimidated by Antonioni, because he seemed so fearless and certain in his artistic vision. I had been pretty happy with my progress in writing the score so far, but I had no idea what to say when he asked me this question.
He saw that I was struggling, so he answered for me. “There is no such thing as art,” he said. “There is only this painting, this piece of music, that sculpture. And it either resonates with you or it doesn’t.” He paused for a moment, then added, “There is no such thing as art—there are only works.”
I suddenly understood what he was saying. There was no monolithic “art,” because no one term could encompass all the varied works that move people. It was pointless to try to create one giant category for them, because people responded differently, or sometimes not at all, to different works. Antonioni was putting power in the hands of the viewer, not the critic or the culture—which tied in perfectly with that first moment when he said every interpretation of his film was correct. In both cases, Antonioni was trying to give power to the audience.
Antonioni creates a film that’s provocative, and if it’s provocative enough, then there will be many different interpretations of it. That’s why, if you see an Antonioni film ten times, you may come away with ten different interpretations of it. When you go to a film and it’s all laid out for you, there’s nothing to discuss—you walk out of the film, and the film walks out of you. But the end of an Antonioni film is really a beginning, a springboard for further reflection and discussion.
In those two moments Antonioni taught me something profound. He wasn’t standing on top of some ivory tower, dictating how people should feel. Instead he was letting inspiration guide him, simply putting elements out there for people to create whatever they wanted. This was a brilliant strategy for film, and I realized it also had a direct parallel with music. Sometimes a song is painful, or difficult to swallow. But then if you listen to it again, in another emotional state, it may create a very different impression.
The best music is stimulating, in the sense that it stimulates the listener’s creativity. It allows the listener to make his or her own interpretation, to be part of the story. It’s never easy to let go, but the lesson I took from Antonioni was that, in film and music and art, letting go of control reveals whole new levels for both the artist and the audience. I resolved to try and do that more with my music.
When it was time to record the soundtrack, I had to get suggestions on whom to hire, since I didn’t know any jazz musicians in England. We got a trumpet player I’d heard of, but everybody else came by recommendation, and when we started recording, I realized we had a problem. I had been living in New York, playing with the top jazz musicians in the world, and the ones in London weren’t quite up to the task. The studio recordings we made in London weren’t very good and didn’t represent the music I had in my head. I played them for Antonioni, but we both knew they weren’t of high enough quality to use in the movie. We needed to record the score again, with better musicians.
The trouble was, because we were filming the movie in England, the film company needed us to use musicians from the British Commonwealth, for tax purposes. So we figured out a little scheme. I told Antonioni I would fly to Canada—part of the British Commonwealth—and record the music there, with Canadian musicians. And I did in fact fly to Toronto and make recordings there, even though I knew already we weren’t going to use them. I never told the Canadian guys that, of course, but as soon as I could, I hopped on a flight from Toronto to New York.
In New York I got all the top musicians into the studio as fast as I could—Jack DeJohnette, Ron Carter, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson. We recorded the score, and I put those tapes in the boxes marked “Canada” and then flew back to London. I handed them over to Antonioni, and as soon as he listened to them, he knew! “Is that Joe Henderson?” he asked, his eyes lighting up. “And Jack DeJohnette?” He was such a huge jazz fan, he could tell who was playing by the sounds of their instruments and the way they played.
I felt bad misleading the Canadian musicians, but in the ’60s there really was a vast gap between the quality of American jazz musicianship and that of the rest of the world. In order to give Antonioni the level of music he wanted, I had no choice but to use New York musicians, who fortunately didn’t care a thing about getting credit. Eventually, when the Blow-Up soundtrack was released, the New York musicians were listed on it, so the secret was out. But for a long time only Antonioni and I knew.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A few years before I joined the Miles Davis Quintet, I heard a record Miles had done with the arranger Gil Evans. It was called Miles Ahead, and the first time I listened to it I found myself in tears, the songs and arrangements were so gorgeous. I must have played it five times in a row that first day—it was the most beautiful record I had ever heard. To this day Miles Ahead is one of my all-time favorites. I still cry when I listen to it, and I’m not a guy who cries, ever . . . well, not often, anyway.
The genius of Gil Evans was that the sound he created with brass and woodwinds was like that of a full orchestra. He wrote classical references into his arrangements, both traditionally orchestral and harmonically contemporary, and the way he melded them was achingly lovely. Throughout my time with Miles, that influence grew on me.
When it came time to do my next record after Maiden Voyage, I wanted to capture the essence of the Gil Evans sound. But instead of doing it with the same instrumentation Gil did, I decided to set myself a challenge, to try something impossible: What was the smallest number of horns I could use and still get the essence of that sound?
I figured I would need at least six horns to capture some of its key colors and nuances, so . . . could I do it with five horns? That would be more difficult, but it still didn’t seem like enough of a challenge. What about four? That would be really hard, and it was probably the least number that could actually work. If four was the smallest workable number, then I had to push it one more step, to do the impossible. I decided to use just three horns.
