Herbie Hancock

by Herbie Hancock

  The Warners executives weren’t the only ones who were skeptical about Crossings. Lee Weisel was still managing us, and he didn’t really know what to do with this kind of music, or with us. I appreciated everything he’d done for us, but after Crossings came out, I asked David Rubinson if he would take over managing the band in addition to producing our records. David wasn’t an experienced manager, but he understood and respected what Mwandishi was trying to do, so it made sense to bring him on in that new role.

  Around that same time, I decided there was another person I wanted to bring permanently into the band: Pat Gleeson.

  In 1972 it was a radical move to add synthesizers to a jazz record. But that was nothing compared to hiring a full-time synthesizer player to travel with the band—and especially hiring a guy like Pat for a band like Mwandishi.

  First of all, Pat would be a long-haired, gray-bearded white guy in a band of black men with Swahili names and dashikis. Second, adding him meant that one more person would be taking a cut of whatever income we made. Third, the other guys had never played with Pat, and some of them were skeptical about whether synthesizers even qualified as musical instruments at all. And fourth, it would be no small feat to lug synth equipment from gig to gig and then create the right sounds onstage every night using handfuls of patch cords.

  But I just really dug the sounds that Pat added to the music. So in the spring of 1972 I invited him to join us.

  There was one funny moment we shared in the beginning, soon after Crossings came out. We were all hanging out at David Rubinson’s house in San Francisco, and my sister, Jean, was there, too. She had a copy of Crossings in her hand and was reading off everybody’s Swahili name—Mwandishi, Mchezaji, Mwile, Pepo Mtoto, Jabali, Mganga . . . and then she turned to Pat. “So what are we gonna call you?” she asked.

  Pat just shrugged. What could he say? He was a white dude in a black band, and besides that, he didn’t know any Swahili.

  Jean laughed. “I know!” she said. “We’ll call you Bwana!”—the white-hunter name in safari movies from the ’30s. Everybody cracked up, though Pat looked over to me first to make sure I was laughing, too.

  Pat knew he couldn’t carry around his giant Moog synthesizer, so he tried to find a more portable version that would work. A company called ARP was making a smaller synthesizer, the 2600, but even that was still pretty big and not very easy to use. There was still no memory, so Pat had to create sounds from scratch every time he used it. And there were so many ways of doing that, he had to keep track of dozens of patch cords at a time, remembering where to insert them to create certain effects. Here’s how Pat describes it:

  I’ve got a back panel. And on that back panel there are some very basic audio things. There are oscillators, which make pitch—that’s all they do, just pitch, high and low. I’ve got filters, which can filter out the top of the band, or high-pass can filter out the low.

  I’ve got a thing called a “sample and hold generator,” which can be used to apply different voltages either to make a rhythmic pattern in a filter or to make a pitch pattern in an oscillator. I mean, there’s a limited number of things I can do, but I can also take them and put them together in weird ways. Then I also had a wah-wah pedal, which I used a lot. And I also had a very noisy Echoplex.

  So with those, at every instance when the band was playing something, at the moment they were playing I would—I won’t even say decide. I would just know that I was going to take this patch cord and go into there, and then go into there, and this would get me started; it would be enough for the first ten seconds of sound.

  And while that ten seconds was sounding, I could patch something else up and complicate the sound, and then when that musical gesture for the rest of the band had come to an end, then I could no longer use that patch—I’d have to start again.

  In the course of an evening, I probably changed patches two to three hundred times. I had about twenty-five patch cords, and when I went with the group, I thought I would color-code the patch cords to help me. But there wasn’t even time to think about that: You just grab a cord, you put it into an oscillator, and you’re on your way.

  The guys in the band were used to exploration, but this was a pretty radical change. Not all of them loved it, but I did. Adding synthesizers opened up whole new territories for us to explore. Pat would sometimes tell me, “Herbie, I don’t always know what sound is going to come out,” and I’d say, “Don’t worry, because I don’t always know what a chord is going to sound like when I play it, either.” And it was true! I had a general idea, but mostly I just knew that whatever sound came out, we would make it work somehow.

  We had a saying in the band, “Everything is everything.” Everything was part of a whole, all of it melding together, playing off each other, coming together as one. When Bennie started a solo on the bass clarinet, Pat would echo it with his synthesizer or bridge it back into what the band was doing. Then Eddie might pick up the thread, playing off what Pat was doing. Everything was everything, and everyone was everyone.

  Onstage we were learning from each other and reaching new heights all the time. And offstage one of the guys in the band was about to teach me something that would change my life forever.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  One Thursday night in the summer of 1972 Mwandishi played a gig in Seattle. When it was over, we heard about some parties that were happening, so we all took off into the night to have some fun. The band didn’t always party after gigs, but on this night we hit the town hard. We went to as many different places as we could, and by the time we straggled back to our hotel the sun had not only risen—it was already beginning to set again. I was totally spent, but we had only a couple of hours before we had to get to our Friday-night gig.

