Meanwhile, there was a guy we met named Jerry who was such a big fan that he came to all the gigs. Jerry was totally into the band, and he hung out with us a lot while we were in Chicago. He was also a self-styled mystic who was into astrology and numerology, and in our state of spiritual exploration we were getting into those kinds of alternative thinking. Everybody wanted to hear what Jerry had to say about the band, so he started looking at our numerology and found out some really cool things.
Jerry discovered that four guys in the band—actually, three players plus our soundman, Billy Bonner (who went by the Swahili name Fundi)—were born on the twenty-ninth of their birth month. And their four birth months represented the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. Buster and I were both Aries, and Mars is the fourth planet, which was another number four. So the number 429 became the magic number for the band, because it connected with all of us.
This may sound kind of far out, but as soon as Jerry had identified 429 as Mwandishi’s number, we started seeing that number everywhere. I can’t tell you how many times we were booked in room 429 in hotels, or I’d look at my watch and it was 4:29, or a cashier would ring up a check that totaled $4.29. It blew our minds how often those numbers appeared—we even made up a logo that incorporated 4, 2, and 9. Something very unusual was coming together within the band, and all of us could feel it.
In our second week at the London House, the audience began to change. Now younger black patrons started coming in from the South Side. Word had gotten out that the sextet was playing different music from the usual London House jazz fare, and people came wanting to hear something far out. The energy in the room was changing, and one night in the middle of that second week it entered the realm of the mystical.
We played the first set, and it was on. It was happening. Our friend Jerry had been coming for every show, but he missed the opening set that night. When he arrived, I told him, “Hey, man, it’s too bad you missed that first set!” We thought he’d missed out on the magic. But the magic hadn’t even started yet.
The second set was even better than the first. We were so tight, so attuned to each other, that it began to feel as if we weren’t even playing the music anymore—it felt like the music was playing us, coming down from somewhere above, and we were just the vessels. We were on some other plane, all of us together, but that still wasn’t the peak of the evening. Because the third set . . . the third set was transformative.
As we started that set I watched my fingers as I played. To my shock, they seemed to be moving by themselves. I wasn’t controlling them; they were just playing of their own accord. Yet everything my fingers played was connecting perfectly to everything Buster was playing, and Bennie was playing, and Billy was playing. As we got deeper into the music we became one big, pulsating creature—all of those guys somehow became me, and I became all of them. It was as if we were inside each other, in a way I had never felt before and have never felt since. It was a deeply spiritual experience.
I didn’t speak between tunes—we just went from one to the next. And when we finished, the club was absolutely silent. Not a soul moved. I felt totally euphoric, like I was floating on air. And then the applause started. It just rose and rose, the loudest ovation I’d ever heard. People were shouting, laughing, crying.
I tried to stand up from the piano, but I couldn’t feel my feet. I looked down, and I swear they were ten feet below me, as if I were floating above my body. I hadn’t taken any drugs or had anything to drink that night—none of us had. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t process what was happening. Somehow I managed to move off the stage and make my way back to the dressing room, still feeling outside my body.
When all six of us were back in the dressing room, we looked at each other in shock. “What just happened?” somebody asked, but none of us could answer that question. We started talking about it, laughing in wonderment and shaking our heads. Then, after about ten minutes, somebody from the club came in and said, “They’re still applauding out there. Come out and take a bow.”
I said, “I can’t, I’m sorry.” And I really couldn’t, physically—I don’t think my legs would have carried me. The audience clapped and clapped for about a half hour, but we never did go back out onstage. We just stayed where we were, trying to process the amazing experience we had all just shared.
Buster remembers a patron in the club being overcome that night:
We were playing, and someone in the audience near the front just fell out. Just passed right out. After the gig we were over at a friend’s house and he was telling us he saw us levitate. “I swear, I saw the band levitate!” he said. “The band left the floor!”
I didn’t see the guy in the audience faint, but the person who said he saw us levitate was our friend Jerry. And then Jerry actually had an episode himself, after we left the club and all went to the house of one of my high school friends. Fundi, our soundman, always made tapes of every gig, so we were all really eager to hear what had gone down that night. We sat in Jerry’s living room listening to the tape, and even though nobody was having a drink or a smoke or anything, we all felt really high listening to it.
We were all listening intently, and then suddenly Jerry, who’d been sitting in a chair, just keeled over. I mean, he fell right onto the floor, curled up like he was still sitting in the chair. “Jerry!” I said. “Are you okay?” But he was just lying there, as if in a catatonic state. And then, after a minute or so, he came to. He just got up and sat back in his chair as though nothing had happened. Strange!
That London House gig became part of the legend of Mwandishi, but there was another element of it that almost nobody knows.
Whenever we played in Chicago, I would stay with my parents. So after all the crazy experiences of that night, I finally made my way back to their apartment on the South Side. By the time I got there the sun was coming up—it must have been about six in the morning. I fell into bed, exhausted, but an hour or two later the phone rang. My mother answered, and it was for me.
