Herbie Hancock

by Herbie Hancock

  Just then Gigi walked in, and she looked absolutely gorgeous. She had a smile on her face, and she walked over and gave me a big hug and a kiss. We sat down, I poured the wine, and I asked her what was going on.

  She told me that during the time I was on tour, she’d gone on a little vacation with her friend Maria. While she was away, she had thought about our relationship and the fight we’d had. And she had come to a realization.

  “I realized that regardless of whatever else happens, I know you love me,” she said. “I trust that to be the truth.” I nodded, because it was true.

  “The second thing I realized was, I have been depending on you for my happiness,” she said. She told me she had been relying on me, and on our relationship, to give her purpose. And because I was away so much on tour, she felt empty much of the time. After our fight, she saw that she was putting pressure on our relationship—so much pressure that it was threatening to collapse. “I have to create my own life and be responsible for my own happiness,” she said.

  I could not believe what I’d just heard. But she meant every word of it. From that day forward she chose to trust in my feelings for her, and she became more independent, and more centered, than I could have imagined. She has such amazing strength of will that she was simply able to change her attitude. Our conversation that day released the pressure from our relationship, and it just got stronger and better from then on.

  Gigi taught me something that day. No person is responsible for another person’s happiness, and you can’t make a person into who you want him or her to be. You have to love her for who she is or look for somebody else. Gigi and I loved each other before that day, but now we were free to love each other for exactly who we were. I looked at her across the table and thought, Wow, I am a lucky man. I still think that.

  We decided to get married in the summer of 1968. I didn’t want a big, expensive wedding, so I said, “Okay, Gigi. You choose. We can either have a big wedding with a bunch of freeloading friends who’ll give us gifts we don’t want . . .” She was looking at me like I was crazy. “Or,” I went on, “we could fly first class to Brazil and live like a king and queen in a beautiful hotel on Copacabana Beach for two weeks.”

  “Where’s my ticket?” she said.

  We got married at New York City Hall on August 31, 1968, with my brother, Wayman, as our witness. And then we were off to Rio! We stayed at the Copacabana Palace, a gorgeous Art Deco−style hotel right across from the beach, and on our first night in Brazil we treated ourselves to dinner at the famous Ouro Verde restaurant. We drank champagne and ate oysters, and it was a fantastic night. Until we got back to our hotel.

  It must have been the oysters, because I was sick as a dog that whole first night. The next day I didn’t feel much better, so the hotel called a doctor for me. I knew that getting a doctor to make a house call would be more expensive than going to the hospital, but the dollar was strong at the time, so how bad could it be?

  Well, this doctor apparently knew he’d caught himself a live one. He examined me and said, “You must be very careful. Bacteria could get into your bloodstream, and you could get hepatitis.” He insisted on coming back the next day to see me again, and when I asked how much it would cost, he said, “Oh, nothing you can’t afford, don’t worry.”

  The doctor came back the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. Every day he convinced me that I was practically on the brink of death. “Your liver is very swollen,” he would say gravely. “You must rest. I will come back tomorrow.”

  This went on for our entire honeymoon. I spent the whole time in bed or resting on the beach, trying to make sure I didn’t get sicker. The doctor kept telling me I was in grave danger. And by the end of our two weeks he had the gall to say, “You are not ready to travel yet. Your liver is too big. You must stay here at least another week.” By now he had racked up thousands of dollars in fees from me, and he didn’t want to let his cash cow fly on home.

  I had gigs with the quintet coming up, and if I didn’t get back to New York, I was going to miss them. I called Miles and said, “Listen, man, I got food poisoning, and the doctor here is telling me I shouldn’t travel. So I won’t be home for another week.” Miles, of course, thought I just wanted to have an extra week in Rio with my beautiful new wife, so he wasn’t very happy about that. As it turned out, he’d also been suspecting for a while that I was planning to leave the quintet, so now he decided to make sure he had another piano player lined up.

