I called Miles and told him about the retrospective, and I asked him if he’d be willing to play with the quintet onstage. And to my surprise, he actually said yes. I think he was excited about the prospect of playing with Wayne, Ron, and Tony again. Once Miles agreed, I approached the other guys, and of course they all signed on. But somehow I already had a feeling that this might be too good to be true. I told the guys, “You know, Miles might change his mind, so I can’t vouch for whether he’ll go through with this or not.” They each said they’d do it regardless, but I really did hope Miles would do it.
After I got the other guys on board, I called Miles back to reconfirm.
“Herrrrbie,” he said, “I’ve been thinking. What would that be like, me playing for my own sideman? You were my sideman, and now I’m going to come be yours?” As much as he might have liked to play with everybody, doing it as part of a Herbie Hancock retrospective just didn’t feel right to him.
“Okay, Miles,” I told him. I was disappointed, but I understood. And I already knew whom to ask to take his place: Freddie Hubbard. Freddie was not only a great trumpet player, one of very few who were capable of stepping into what had been Miles Davis’s place on a stage, but he and I also had a long history together. Freddie had played on many of my Blue Note records, including my very first one in 1962, Takin’ Off. He had helped establish my career, so it felt right to invite him to play with us—and not just be a substitute for Miles.
Without Miles, we obviously couldn’t call the group the Miles Davis Quintet. But what should we call it? After tossing around a bunch of different possibilities, we came up with V.S.O.P. I’ve always loved titles with double meanings, and V.S.O.P. had two that were perfect. First, it’s a grade of cognac (Very Superior Old Pale), which is a brandy that has been aged a certain length of time. The more the cognac ages, the better it tastes—which is the perfect metaphor for an artist’s retrospective. I was only thirty-six that summer, which is not really that old when you look at it now. But I had been around for a while, and so I liked the idea of improving with age.
And V.S.O.P. could also stand for Very Special Onetime Performance, which is what this particular reunion was intended to be. When I managed to pull together the guys from the quintet, I thought, Let’s make this special, a onetime thing—either you saw it or you didn’t, but either way it will never happen again.
So now we had our lineup for Newport: V.S.O.P., Mwandishi, and then the Headhunters. And that’s when I started to realize how incredibly difficult it was going to be to do this concert. Three bands, three rehearsals, three set changes . . . and each band’s style was light-years away from the others’. It wasn’t difficult for me to play acoustic jazz or hard bop or fusion or funk. But to do one right after the other, with different lineups and almost no time to recalibrate my brain between performances? This was going to be an adventure.
In fact, it turned out to be the hardest concert I ever played. I was sweating my ass off, trying to focus on whatever style we were playing, and then, between sets, making sure we had the right personnel and equipment up on the stage. We had less than twenty minutes between each band’s appearance, which really isn’t much time to wrap your brain around the shift from something like “Maiden Voyage” to Mwandishi’s far-out space music.
With V.S.O.P. we fell right back into the groove of playing together. But trying to re-create the magic of Mwandishi was pretty much impossible. When that band was still together, we were incredibly attuned to each other both onstage and off. But there was no way we could instantly recapture that synchronicity. It was like asking a group of circus performers who hadn’t practiced in a year to suddenly do a trapeze act; where we used to be able to catch each other effortlessly, we were now just trying hard not to crash to the ground. Here’s how Buster remembers it:
We got together to rehearse the Mwandishi band. It was fun, nothing but laughing and talking, telling stories and reminiscing and hugging. And then we tried to play some music.
Trying to re-create what we had in that band was the most difficult thing I had ever done. It was almost impossible. We had some flashes, and there were a few moments of brilliance, but I don’t think any of us were satisfied at the end of that performance.
You know, it’s like trying to re-create the first time you had a climax. It’s never the same! But that’s what we were trying to do. I think that performance made us all know that Mwandishi was a moment in time that was a treasure, something to be revered, not messed with. Let’s use it as a spiritual impetus for us to go on, go forward, and create beauty, but that particular thing just couldn’t be done again.