But which three? If there was any hope of creating a rich, orchestral sound, each horn would have to serve as its own section, and all three horns would have to be able to play on either top or bottom—that way I’d have more colors to work with. I picked the alto flute and the fluegelhorn, but I wasn’t sure what the third horn should be. Miles said two words, “Bass trombone,” which is essentially a regular trombone with a bigger bell and some extra tubing to get lower registers. So that’s what I chose.
Now I had the instruments. But what was I getting myself into? I called my friend Joe Zawinul, the great pianist and composer (who later went on to co-found Weather Report with Wayne Shorter), and told him what I was trying to do. “You got any tips?” I asked him. I would need all the tricks and devices I could find to get the fullness of sound I wanted.
In listening to Gil’s arrangements, I could hear the bass playing little countermelodies. Gil sometimes doubled these with a tuba, which wasn’t typical of big-band writing, but it gave the sound more heft. I wanted to do something similar, but if I had the trombone player double the bass, then I’d have only two other horns to create the rest of the palette. I also noticed that Gil had certain colors that, when standing alone, sounded like a clash of harmonies, but in the flow of the music they didn’t clash at all. How did he do it?
I was getting up in my own head about everything, so Joe said, “Herbie, here’s what you have to do. First you have to get away from the piano.” He told me to write the
arrangements without sitting at the piano, just hearing the various instruments in my head. “If you do that,” he told me, “you won’t be just duplicating your piano lines.” I had never written an arrangement that way, so it wasn’t going to be easy.
“Next,” Joe said, “make every line that each horn plays a singable melody.” Normally a composer would write vertical harmonies for the two horns that weren’t playing the melody, but Joe’s idea was to create melodies for them, too. “Even if the melodies clash vertically with the harmony,” Joe said, “the strength of the singable melody will pass right by. The clashes won’t sound like clashes—they’ll sound like spices to the ear.” I wasn’t so sure, but Joe just said, “Trust me. It will work.”
Writing the arrangements for that record, Speak Like a Child, was like solving a puzzle. I used every device I could think of, layering in different melodies, scales, and trills. Most listeners probably never noticed the influence of Gil Evans on that record, but it was very clear to me. I just loved the colors we got out of those three horns, and I began to think that when eventually I started my own band, that was the instrumentation I’d like to have.
Little did I know it, but that day was coming soon.
In May of 1968, two months after Speak Like a Child was released, the quintet went into CBS Studios to finish recording our new album, Miles in the Sky. On our last day of recording, May 17, I walked into the studio and there was no piano for me to play. At first I didn’t say anything, figuring someone would take care of that little oversight. When that didn’t happen, I finally said, “Miles, what am I supposed to play?”
“Play that,” he said, and nodded toward a Fender Rhodes electric piano in the corner.
Even though I’d always loved electronics and mechanical gadgets, I had no interest in playing electric piano. The conventional attitude, shared by most jazz musicians and particularly by piano players, was that they were cute but not substantial. There was no way they could produce the full, rich sound of a real piano, so why bother with them? They were gimmicks.
So when Miles said he wanted me to play the Fender Rhodes, I wasn’t too happy about it. I thought, You really want me to play this toy? I walked over, flipped it on, and played a chord. And, to my surprise, I thought it sounded kind of cool. It was prettier than I had anticipated, even if it didn’t have the same fullness or depth of an acoustic piano. I played around a little bit and then decided to have some fun by turning up the volume as loud as it would go.
I played a chord, and it was LOUD. And I suddenly realized that if I played this electric piano, Tony wouldn’t have to back down from his intensity and volume when I soloed. No matter how hard I hit the keys on an acoustic piano, he always had to pull back so he didn’t drown me out. But on the electric piano I could play really loud without even putting any more pressure on the keys—all I had to do was turn a knob. Suddenly I felt excited to play this instrument that I had been so ready to dismiss.
I learned something that day, and not just about the electric piano. I had formed a judgment based on the opinions of others, rather than on my own experience. I had locked the door for no reason at all and almost missed out on an exciting new musical experience because of it. This was one more step in overcoming my musical snobbery, and I vowed not to forget it.
I had actually started listening to electronic music a few years earlier, when Tony Williams turned me on to the German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Tony had broadened my musical horizons over the years, introducing me to artists like Alban Berg, John Cage, and Paul Hindemith. I was always asking him, “What are you listening to?” because I knew I’d learn something. And one day his answer was to play me Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, one of the first great works of electronic music.
In Gesang der Jünglinge Stockhausen used sine waves and clicking noises to form a mesmerizing electronic tableau. When I first heard those sounds, I felt drawn to them, though I didn’t really investigate how he’d created them, since I wasn’t interested in making electronic music myself. Stockhausen’s work was often categorized as classical, but it fell on a continuum of avant-garde music that intrigued me, a continuum that stretched from Stravinsky and Bartók all the way to Jerry Garcia.
