Gigi was in the final stage of labor for two hours, which is longer than normal. The doctor told us that our baby was on her back instead of her belly and that if she didn’t turn over by herself, they’d have to use forceps to turn her. They gave Gigi a caudal block, which numbed her enough to endure the pain from the use of forceps, then Gigi pushed as hard as she could—and out popped Jessica, all purple. I couldn’t tell what was what, and at first I thought the afterbirth was Jessica! You can’t really distinguish one thing from another, because everything’s pretty much purple, but the nurses cleaned Jessica up, and she started crying.
As I watched my daughter come into this world, I was struck by the realization that this was exactly the same way I had entered it. For a moment I felt as if I were watching my own birth, and it was such a surreal experience, it nearly overwhelmed me. There was something so phenomenal about it, so profound, that I felt bonded to Jessica immediately. It’s a bond that has only grown stronger with time.
Shelly’s Manne-Hole was a club in Hollywood named after its co-founder, the drummer Shelly Manne. In its first decade all kinds of jazz greats came through that club, including Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Miles. And in the spring of 1970 the sextet was booked there for a few nights.
Our drummer at the time was Tootie Heath, and as we were doing our sound check before the first show, Tootie’s nephew James Forman came down to the club to see us. James was the twenty-three-year-old son of the saxophonist Jimmy Heath, and he was a musician and composer himself. But his main focus now was the cause of black empowerment. He was a member of the militant black nationalist group U.S. Organization, a rival group to the Black Panthers that was headed by Maulana Karenga and Hakim Jamal, a cousin of Malcolm X’s. James had recently discarded what he called his “slave name,” and now he went by the Swahili name Mtume.
That afternoon, as we were doing our sound check, Mtume was berating us for not understanding black history and for not doing more to further the cause of black Americans. “You guys have no respect for your heritage,” he said. “You need to take a stand. The time is now.”
Mtume was on fire for the cause, and his words had an effect on us. From the time I was young I had always made a point not to give in to any victim mentality—but that didn’t change the fact that racism existed and affected us all. Sometimes it came in small acts, like the looks Gigi and I would get when we’d check into hotels together. Sometimes it was more serious, like the time I got arrested in Washington, D.C., for jaywalking. I wasn’t carrying any kind of ID, and despite the fact that Gigi was, the police hauled me downtown and put me in a jail cell. It took a white friend coming down to the station and apologizing profusely for me before the police would let me go.
But I knew my experiences were mild compared with what others had gone through before me, including my parents, who had grown up in Georgia in the early decades of the 1900s. I had heard stories of Klan rallies and lynchings, and as a child I had seen that photo of the horribly disfigured face of Emmett Till. My feeling had always been, Who am I to complain? I was enjoying my life, making music and touring the world. Yet as the Black Power movement grew stronger throughout the late ’60s, I felt the stirrings of wanting to do more, if not for me, then for others. Making The Prisoner was my first step in trying to get involved. But now, as Mtume spoke so passionately, I realized it was not enough.
Mtume told his uncle Tootie that he was going to give him a Swahili name. Right away, the rest of us in the band said we wanted Swahili names, too. We didn’t know any Swahili, so Mtume came up with names that were appropriate for each of us. Tootie’s was Kuumba, which means “creativity,” Buster’s was Mchezaji, or “skilled player.” Mine was Mwandishi, which means “composer” or “writer.”
From that point on, the nature of the band started to shift. Technically we were still the Herbie Hancock Sextet, but soon people started calling us the Mwandishi band. We called each other by our Swahili names, and over time we started embracing other visible symbols of the black diaspora. I had never spent much time thinking about my African roots, but all of us became increasingly influenced by African culture, religion, and music. We started wearing dashikis and African talismans, and I began to feel more connected than ever to the civil rights movement and to our shared, collective past as black musicians. This was a powerful transformation, and of course it affected our music.