  The truth was, I hadn’t made any plans to leave the quintet. I had been with Miles for five years, but I was still learning and still really enjoying playing with the guys. Being in the Miles Davis Quintet felt like the gig of a lifetime for a jazz player, so why would I quit? But Miles had noticed the work I had done on Speak Like a Child and Blow-Up, and he could see that I was developing my own style. I guess he figured it was just a matter of time before I realized I had to branch out, so he decided to beat me to it.

  The quintet played a couple of gigs while I was still in Brazil, and Miles hired the hot pianist Chick Corea to take my place. The next time I called Miles, a few days after those gigs, he just said, “Call Jack.”

  I called Jack Whittemore, Miles’s agent, and he said, “You know, Herbie, Miles is aware that you, Wayne, and Tony are all thinking about leaving the band.” He went on to explain that if all three of us departed at once, Miles would have to start another band from scratch, since Ron Carter had recently left. But if Miles could replace us one by one, he could integrate each new player into the existing sound and then continue uninterrupted from there. He wanted to take control of the situation.

  “Chick played a couple of gigs,” Jack said, “and he was good.” Not every piano player could step into the Miles Davis Quintet and hold his own, but Chick was more than capable. “Miles wants to bring Chick on while Wayne and Tony are still there,” Jack said, “but if you really object, if you really want to stay, Miles will consider it.”

  Well, I wasn’t too happy about getting pushed out of the quintet. On the other hand, I had my pride, and I wasn’t about to crawl to Miles and beg him to let me stay. My brain was racing, going through the scenario that Jack had presented me and considering my options. What should I do?

  I had been making my own records since 1962, and most of them were doing very well. The new music I was writing didn’t really fit the direction that Miles was going in, so it wasn’t right for the quintet. And with Speak Like a Child I had hit on a combination of instruments and a sound that I really wanted to explore. I suddenly realized that there were all kinds of reasons why it made sense for me to go out on my own, but I had never allowed myself to see that. I might have just stayed in the band forever if Miles hadn’t given me that push. Suddenly I was grateful for it.

  “Okay, Jack,” I said. “Tell Miles I’ll leave.” I hung up the phone and looked at Gigi.

  “That’s it,” I said. “It’s time for me to put my own band together.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  In November of 1968 the Herbie Hancock Sextet made its debut with a three-week engagement at the Village Vanguard. Right from the start other musicians thought I was crazy—why a sextet? As a piano player I could have just hired two guys and gone out with a trio, which would have been much cheaper. The bigger the band, the more guys I had to pay. Even Miles Davis had only a quintet, so who did I think I was, hiring so many players?

  But I wanted to continue exploring the three-horn sound I’d been able to develop on Speak Like a Child, so I hired saxophonist Clifford Jordan, trumpeter Johnny Coles, and trombonist Garnett Brown, and for the rhythm section I brought in Ron Carter and drummer Pete LaRoca. I knew it would be hard to make money, but thanks to Donald Byrd’s advice about publishing, I was getting royalties from “Watermelon Man,” which gave me a financial cushion.

  During our run at the Vanguard, Ron Carter couldn’t make all of the performa
nces because he was playing in a Broadway show. So I brought in the bassist Buster Williams, who’d been playing with the great jazz vocalist Nancy Wilson. Buster was a fantastic musician, and by the end of the gig we were really comfortable playing together, so I asked him to stay on. He was the first piece of the puzzle to fit—the only guy from that very first sextet gig who would continue with me into the Mwandishi era.

  I had one more album to do under my contract with Blue Note, so I began making plans to record with the sextet. But I started to realize that even though Blue Note was the preeminent jazz label, and very good at marketing to jazz fans, they really weren’t set up to support music that went beyond those boundaries. I wanted to expand further, both musically and in terms of finding an audience, so I decided that after this final record was done, I would try to land a major-label deal.