It was the mother of a young lady who had come to all of the Mwandishi band’s shows in Vancouver—the place where we’d had that first magical gig, the very first time that Eddie, Julian, Billy, Bennie, Buster, and I played together as a unit. Vancouver was the only other place where we had experienced anything like what we felt at the London House, and this girl had sort of been our muse for that time period. She loved the music of the band, and she came to hear us every single night in Vancouver. She was a beautiful girl, and she played music herself, I believe violin or viola. During the short time we were in Vancouver we hung out a lot with this girl, and all of us in the band grew really close to her. She just had a special way about her.
She was also studying to be a mime, and she’d gotten a scholarship to train with Marcel Marceau that fall. She’d gone to Paris, and we hadn’t heard from her since. But now her mother was calling me to let us know that the night before—the night of our transcendent experience at the London House—the girl had died in Paris. She had wanted to run a bath at a friend’s apartment, since her own apartment didn’t have one, and when the friend told her how to turn on the water heater, she misunderstood how to do it. She turned up the gas but didn’t realize she had to light the pilot, too, and she was overcome by the fumes, passed out, and died.
When I told the rest of the guys in the band, we all had the same feeling: that she had been there with us at the London House, and the magic we felt was her farewell. I always think of that night as her night, and her memory touches me still.
The London House gig was a turning point for the Mwandishi band. We played two more weeks there, and although we didn’t have the same out-of-body experience, the music kept getting freer and farther out. We kept listening to the tapes Fundi had made of that magical night, and we still couldn’t believe what we heard. It was like we were listening to someone else play, not ourselves. We were mesmerized by the music and listene
d to it constantly for inspiration.
When the London House gig ended, we drove to Detroit for a stand at the Strata Concert Gallery. Those performances were as magical as the London House shows, and we made tapes there, too. Finally, after the Strata, we were scheduled to appear at the Village Vanguard back in New York. Fundi drove the truck to the club to set up our sound system, and he parked it right out front so he could carry in our equipment. But while he was in the club, someone broke into the truck and stole all the tapes we had inside.
When Fundi told the guys in the band, we all had the same reaction: Oh, no, no, no! Equipment you could replace, but those tapes? They were the only ones in existence, and now they were gone! All of us just felt despair that we’d never be able to hear that gig again. We’d felt transported listening to that music—the up-tempo moments were so powerful, and the peaceful moments were undulating, almost meditative. Those tapes were treasures. And now they were gone. Why did this happen? How could this be?
We all agonized for a few days, but I finally had to conclude that losing the tapes was a blessing in disguise. The truth was, we were revering what we had done on that one night in November. We were stuck in a time warp, worshipping an event that had passed, and doing that was counter to the very nature of the Mwandishi band. Mwandishi was all about exploring, pushing forward into the next moment—what sense did it make for us to listen over and over to an old gig? Wasn’t that just hindering our ability to move forward?
In the end, I believe it was good that we couldn’t keep listening obsessively to those tapes. Still, for years afterward I thought about them, wondering if they still exist and if whoever took them understood what they were. Yet if those tapes suddenly reappeared somehow all these years later, I think I’d be afraid to listen to them. I’d be afraid that they wouldn’t sound the same to me, because I’m not the same person I was then. Maybe parts would feel magical and other parts not, which would be a disappointment. I’m a little bit curious, but maybe it’s better never hearing them again, because my memory of that night is so perfect and beautiful.
Playing onstage with Mwandishi meant treading a fine line between brilliance and chaos. Everything was intuitive, in the moment. Nothing was planned. We might start with a fragment of a structure, but the sounds we produced on any given day came out of our synchronicity on that day—our shared experience. When it worked, it was so, so powerful. When it didn’t, it was truthfully kind of a mess. Making music like this was not for the faint of heart, but we kept pressing outward, looking for weird sounds and unexplored paths, always in search of new experiences onstage.
I think of Mwandishi as an R&D band—research and development, trying new things. It was all about discovery, uncovery, exploration, the unknown, looking for the unseen, listening for the unheard. The Mwandishi palette was an intergalactic palette, with emotions and shapes and colors that felt out of this world. Sometimes we didn’t even have a beat to hold on to—we would just play moment to moment, going with the temporal flow, relying on intuition to keep ourselves together. Everything was up for grabs as far as creativity was concerned. Everybody accepted whatever anybody else played, and the goal was always to respond without thinking. The music was visceral, emotional, and raw, more so than any music I’ve played before or since.
We didn’t play songs as much as we created a sonic environment. The elements of traditional songs were there—melody, harmony, and rhythm—but we incorporated them in nontraditional ways, using nontraditional instruments. In fact, as the Mwandishi band evolved we started using pretty much anything as an instrument. A table, a lamp, a rock—whatever was on hand, somebody would tap it, slap it, shake it. We were open to any kind of sound from any kind of source.