Mtume was an angry young man, but unlike him, I didn’t come to this place out of anger. I wasn’t militant and had never been that kind of person. I just realized that because I believed in human rights, and this was the big issue of the day, and it happened to pertain to my own ethnicity, then I needed to be involved in it. This was my way of becoming part of the black civil rights movement, by embracing my identity as a black man, a part of the African diaspora. It was my way of being politically involved without actually getting into the politics of the movement.
Adopting Swahili names helped draw us closer together, and the sextet kept getting tighter. But in the summer of 1970 we were still struggling to book gigs and broaden our audience. I hadn’t been able to get a management deal with Bill Cosby’s company, and we needed help. So I turned to a guy who’d been a classmate of mine at Grinnell, Lee Weisel, to manage the band.
Lee was a lawyer by training, but he had somehow become the manager for the rock band Iron Butterfly, even though he admitted to not knowing much about music. “Herbie, I’m tone-deaf,” he told me. “But I helped these guys get their contract, and now they’ve got a big hit. I can help you, too.”
Iron Butterfly’s big hit was a song called “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida,” a free-flowing, seventeen-minute jam on their album of the same name. (Rumor had it that the song was actually titled “In the Garden of Eden,” but the singer was drunk and slurred the words.) Now that Iron Butterfly was a major draw, Lee thought we might be able to piggyback onto their success, so he booked us to play on a bill with the band at the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park.
Boy, was that a stretch. Iron Butterfly was heavy metal before heavy metal, and the audience in Central Park that day was basically a crowd of young white guys wanting to rock out. When a group of black musicians in Afros took the stage, a lot of the audience just started streaming out. Nobody was there to see us, so I tried to think of how we might get the crowd’s attention. And the one way I could think of was contrast: We would have to play loud and soft, high and low, fast and slow, long and short.
We played a funked-up version of “Fat Albert Rotunda” and the ballad “Maiden Voyage,” but we weren’t getting any traction at all. I didn’t hear any boos, but I didn’t hear much cheering, either. It was a strange afternoon, and frustrating for the guys in the band, who were used to a more attentive audience. Buster in particular was really unhappy. “Why are we even here?” he asked me. “This is just a waste of time.”
In a way, Buster was giving voice to a much bigger question: Who were we as a band? The sextet had been in existence for a year and a half now, and its personnel had changed several times. We had made two records, very different from each other. We were taking on a new identity as the Mwandishi band, but what did that really mean? Developing the band’s voice felt like a puzzle that we hadn’t quite figured out yet.
Luckily, just two days after the Central Park show another piece of the puzzle fell into place. And soon after that the whole thing would come together completely.
The Iron Butterfly show was tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson’s last one with the band, but we had a gig lined up at the Embassy Room in Baltimore two days later, on August 2. We needed a new reed player fast, so Buster said, “Call Bennie Maupin.”
Everybody knew that Bennie was a great musician. He had played with Horace Silver, Lonnie Smith, and McCoy Tyner, and he’d also played on Miles’s masterpiece, Bitches Brew. And on top of his musical skill, Bennie had a whole arsenal of woodwind instruments: He played every ki
nd of saxophone, plus clarinet, bass clarinet, and flute, and he also played “bastard” instruments like the saxcello and the curved soprano sax. With Bennie we could get all kinds of different textures and colors, far beyond just the sounds of the standard saxophone and clarinet.
I didn’t really know Bennie, and we didn’t have much time for him to learn the sextet’s music before our show, so I told him, “Let’s drive down together. I’ll talk you through the music in the car.” It’s about a three-hour drive from New York to Baltimore, and I talked Bennie’s ear off. But he remembered everything—it was as if he could picture the music in his head as soon as I described it to him. At our gig that night he played like he’d been playing with us for years.
A few weeks after that the final two pieces of the puzzle came along: trombonist Julian Priester and trumpeter Eddie Henderson. Tootie Heath had left earlier in the summer, so our drummer was now Billy Hart. Those three guys, plus Bennie, Buster, and I, would form the Mwandishi band.
