The following week I attended another meeting. We were still in Seattle, because it was a ten-day gig, so some of the same people were there. I managed to arrive on time, so I got to hear Gongyo, which is the recitation of parts of two chapters of the Lotus Sutra. This was what Buster’s sister had chanted a few months earlier in Philadelphia. The minute everybody started chanting it I was drawn deeply into the rhythm. I tried to follow along in a little book someone handed me, and even though I had trouble with the Japanese words, it was so exhilarating to chant together with this group of people that I didn’t want it to end.
I still wasn’t sure what exactly Buddhism held for me, but I wanted to pursue it further and see what would happen. Like Buster had said, what did I have to lose? And I might just have something to gain.
Gigi and I both loved New York, but now that we had Jessica, I started thinking about moving our family out to Los Angeles. The weather was gorgeous all year round, and unlike in Manhattan, we could actually have a yard and maybe even a pool. A lot of the record companies were based there, and David Rubinson was in San Francisco. And you could actually park in L.A.! In Manhattan we could never find parking. We’d double-park and then listen for people honking in the morning, so we’d know to go move the car.
“Let’s move to L.A.,” I said to Gigi.
“No way!” she replied without any hesitation. New York was the only U.S. city she’d ever lived in, and it was perfect for her work and her lifestyle. She had no interest at all in moving.
“Come on, let’s just try it for a year,” I said. “If you really don’t like it, we’ll come back to New York.” Gigi fought the idea for months but finally gave in. We found a renter for our apartment, but even as Gigi was packing she was still pissed off about the move, throwing stuff into boxes and yelling, “I don’t know anyone in L.A.! All my friends are here!” She was so convinced this would be a mistake that we left most of our furniture in New York, in case we decided to come back.
I wasn’t sure how long this experiment would last, so we rented a little house on Dorrington Avenue in West Hollywood. And our first week there, as Gigi watched three-year-old Jessica run around naked in the backyard in the middle of December, she changed her mind. In New York at that time of year Jessica would have been bundled up in six layers, plus a hat and mittens. I was away for a gig, but Gigi called me on the road and said, “Okay. Let’s buy a house.”
We looked at a few places over the next month or so, and in the end we had to decide between one in Laurel Canyon and one on Doheny Drive, just north of the Sunset Strip. The Laurel Canyon house was beautiful, in perfect condition, and ready for us to move in. The Doheny one was really neglected, with musty carpeting and contact wallpaper, and it smelled like cat pee. But there was something about that second house—it definitely had possibilities, if we had the patience to fix it up.
We couldn’t decide between them, so I went up to the second floor of the house on Doheny Drive and sat down to chant. I had been practicing Nichiren Buddhism since those meetings in Seattle, chanting twice a day, doing morning and evening prayers. I had also gotten into the habit of chanting whenever I needed clarity, as it always seemed to clear my head and help me see situations in a new light. I chanted for about ten minutes, and even though that room was in terrible condition, being there just felt really right. I went back downstairs and said to Gigi, “I want it to be this house.”
Gigi was respectful of my chanting and of my opinions, but she knew how much work it would take to fix the place up, so she wasn’t quite convinced. “Let’s flip a coin,” she said. We did, and the Doheny house won. We bought that house for $72,000 and have lived there ever since. And to this day I still chant on the second floor.
In the six months I’d been practicing I had also begun studying and learning more about Nichiren Buddhism and its history. It was founded by the thirteenth-century Japanese monk Nichiren Daishonin, who concluded that the Lotus Sutra, which was taught thousands of years ago by Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, was his highest teaching and contained the essence of all his sutras, or teachings. Nichiren revealed that the essence of the Lotus Sutra is hidden in its title, Myoho Renge Kyo, literally “the wonderful law of the Lotus Sutra.” On a deeper level it means “The Mystic Law of Cause and Effect through Sound,” the one universal law contained in the life of the universe itself. The Daishonin inserted the word Nam, which means devotion or dedication of one’s life, to this universal law.
Nam Myoho Renge Kyo: These may sound like four random words, but in a way you can compare saying them to saying a person’s name. If someone says the word “Jessica” to me, it’s not just a word; it brings to mind an image of my daughter, and of everything she means to me. When someone speaks my daughter’s name, it releases feelings and emotions in me. Likewise, when we chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, we’re not just saying idle words; we’re invoking the meaning of those words from our life, the law of the universe within all life. When we chant those words, we are awakening the Universal Law within, the awakening of our own inherent Buddha nature, our true self. By chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, we are polishing our life, aligning ourselves with the rhythm of the universe.
Nichiren Daishonin said that this should be taught life to life. Doing this practice is the practice of polishing our life just as we are. When this transformation awakens our highest condition of life—our Buddha nature—synchronizing with the life of the universe, it brings forth a state of compassion, wisdom, and courage from within. This in turn fuels our desire to move ourselves and others toward an indestructible happiness that cannot be defeated by suffering of any kind.
Now, I know that this all sounds pretty far out. But at a more basic level, Buddhism taught me a very important lesson about human life and human beings: It showed me how to turn adversity into opportunity. We believe that obstacles are a means for our growth.