For a while we got really into flutes. Bennie knew a guy who made all kinds of flutes, and he started collecting them. He had wooden ones, bamboo ones, all sizes from a piccolo to a didgeridoo. And everybody was really into percussion, partly because it sounded good but also because we wanted something to do when the solos were happening. It’s a little dull watching five guys standing around onstage while one of them goes off on his solo, so we’d pick up anything we could find and bang on it.
The guys would develop patterns of rhythmic interplay, point and counterpoint, and every night was a new exploration of all the ways we could create music no one had ever heard before—and would never hear again. That was the only rule: never to repeat what you’ve played before. The goal was always to create, create, create. Buster liked to quote Duke Ellington’s reply when someone once asked him, “What’s your favorite composition?” Ellington said, “The next one.” That’s how we all felt, every gig, every day.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the late summer of 1970 a young guy started coming to see us play. His name was David Rubinson, and although he was just twenty-seven, he was already building a reputation as a hitmaker. He had produced records for acts like Santana, Moby Grape, and Taj Mahal, and music executives saw him as having the golden touch, an ability to help artists make commercially viable records.
The time had come for Mwandishi to make a record, and Warner Bros. wanted us to go in a more commercial direction. Fat Albert Rotunda was R&B-inflected and easy to listen to, and the executives believed that if we continued that trend, we could sell a lot more records, so they hired David to help us do that. What they didn’t realize was that Mwandishi had flown light-years into the future after Fat Albert Rotunda, and we had no interest in going back to a more traditional R&B sound.
When David came to see us play and heard the far-out path we were heading down, he knew there was no way he could urge us in another direction. Unlike the Warners executives, David cared more about music than about sales. He loved what he heard when he saw us live, and he wanted to help us express ourselves fully in our music—not make us more commercially palatable. As he said later, “I would no more tell you what kind of record to make than tell you what kind of child to have.” Warners had sent David to turn us, but we had turned him instead.
In December of 1970, when we went into the Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco to make our next record, David had distinct ideas about how he wanted to record it:
What I wanted to do was put Herbie and his band in a hothouse, in a laboratory, and let them create the music they wanted, and then capture it in the studio. So we went into the studio with Mwandishi to record the music the way they played it live. He had this organic band he’d put together, based on collective consciousness, organizing around African cultural roots, and spiritual mutual respect. They were a union.
Herbie was finding his identity—going way back and way forward at the same time. He was blowing down all the walls to the future. The period when I started working with him was an explosive, exploratory period, and those guys in the band, they were all really smart guys. There was no bullshit. That band told each other the truth, all the time.
David wanted to capture that energy on our record, and he believed that having us record live, all together, was the way to do it. But he also had another idea. He was a rock and roll guy, and in rock and roll there was no glass wall between the artist and the production process. Jazz musicians didn’t normally get involved in production; we just recorded the cuts and left the rest to the producers, and a few weeks later somebody would hand us the finished product. David knew I was an electronics and engineering guy, so he wanted me to have a crack at the production process, too.
This was a revelation for me. It had never occurred to me that I could take part in production, but as soon as David suggested it I couldn’t wait to get my hands dirty. And I loved it! I loved finding effects and sounds, deciding how to arrange the different cuts, and playing around with volume and depth and layers. Just as it had when I started playing electric piano, doing this opened up a whole new world for me.
We released the record, titled Mwandishi, in early 1971. There were three songs: “Ostinato (Suite for Ang
ela),” an ode to the black activist Angela Davis; “You’ll Know When You Get There”; and “Wandering Spirit Song.” We had recorded it as if it were a live performance, with all kinds of percussion and far-out solos, and I felt that it was a step forward for the sextet. We were moving in the direction we wanted to, making music that was as free as we could make it, even in a studio setting.
But not everybody loved it. Warner Bros. had asked for something commercial, but we gave them this whacked-out space record in which the first song had a 15/8 time signature, not something most people can snap their fingers to. Mwandishi didn’t fit in any of the usual slots. It wasn’t a straight-up jazz record, but it wasn’t anything else, either. It didn’t even fit comfortably on either black radio or white radio. What was Warners supposed to do to try to sell it? I didn’t really care, and neither did David, which gave them some heartburn. And we’d give them some more before Mwandishi was done.
That summer Mwandishi launched our first European tour. From the start it was a disaster in the making.
The tour was arranged by a Danish promoter named Jenny, who was a charming lady but a terrible tour organizer. We flew into Paris, and Jenny told us it would be a two-hour drive to get to our first gig, which was that same night. We figured we’d have plenty of time to make it through customs, rent a van and a car, and get where we were going.
Unfortunately we arrived at Orly airport at noon, which was the lunch break for the customs office. And this being Europe, lunch did not mean a half-hour break—it was closer to two hours. So we all sat there twiddling our thumbs at the airport, waiting for the French customs agents to mosey on back so we could have our passports stamped and get on the road. But when we finally did pile into the van and open one of those giant foldout maps of France, we realized it was more like a six-hour trip to our destination. So we had to drive like bats out of hell that first day just to make our gig.
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