  I fell into bed and slept for those two hours, and when I woke up, my head was hurting and my mouth was dry. Oh, man, I did not feel like going to play, but I had to somehow find the energy. When the other guys came downstairs, they looked about as rough as I felt. But we managed to drag ourselves to the club, and because it was a Friday night, it was already packed. The audience was ready for a show, even if we weren’t quite ready to give them one.

  As we came out of the dressing room and made our way to the stage I felt as if I were rising from a coffin, like a vampire. My body and mind and soul were just shut down, and when I looked out at all those people, with all that energy pulsing out of them, it was too much for me. I didn’t have enough juice to start the way I normally might, opening with a strong piano intro, and for whatever reason I also decided not to open with the drums. I looked over at Buster, our bassist, and said, “Toys.”

  “Toys” was a medium-tempo tune off Speak Like a Child, and instead of starting with me, it starts with the upright bass, the softest, gentlest instrument in the band. I figured we’d let Buster ease us in, and I hoped we’d be able to find some energy somewhere.

  Buster started playing, and what came out of him was amazing. Astounding! I was hearing notes fly all over the place, and wondering how in the world he could do all that on a four-stringed instrument. At one point I saw him do three different activities at the same time: The fingers on his left hand were somehow moving up and down simultaneously while two other fingers were trilling. His hand looked like some kind of crazy spider, crawling up and down the neck of the bass.

  He finished up one progression, then paused for a moment and looked at his strings. I saw him nod, like “hmm,” and then he did the whole thing over again! I was flipping out, and so was everybody in the club. I could feel my energy rising, could feel myself waking up. I let Buster go for ten minutes or more, even though normally that intro would go for only a couple of minutes. Then, when the rest of the band joined in, the place exploded.

  We had come onto the stage half-asleep, but Buster had lit a fire under us. The rest of that night was so beautiful, one of those gigs where everything just comes together. Afterwa
rd people came up to the stage, some of them crying, reaching out to shake our hands, to touch us, to hug us. A woman told me, “We didn’t just hear this music. We experienced this music.” I’d never heard anybody say that before, but it was true. All of us in that room had just shared a spiritual experience, and Buster was the spark that made it happen.

  When we got back to the dressing room, I grabbed Buster and said, “Where did that come from? Whatever made you play bass like that, I want some of it!”

  His eyes were so bright, it was like he was lit from within. He said, “Herbie, I’ve been chanting for a way to tell you about this.” And he started telling me about this Buddhist philosophy he’d just started practicing. During those two hours when the rest of us were sleeping off the previous night’s partying, Buster had been awake in his room, chanting the words Nam Myoho Renge Kyo over and over. He hadn’t slept at all, but when it came time for the gig, he had more energy than all the rest of us put together.

  Now, this wasn’t actually the first time Buster had tried to tell us about chanting. About six months earlier his sister had come to a gig in Philadelphia, and he’d brought her into the dressing room after the show. “Hey, Toni,” he said to her, “do that cool thing you showed me.” And she started chanting. She chanted Nam Myoho Renge Kyo several times, and then she opened up a little book and went into some other kind of chant.

  We were all mesmerized by what she was doing, mostly because of the sound and rhythm of it. I was thinking, Yeah, this is cool! because it was a rhythm I hadn’t heard before. Everybody in the band was always searching for new sounds, and this was definitely new and unusual. It was actually kind of hypnotic. But at the time I just thought it was something interesting we might explore for our music. It didn’t particularly register as a spiritual exercise.

  I hadn’t thought about chanting since that day in Philadelphia, but now that I knew Buster was doing it, and especially now that I’d seen the energy and focus it gave him, I was really intrigued. The truth is, if Buster had just told me about Buddhism, I would probably have just said, “Hey, great! Whatever works for you, man.” I doubt that conversation would have spurred me to explore it myself. But seeing firsthand what chanting did for him musically onstage—well, that got my attention.

  Buster invited me to come to a Buddhist meeting the next night, and I told him I would. I needed to find out more about this phenomenon.

  From the time I was young I considered myself to be somewhat spiritual. Even though my experiences in the churches of South Side Chicago hadn’t turned me into a churchgoer, I was always interested in different religions. I had never found what I was looking for in the Western religious tradition, though, so in the ’70s, like a lot of Americans, I began exploring Eastern religions.

  In fact, everybody in the band did, especially after that otherworldly experience at our London House gig. In our spare time we’d hit the bookstores in various cities, reading up on all kinds of belief systems, from Transcendental Meditation to Sufism to Eastern mysticism and even the occult. We all wanted to discover whether we could somehow conjure up again what we’d felt that night onstage.

  We were eager to find a way to connect like that more often, and finding a spiritual path seemed the way to do it, because the music itself felt so spiritual. While it was often wild and angry, relentless and visceral, at other times, when it was peaceful and calm, it had a strange, almost mystical beauty. In those moments we felt a power greater than ourselves, and we all spent a lot of time exploring what that power might be.