When he first told me about chanting, Buster said, “You practice for yourself, and you practice for others.” Buddhism is a compassionate practice. It’s about respecting and caring for others, sharing the practice as a means to relieve them of their sufferings. Shakyamuni said, “How can I help people to find the Buddha way?” The Daishonin taught the true intent of the historical Buddha’s teachings.
That emphasis on others really struck me. I had never spent a lot of time thinking about how to help other people. I wasn’t a bad guy, but I had never been a particularly empathetic person, either. I pretty much focused on music, and that was that. But hearing Buster talk about focusing on other people and helping to make their lives better really affected me.
Ever since I was seven years old, music had been the number one thing in my life. If anyone asked me how I would describe myself, I would have said without hesitation, “I’m a musician.” But as I got deeper into the practice of Buddhism, a new realization began to form inside me. I began thinking of myself as a human being first, removing any sense of separation between myself and others.
I started to see music differently, too. Before, I played music for the sake of playing music; my focus was on tunes, harmony, rhythm, and melody. Now I began trading my musician’s ear for the larger purpose of using music to address issues in our daily lives. My desire turned to seeking ways to create music to serve humanity, to contribute something empowering and potentially transformative to the people of the world.
At the time I first started practicing Buddhism, though, my live music was attracting primarily a small number of hardcore avant-garde jazz fans. How could I expand that audience, providing a doorway to their appreciation of the new direction of our music? I began chanting about it.
After doing three records with Warner Bros.—Fat Albert Rotunda, Mwandishi, and Crossings—I knew we weren’t cutting it with them. WB was a big label, and our records just hadn’t been reaching a wide-enough audience. And instead of moving in a more commercial direction, Mwandishi’s music was just getting weirder a
nd more far out.
With each new record David Rubinson was like Houdini, pulling rabbits out of a hat to convince the executives that we had sales potential. My reputation as an artist was still intact, but for commercial reasons we knew it was only a matter of time before Warners dropped me. So David said, “Let’s make a move before that happens.” He knew it would be easier to get me in at another label if I didn’t have the taint of being released by Warners.
Bruce Lundvall was the vice president of Columbia Records, and fortunately he was a huge jazz fan. He pitched Clive Davis, the president of the label, to sign me. I’m not sure whether Clive was all that keen on the idea, but Bruce really went to bat for me. We agreed to a deal, and David told Warner Bros. we were making the switch. I suspect they were relieved, since they seemed eager to move away from this new nexus of funk, jazz, and rock. In fact, around that same time they also let go of another band that, like Mwandishi, was pushing boundaries but hadn’t yet found a wide audience: Earth, Wind & Fire. It wouldn’t be long before they wouldn’t be feeling quite so relieved about losing either of us.
For the new record, which we called Sextant, we still had only three songs. But this time I changed up how they were constructed. I wanted there to be more contrast, more compelling arrangements, to draw in more listeners. And for the first time we had synthesizers throughout the whole record. The songs and arrangements were complicated, so we rehearsed for months before going into the studio. One song, “Hidden Shadows,” had a time signature that changed from bar to bar, over four bars, and then repeated, so we practiced it over and over again until we got to the point where we could just feel it without having to count in our heads. I wanted to use that pattern as the platform and then construct the solo improvisations on top of that, but it’s hard to improvise when you have to focus on counting the beats.
After weeks of rehearsal we finally got it down to where we could play it in our sleep. Then we started playing it faster and faster. We’d be doing improvisations and not even have to think about where the patterns were, but then they’d end up with a bap! from the drummer, signaling the end of the pattern. And then it felt so second nature that we started adding more percussion, wood blocks and shakers. It was a beautiful structure of sound.
The whole record was like that, which I hoped would appeal to a wider audience. Mwandishi incorporated different kinds of beats, some of them African based, some of them backbeats. At this point our music still required pretty active listening, but there were other avant-garde jazz bands way farther out than we were that had no real beats at all, just raw free jazz. Compared to them, we were more mainstream. But even though I had high hopes for Sextant, it still didn’t reach the kind of sales the record label was hoping for. I began to wonder if it was possible to break through that ceiling we seemed to have reached without compromising myself as an artist.
And then I found some inspiration from a very surprising source: the Pointer Sisters.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Pointer Sisters burst out in the spring of 1973 with a self-titled debut album and a single, “Yes We Can Can,” that went to number 11 on the pop chart. This wouldn’t have meant much of anything to Mwandishi, except that David Rubinson was now managing the Pointers, too, and their success gave him an idea.
David had been trying to get our music played on black college radio stations, but that hadn’t led to significantly higher album sales. We were still playing small clubs and niche venues, so David decided to shake things up. He arranged for Mwandishi to appear at a weeklong stand at the Troubadour Club on Santa Monica Boulevard—with the Pointer Sisters opening for us.