One evening in 1966 I was performing with a trio at the Village Vanguard. The club was in a basement, and during a break I was walking up the stairs with another musician when a guy came chasing after me. He said, “There’s a musician from the classical scene here who liked the way you played. He wants to meet you.” I was always curious to meet classical players, so I said, “Great! Who is it?” And the guy said, “Karlheinz Stockhausen.”
I flipped out. I was so excited to meet him that I went running right back down the stairs. We talked for a while, and I told him I was a big fan of his work. He said, “I’m writing a piece using the national anthems of various countries. Would you record the U.S. national anthem for me?” He wanted me to put my version on tape, and he would then manipulate the tape to get the sound he wanted. I was really excited to do it, but between one thing and another I didn’t get it done in time. Stockhausen created that piece, called Hymnen, over a two-year period, and it premiered in November of 1967.
The late sixties was an exploratory period, and Miles telling me to “play that” Fender Rhodes was part of his own leap into that exploration. Miles in the Sky was the first record he made with electric instruments, and he never made another all-acoustic record again. And, thanks to him, I discovered an unexpected love for electronic instruments that would change the way I made music.
By the summer of 1968 Gigi and I had been together for almost four years. We loved each other, but our relationship hadn’t been completely smooth sailing during that time. One of the roughest spots had come a couple of years earlier, in the summer of 1966, when she nearly left me after an incident in Denmark.
The quintet was touring Europe, and Gigi had taken time off from work to come along for part of it. I liked having her with me, but I also wanted to do my own thing sometimes. I had never been abroad before joining Miles, and suddenly we were traveling all over the world, so I wanted to explore and experience everything I could.
One night in Copenhagen a group of Danes invited the band to have drinks after the show. I was always up for that, so we headed out into the night and proceeded to drink our way through the city. I had a pretty high tolerance for alcohol, but the Danish just take it to a different level altogether. I made the mistake of trying to keep up, and by the time I got back to our hotel I was really tanked.
Gigi helped me into the bathroom and started filling the tub, so I could have a bath and pull myself together. But I was too far gone—I threw up all over the place, and she just left the bathroom, disgusted. To my surprise, she went right to the phone by the bed and called the concierge for help booking a plane ticket. “I’m going back to New York, Herbie,” she yelled to me in the bathroom. “That’s it. I’m done.”
She was angry about the state I was in, but she was also angry about the state of our relationship. We had been living together for two years by then, and even though attitudes were changing, most people in the 1960s still frowned on unmarried couples living together. My mother had a very Victorian attitude about it, which she made known. And Gigi felt uncomfortable checking into hotels with me as my girlfriend. She figured that people would notice the absence of a ring on her finger and assume she was either a loose woman or a hooker.
Gigi was also painfully aware that neither my mother nor my sister liked the fact that I had a white girlfriend. A lot of black women felt that way, and some still do. My sister, Jean, would say, right in front of Gigi, “How come all the nice, well-to-do black men end up with white women?” She was resentful, and she made sure Gigi knew it.
I knew that marrying Gigi would make things easier for her, but I was nervous. Because Gigi was European I wasn’t sure she really understood what it meant for a whi
te woman to marry a black man in America. A white American girl would have grown up understanding how deeply entrenched American racism was; she would know what to expect. But what would happen when Gigi had to face that ugly underside of American society? She had never seriously dated a black guy before me, so I’d decided it was best to wait a while, to make sure she knew what she was getting into.
But in that hotel room in Copenhagen Gigi decided she’d had enough. When I heard her making arrangements to fly back to New York, I managed to pull myself together enough to come out of the bathroom. “Gigi, come on. Please don’t do this,” I said to her. She just shook her head, still angry. So then I said, “Let’s get married.”
It wasn’t the most romantic proposal in the world, but Gigi said yes. We called a jeweler the next day, and he came down to the hotel with a tray of rings. We picked out two simple bands and bought them—but even so, I still wasn’t quite ready to marry Gigi.
I was twenty-six when we got engaged, and although I knew Gigi was the woman I wanted to spend my life with, I wanted to be free to have more experiences, to not feel tied down yet. Let’s put it this way: I wasn’t a skirt-chaser, but I did like skirts. Whenever the quintet traveled, I liked to feel that I was allowed a certain degree of freedom.
Gigi struggled with this, and about a year after we got engaged we had a big fight about it. The quintet was about to go on tour, and she and I had it out before I left. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I also wasn’t ready to make the kind of promises that she needed. The whole time on the road I dreaded coming back to New York. I figured we would fall right back into the same argument, and I didn’t know how to resolve it.
When I got back home, I walked into the apartment like I was walking on eggshells. To my surprise, the lights were dimmed and there were candles on the dining room table. My favorite dinner was waiting, and a bottle of very expensive wine. What in the world was this? Was it a peace offering, or was Gigi about to kill me?
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