The magic of this particular combination was evident the very first night we played together. We had gone to Vancouver for a gig, but we’d never even rehearsed as a unit. Buster, Billy, and I played that first afternoon as a trio while Bennie, Julian, and Eddie stayed in the hotel to go over the music. They were having a cram session just like the one Bennie and I had had on the drive to Baltimore, but none of us knew how we’d sound when we actually played as a group.
That night, for our first set, the six of us started slow, kind of feeling each other out onstage. Very quickly we started to get comfortable . . . and just like that the music started to flow. We started out with “Fat Albert Rotunda,” but that wasn’t the heart of it. As we moved into “Speak Like a Child,” a mellower piece, everybody started to open up, like a flower blossoming. We got freer and freer up there onstage, exploring musical avenues and rhythms with no fear or hesitation, as if we’d been playing together forever.
How was this happening? The six of us had never even played as a group before, but this was turning into one of the most sublime nights of my life. We played for nearly two hours, riding along on this river of gorgeous sound, and when it was over, we just looked at each other in awe. We walked back to the dressing room, and nobody said a word. What was there to say? We had experienced something very deep out there, and words would have felt inadequate.
From that very first night there was a rare, beautiful unity among the six of us—some kind of underlying connection that wasn’t apparent before we played, but the minute we started playing, it was there. Now the question was, could we sustain it?
CHAPTER TEN
We took all the gigs we could get in the fall of 1970, and the more we played, the farther out the music got. Everybody in the sextet kept pushing boundaries onstage, and we started doing the same offstage, too.
Bennie was a vegetarian—a rare bird in those days—and once he joined the band, we all followed his lead and started eating vegetarian food. But we were on the road a lot, and it wasn’t easy to find restaurants that made dishes without meat. San Francisco was never a problem, because we could just go to the Haight, where the hippies and flower children hung out, and get whatever we needed, but everywhere else it was rough going.
Here’s how Bennie remembers that time:
We were into eating a really healthy diet, wheat germ and vitamin B, and a primarily vegetarian diet. We were just incorporating as many things as we felt would be beneficial to our lives.
We could buy certain things and keep them in our hotel rooms. I used to travel with a butane burner, the kind you use for camping. I’d get to the hotel room, and I’d have a bag of brown rice and a big Pyrex bowl, and I’d fix the rice and have it with pickled vegetables. We were all so skinny! We’d all bring our stuff, because we knew it would be difficult—you’d go to restaurants and say, “I’d like a salad,” and they’d bring you iceberg lettuce with French dressing and maybe a tomato slice.
At some point I bought a van from the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and all of us would cram into it for out-of-town gigs. We’d pack it up with our instruments, luggage, and bags of brown rice and dried seaweed and hit the road for weeks at a time. The six of us spent hours and hours together, onstage and off, and we started developing really strong bonds as a band and as people. Bennie taught us yoga, and we all tried to open our minds to whatever we might encounter on our shared journey.
And it wasn’t just our band that was exploring—the whole country was in a state of upheaval and discovery. The combination of the civil rights movement, young people’s anger, the Vietnam War, plus the excitement of rock and roll, avant-garde music, the sexual revolution, and psychedelic drugs—all these elements came together in a fantastic alchemy that resulted in far-out music, art, movies, and books. It was a time of beautiful ferment.
Just as with Miles’s band, all of us knew it was too much of a high-wire act to play on any kind of pharmaceuticals. On the bandstand we had to be at peak focus, because the music was constantly changing and swirling and unpredictable. I always preferred to play straight, but one time in San Francisco, in the summer of 1970, I popped a tab of acid into my mouth before a show without even thinking. As soon as it dissolved I thought, Oh, man, what have I done? I had never played while tripping before—in fact, this was only the fourth time I’d ever taken LSD. So I knew this night was going to be . . . interesting.