  I did a lot of reading in the course of that search, but I always ended up with more questions than answers. It seemed to me that most of the books I read would be tough for ordinary human beings to understand, as a lot of them were written in a very intellectual way, which bothered me. If only intellectuals could understand a religion, then what was in it for everybody else? I was searching for a belief system that applied to everybody and could be understood by everybody.

  When Buster started telling me about his Buddhist philosophy, a practice of Nichiren Buddhism adopted by Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a lay Buddhist organization, the first thing I noticed was how much it resonated with beliefs I already had. He told me that the purpose of chanting those words, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, was to fuse your life with the mystic law of cause and effect through sound. That surprised me, because cause and effect is a basic principle of science. Throughout my life, whenever I had taken apart a situation like it was a clock, what I was really doing was looking for cause and effect, for deeper ways of understanding events. So if that was also a tenet of Buddhism, then I was definitely interested in hearing more.

  But at the same time I wasn’t sure about this idea that chanting certain words could actually cause something to happen. That sounded a little far-fetched. If Buddhism required me to believe that, out of the blue, I wasn’t sure I could make the leap.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” said Buster. “Chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo works whether you believe in it or not.”

  What? Now, this definitely didn’t sound like any religion I’d ever heard of. Every other religion I knew of depended on blind faith, and some of them required elaborate displays of it. But here’s what Buddhism did sound like: science. Because the law of gravity works whether you believe in it or not. And the laws of thermodynamics work whether you believe in them or not. Why would religion be weaker than natural laws? Shouldn’t it be even stronger? Then why should religion require a person’s belief for it to actually work?

  Buster repeated, “Listen, this works whether you believe it or not—so you have nothing to lose by trying it.” And that made perfect sense to me. I liked the fact that, in Buddhism, human beings have the capacity to create their own destiny. They are not dependent on an external higher power to fix things; by chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, people could seize control of their own lives.

  I had one more question for Buster: “Do you have to stop believing in other things to become a Buddhist?”

  “No,” he said. “You don’t have to stop believing in anything you already believe in. If you just do this practice, the truth will reveal itself.” He told me that simply chanting those four words would help me achieve what I really wanted to achieve, because Nichiren Buddhism isn’t just theory; it contains documentary proof and real evidence of its validity in our daily lives. Followers of Nichiren Buddhism believe that when chanting helps people gain or achieve something in life, it provides a tangible affirmation of an intangible inner transformation—called Actual Proof—to themselves and to others of the power in their lives unleashed by their Buddhist practice.

  I decided it was worth a try. At this point, I was searching for a way to have more nights when I was “on” musically, and if Buddhism could help me do that, I was ready to start. So I told Buster I would join him at the meeting.

  Pretty much my whole adult life I’d been functioning on “jazz musician time,” which meant I rarely got to places on time and sometimes ran an hour late. Buster had told me where the meeting was and that it started at seven. Sometime around eight I made it to the address he had given me.

  When I got there, I found myself in front of a big apartment building. The front door was locked, and Buster had forgotten to tell me the apartment number, so I had no way to get buzzed in. I stood there for a few minutes, not sure what to do. Then I thought, Well, Buster said chanting really works. Might as well try it now. I said Nam Myoho Renge Kyo—or something close to it, anyway—a couple of times, and just then a guy came up behind me and unlocked the door! He went in before I realized what was happening, though, and the door clicked shut behind him. I was still stuck outside.

  I kept saying the words, and soon another man came to the door, this time from the inside. He opened it up and peered around, as if he were looking for someone, and when he went back in, I grabbed the door before it could latch shut. At least I was inside the building, but I still
didn’t know which apartment the meeting was being held in.

  As I stood there in the hall I heard this faint sound, like bees buzzing. I started following the sound, down the hallway and around a corner, and just as I stepped to the door where it was coming from the sound stopped. I knocked, and when the door opened, I saw a group of people sitting cross-legged on the floor. They had just at that moment finished their chanting and were wrapping up the meeting.

  I apologized for being late, but everybody welcomed me warmly. Some people had to go, but a few stayed to talk to me about the practice, and their experiences, and what had happened in their lives as a result of it. We talked for fifteen or twenty minutes and then somebody said, “Okay, let’s chant three times, and then we’ll split.”

  At the front of the room was a wooden cabinet with its doors swung open. Inside the cabinet was a scroll with Chinese writing on it. “That’s the Gohonzon,” somebody explained. “When you chant, keep your eyes open and look at it.” This was a serious-looking scroll, with its calligraphic Chinese lettering and that beautiful wood cabinet. I thought, Okay, this is no joke. This is not something to be played around with.

  We chanted Nam Myoho Renge Kyo three times, and I kept my eyes trained on that scroll. The whole thing took about a minute, but I felt transported. I felt high! This was so unexpected—nobody had told me what it actually felt like to chant. I just thought it would be a simple recitation, a moment to get through. But my body, my mind, and my soul responded to it in a way I had never imagined.