  The last record I did for Blue Note, The Prisoner, reflected the beginnings of my new musical directions. It was a concept album focusing on the struggle for civil rights. Like most black Americans, I was shattered by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April of 1968 and of Bobby Kennedy two months later. The Black Power movement was growing, and the U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos had raised their fists in a Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City that summer. Yet although I’d been emotionally invested in the civil rights movement, until now I’d never made any overt moves to get involved in it.

  Most of the songs on The Prisoner were about Martin Luther King, Jr., including the fourth track, “He Who Lives in Fear.” But as serious as its subject matter was, that song, like “Maiden Voyage,” had actually started out as an advertising jingle.

  I’d been hired to write music for a TV commercial for Silva Thins cigarettes. The ads featured a Mr. Cool−type character, a white guy in dark sunglasses and hip clothes who’s always snatching his cigarettes away from the beautiful girls hovering around him. In one ad he even throws the girl out of his sports car, because that’s how much he loves those cigarettes. Those ads would never fly today, but the Silva Thins print campaign was even worse, with the tagline “Cigarettes are like women. The best ones are thin and rich.” It’s no wonder that the late ’60s was a time of ferment not only for black empowerment but for women’s rights as well.

  Anyway, the advertising agency wanted cool, Miles Davis−style music, so I wrote a few bars and recorded it with six horns and a rhythm section. I really loved the sound of that jingle—it was intriguing and mysterious—so I decided to repurpose it as a song. (This was something I did often, as I wrote original music for dozens of ad campaigns over the years, for products like Pillsbury’s Space Food Sticks, Standard Oil, Tab soda, and Virginia Slims cigarettes.) The agency didn’t much like the idea, but I changed the harmonies, title, and tone and created “He Who Lives in Fear.”

  The Prisoner didn’t sell very well, but it’s a record that’s close to my heart, as it was the first one I made after leaving Miles and my first step toward a new, freer style of playing. I was soon able to land a new deal with Warner Bros., a big-label deal that I thought would help me in continuing to develop my own style.

  Fifteen years had passed since I first learned to improvise by copying George Shearing records. From the beginning, the goal was to move beyond imitation and find my own voice, and I felt that that was finally happening. Miles had been the guiding light to my growth, encouraging all of us in the band to develop our own styles of playing, and during my five and a half years in the quintet I did start to develop my own sound. But it wasn’t until I got out on my own that I felt I could really explore it.

  Now that I had my own sextet, I started thinking analytically about what actually goes on within a jazz group. At every moment onstage players are making choices, and each choice affects every other member of the group. So each player has to be prepared to change directions at any given moment—just as Miles did when I played that “wrong” chord onstage a few years earlier. Everybody in a jazz ensemble has learned the basic framework of harmony and scales and how they fit. They know the basic song structure of having the rhythm section—piano, bass, and drums—playing together while the horns carry the melody. But apart from those basics, jazz is incredibly broad. There are really uncountable ways of playing it.

  For the pianist alone there are so many choices to make: what pitch, how many notes, whether to play a chord or a line. I have ten fingers, and they’re in motion almost all the time, so all of those decisions must happen in an instant. I’m reacting to what the rest of the band is playing, but if I’m only reacting, then I’m not really making a choice; I’m just getting hit and being pushed along. Acting is making a choice, so all the players must be ready to act as well as react. The players have to be talented enough, and confident enough, to do both.

  I had watched Miles surround himself with amazing musicians and then give them the freedom to act. I wanted to do the same—but I also wanted to push beyond what we’d done in the quintet, into uncharted musical territories. In the quintet we had played with “controlled freedom.” Now I was ready to cut loose some of that control, but in the summer of 1969, in the midst of touring and playing and trying to manage all the details of the sextet as well as commercial work and possible new movie work, I needed help doing that. So I made a call to Bill Cosby.

  I first met Bill back in the spring of 1963, when I played the gig with Judy Henske at the Village Gate. Bill is a huge jazz fan, and he’d heard that Miles had hired me, so he came up to me after the gig to congratulate me. “Man, you’ve made it!” he said, clapping me on the back. “I’m so happy for you. I hope I get a break like that someday.” Bill had been doing stand-up comedy all over the country, including New York dates at the Bitter End, across the street from the Village Gate, but he hadn’t yet made it to the big time.