Even more interesting was the fact that I still had to drive to the show. My sister, Jean, had moved to Oakland, and I was staying at her apartment. The gig was at the Both/And club, on Divisadero Street in San Francisco, so it was not close by. I borrowed Jean’s car and set out for the city, hoping I could get there before the most intense tripping began. But when I got to the Bay Bridge, I started to sweat. All I could think was Oh, shit. That bridge is reeeally long.
I drove slowly and talked to myself all the way across, just saying, “You’re gonna make it, Herbie. You’re gonna make it. Just drive in a straight line.” It felt like hours, but when I finally got to the tollbooth on the other side, I thought, Okay, just give the guy the money and then ask for a receipt. Or, wait—No! Don’t ask for a receipt! Would that seem suspicious? Would it be obvious I was tripping? I was so frozen with paranoia, that tollbooth guy must have thought I was losing my mind.
Somehow I made it to the club and managed to park the car, and when I got inside, the colors and the lights were overwhelming. My feelings of paranoia were growing—I was really convinced something terrible was going to happen. I told the guys I had dropped acid, and none of them could believe it. This was just not a thing I ever did, at a gig or otherwise. But after they got over their shock, at least one person said, “Well, don’t leave me behind!” and took acid, too.
I don’t remember all that much about the gig, but I do remember that we played one song for nearly an hour before we even found our way to the melody. The six of us were just out there, creating this montage of sound that went in every kind of direction. Sometimes when you drop acid, you hear what I think of as “acid runs”: a kind of arpeggio up the scale, with a little trill at the end. That night I kept hearing them, even as the other guys were creating their own amazing palette of sound. The intensity of emotion in the room was profound, and even though I was in my own world, I believe that the audience could feel the emotion, too.
Right from the start of the sextet I had hoped we could move beyond the “control” in “controlled freedom.” I wanted to set everybody loose, to explore more deeply the avant-garde side of jazz music. In the beginning we were even more controlled than the quintet had been, partly because we had to find the right personnel and establish a level of comfort and trust together. But now, with these six guys, we were finally arriving at that place. The music was becoming more than just free; at times it felt transcendent.
That was especially true at one surprising gig in November of 1970, at a buttoned-down steak-and-cocktails place in C
hicago called the London House.
The London House was an old-school jazz club on North Michigan Avenue, just a few blocks from the Chicago Harbor. It was the kind of place where mostly older, white audiences showed up in suits and dresses to sip martinis and listen to classic jazz. The music was very good, but it wasn’t what you’d call avant-garde. George Shearing and Oscar Peterson and Dave Brubeck played there, and the lineup was usually trios or quartets. The jazz there could be described as calmly exciting, not extremely challenging to the ear.
For whatever reason, London House owner Oscar Marienthal decided to book the Herbie Hancock Sextet for four full weeks, the longest gig I had ever played. I think he thought he was going to get straight-up tunes like “Speak Like a Child,” “Maiden Voyage,” “Dolphin Dance”—our more melodic, gentler pieces. He didn’t realize that the band that had started out so gentle and controlled had evolved into this ferocious beast from outer space.
We were hired to play one short set during the dinner hour and then a longer set later in the evening. I told Oscar, “I really don’t think you want us to play during dinner.” I couldn’t imagine how the clientele would respond to our tripped-out vibe while they dug into their filets mignons. But Oscar insisted, so we played a couple of spacey, funked-up tunes. And that was all it took. He came up to us afterward and said, “Thank you very much, but we’ll just have you do the late sets from now on.”
We played the first week, and the audiences were just not into us at all. Oscar was irritated, telling us we were playing too loud and “too strange” for his clientele. The guys in the band weren’t happy, and they started grumbling about not finishing out the rest of the gig. But I was convinced we could win over the crowds. We had three more weeks to go, and I was determined to turn this thing around.
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