If it had seemed strange for Mwandishi to play with Iron Butterfly two years earlier, this felt even weirder. The Pointer Sisters sang throwback harmonies blending jazz, bebop, disco, and R&B, and they wore 1940s hairdos and thrift-store styles as part of their act. We were a group of serious guys in dashikis and Afros, playing high-wire improvised electronic music where people sometimes couldn’t even find the beat. Any way you looked at it, this was one strange bill.
We were booked to play at the Troubadour two shows a night for a week, and on that first night the lines went around the block and way down the street—it was as if everybody in L.A. wanted to come to this show. David had hired P.R. people to get the word out, and the club was filled to capacity with jazz fans, agents, executives, actors, and other musicians. It was a scene.
The Pointer Sisters came out and did a half-hour set, and they just killed it. People had never seen anything like them! Here was this group of women cracking up and having a great time, one of them actually roller-skating around on that tiny Troubadour stage. Their music borrowed from the past, but it had a contemporary twist, so they were able to reach across all kinds of barriers. The Pointer Sisters were electric, and everybody in that building felt it. At the end of their set, they came offstage still laughing and carrying on as everybody was stomping and yelling for more.
Seeing the effect they had on the crowd just about turned my head inside out. The Pointer Sisters were fun. They were out there showing people a good time, lifting everybody’s spirits with their light, happy vibe. When Mwandishi took the stage, the vibe was very different, because although our stuff was great, it was serious. This gig put one thing into clear perspective for me: The audience at a Pointer Sisters show could let loose and have some fun, but the audience at an Mwandishi gig had to do some work.
And that work extended into listening at home, too. When people put on a Pointer Sisters record, they could either sit and listen or do things around the house—cook dinner or finish some housework or any kind of activity, really. If you put on a Mwandishi record, you couldn’t really do anything else but sit and listen, because you had to be concentrating to take it in. This wasn’t music you could just have on in the background.
I started thinking, Who’s got time for all that? People have things to do! We were putting out records with just three songs on them—three long songs that changed tempos and time signatures and keys and everything else. We were requiring a tremendous amount of attention and patience from our listeners, both live and on the records. No wonder our audience was limited.
That gig with the Pointer Sisters got me thinking in a different direction. I told David, “I want to reach people like that.” I loved Mwandishi’s music, and we had certainly been able to touch people with it. But I was beginning to understand why it was so hard to reach beyond the serious jazz fans who dug our style of playing. If we could find a way to incorporate the kind of excitement the Pointer Sisters brought without compromising who we were as a band, we might finally be able to break through.
Part of the Pointer Sisters’ appeal was their stage act, of course—the hairdos and costumes and roller-skating. But I had spent five formative years playing with Miles Davis, who wasn’t one for jumping around and acting out onstage, so I wasn’t interested in theatrics. We always let the music speak for itself, and I wanted to continue doing that.
What can we do with what we have? That was the question marinating in the back of my mind. I kept thinking about how we could redesign our music to make it more accessible, and just as I had before our gig with Iron Butterfly, I thought about contrast: loud to soft, high to low, simple to complex. I didn’t believe we needed a radical change, but there had to be something we could do, musically, to get the attention of a broader audience.
I talked to the guys in the band about my thoughts, but most of them were stewing over the fact that we’d played on a bill with the Pointer Sisters in the first place. They felt that Mwandishi’s music was “real” in a way that the Pointer Sisters’ pop stylings weren’t—but to my mind, this was just the same kind of musical snobbery that I’d exhibited when I first started with Miles. The Pointer Sisters were great at what they were doing, and rather than judging them, I wanted to learn from them. I was ready to move in a new direction, but not everybody else w
as, and that difference of opinion deepened cracks that had already formed in the band.
It was around the time of the Troubadour gig that the guys in the band rebelled: They wanted to get paid more money, and they wanted to be put on salaries.
I understood where they were coming from. By now we had been playing together for several years, and they’d never had any raises. We always split the take from each gig, but paying seven guys, plus our soundman, Fundi, meant there wasn’t much to spread around. Every member of the band was an amazing musician, and not only did they all put a lot into the music, but they had to pack up and carry all their own gear and the sound equipment, too.
I didn’t know all the details of the band’s financial situation, because David Rubinson handled the numbers. But because I paid all the expenses, I was pretty sure Mwandishi had been costing me money over the years. The guys seemed to think I was profiting from the band, so I asked David to run the numbers on what was coming in and going out, and we scheduled a meeting with everyone to discuss it.
Before that, I made them a proposal: “I will level with you about what we’re making, and if you want to split everything down the middle, we can agree to do that,” I said. “But if we’re losing money, then everybody will have to chip in equally to cover it.” Nobody wanted to promise to cover losses, so that conversation didn’t go very far. What it did was crystallize the difference between how I saw the band and how the band saw itself.
The typical setup for a jazz band is that there’s a leader and there are sidemen. The guys wanted to be paid as sidemen, at a level that matched their skills. But I saw the Mwandishi band as a collective: When we made money, we all made money, and when we didn’t, we didn’t. We were in it together. Otherwise I couldn’t sustain it with that number of people.
Herbie Hancock Page 17