  Two years later, when I was in San Francisco with the quintet, I was standing on a corner near Union Square when a red Mercedes 300SL Gullwing pulled up. To my surprise, Bill Cosby stepped out with a big grin on his face.

  “Hey, man!” I said. “Whose car is this?”

  “It’s mine!”

  “No fucking way!” I just started laughing. That car was gorgeous.

  “Herbie, you won’t believe this,” he said. “I just got back from shooting in Hong Kong.” He told me he’d been hired to co-star with Robert Culp in a television show called I Spy—the first time a black man would be starring in a TV drama. In the two years since I’d seen him, Bill had been on The Tonight Show, released a comedy album with Warner Bros., and landed this TV role. He had gotten his big break, all right.

  And it just kept getting better for Bill. By the time I was touring with the sextet, in the spring of 1969, he had won three Emmys for I Spy and four Grammys for his comedy albums; he’d even charted an R&B song he recorded. Playboy magazine ran a long interview with him in May, and as I read it, one other detail caught my eye: Bill had a management company—and I desperately needed a manager.

  So I decided I’d give him a call. Even though the sextet wasn’t making any money, Bill loved jazz, so I hoped he’d agree to take us on. But when I reached him, he had another idea instead.

  “Listen,” Bill said, “I want you to write the music for this cartoon special I’m doing. It’s about Fat Albert, a kid in Philadelphia.” I mean, I didn’t even hesitate. A prime-time cartoon starring black characters? Created by a black comedian? This was a really big deal for 1969, so I jumped at Bill’s offer.

  I figured that if Fat Albert was from Philly, the music should be more R&B than jazz. And because I hadn’t been listening to much contemporary R&B, the first thing I did was go to a record store. I bought about fifteen James Brown−type records and then spent a couple of days listening to them over and over again. And then I started writing some music.

  We were scheduled to record in Los Angeles, so I asked around to find some funky musicians to add into the mix with the sextet. We w
ent heavy on the electric instruments, with me playing the Fender Rhodes and Buster Williams playing electric bass, and we added Eric Gale on guitar. After we’d laid everything down for the TV show, I asked Bill whether he’d mind if I put some of those songs on an album for Warner Bros. Bill was fine with the idea, so I brought back just the jazz musicians and recorded some of the songs again, leaning more toward R&B flavor than funk. I wanted to have some fun with it, so we called the record Fat Albert Rotunda, as a play on “rotund,” and the cover art was a drawing of a refrigerator with a bunch of food stuffed inside.

  The TV special Hey, Hey, Hey, It’s Fat Albert aired on November 12, 1969. It was just a one-shot deal, although three years later Bill Cosby would use those same characters to develop the Saturday-morning cartoon series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, which ran for thirteen years. Our record Fat Albert Rotunda sold about seventy-five thousand copies, which wasn’t bad for a jazz band but pretty small potatoes for Warner Bros.

  I was excited when Hey, Hey, Hey, It’s Fat Albert aired, but the real excitement had come the day before, when Gigi gave birth to our daughter, Jessica. We had been taking Lamaze classes together, learning all the breathing exercises, and the instructor told us we’d eventually be so familiar with what was going to happen in childbirth that when the time came, it would feel like we’d already been through it. That was true, but still, nothing can compare with what the mother experiences.

  When Gigi went into labor, I drove us to Woman’s Hospital at St. Luke’s, and the nurses got us situated in a delivery room. In the Lamaze class they’d taught us that the partner should deep-breathe along with the mother, to help her stay on track. Unfortunately that can lead to hyperventilation, so you’re supposed to have a paper bag with you to breathe into. I was breathing right along with Gigi, trying to help her out, until I got so dizzy, I had to breathe into that paper bag. I didn’t pass out, but I was definitely feeling woozy.