Of the three groups that played, the one that got the most attention was V.S.O.P. People hadn’t heard that sound since we’d played with Miles, and they just went crazy. A lot of the jazz players from the sixties, including Tony and Wayne and Ron, had gone on to form fusion bands, so there were fewer major groups around playing pure, top-level acoustic jazz. The serious jazz fans at Newport just ate it up.
So many people loved it that we started getting interest from promoters about taking that quintet on the road. And I thought, Well, why not? We could go on a onetime V.S.O.P. tour, right? If it was only a single tour, it would still be a Very Special Onetime Performance—an exclusive event for jazz lovers. So that’s what we did.
We toured all over Europe, and thousands of jazz fans turned out. People were just really excited to hear this style of music again, and the five of us were loving playing it. As much as I wanted to explore electronic music, I was enjoying playing a completely different style of music with V.S.O.P.
In fact, we were all having so much fun, we eventually gave in and decided that V.S.O.P. wasn’t going to be a onetime thing after all. We kept touring throughout the next few years, even as I continued to delve deeper into electronic music with the Headhunters. I was still really focused on the future of music, but I decided it wouldn’t hurt to dive back into the past in a new, more seasoned way. It somehow made the past become new again.
Along those same lines, Chick Corea and I decided to do a tour together in 1977, just two guys and two acoustic pianos. I had known Chick for years, and of course he was the pianist I replaced briefly in Mongo Santamaria’s band, and who later replaced me in the Miles Davis Quintet. Chick and I had a lot of the same influences, and I loved his style, but at first I wasn’t sure whether our two-piano collaboration would work out. There was only one way to find out, and that was for us to get together and see whether we could make the magic happen.
At the time Chick was living in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, in a home that had two grand pianos. I drove to his house one afternoon, and at first we just sat and talked about what pieces we might like to play together. After a while we finally took our seats at the pianos, and Chick counted off a tune we both knew. I don’t remember what song it was, but it was something easy, so we could just fool around a little bit and see how things went.
We began by being very polite to each other—I didn’t want to get in his way, and he didn’t want to get in mine. But little by little we started warming up, taking it to the next level. And about five minutes in we were just flying all over the place, playing off each other and having a great time. And then we picked another tune, and we started to improvise an intro, just vibing off each other, and we both started cracking up. We were laughing, playing back and forth, and about halfway through that song we stopped and I said, “Okay, this is not going to be a problem.”
We started to make a list of songs for the tour, but neither of us actually knew any of the other’s songs. Chick and I were both composers and bandleaders, which meant we did our own stuff. So that first list had songs like a piece from Bartók’s Mikrokosmos and the standard “Someday My Prince Will Come.” We worked up a few numbers, but for the rest we decided to more or less wing it, wanting to save some of the improvisatory fun for the audience.
; The great thing about Chick’s playing is how whimsical and loose it is. There’s a real playfulness to him that shines through in his music, and the titles of his pieces often refer to fantasy and whimsy. Those qualities shine through in his personality, too, which made touring and playing with him a joy. He’s very open to everything, and he has a spiritual side, too, having been a Scientologist for many years.
And as much as he and I enjoyed playing together, the audiences seemed to enjoy hearing us. We toured through seven countries, and the crowds really went nuts. I can remember performing five encores after our show in Montreux—and by the last encore we weren’t even playing piano anymore, just standing up at the front of the stage, making sounds and faces at each other in a rhythmic way, riffing on the great chemistry we shared.
Touring with Chick and with V.S.O.P. was a fun and challenging acoustic complement to working with the Headhunters—but electronic music was where my heart was leading me. I couldn’t wait to find out what was coming next.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
My mother had tried to instill a love of classical music and culture in her kids, but that didn’t mean she was stuck in the past. She considered herself progressive and open to new ideas, and despite the fact that she was in her sixties now, she wanted to be the hip mom.
My parents weren’t exactly staunch Christians, and my mother only occasionally attended church. So when I told them that I was practicing Buddhism, she seemed intrigued and asked me several questions about it. My dad wasn’t as interested—maybe he figured it was just a phase. It seemed as if everybody in America was exploring alternative religions in the ’70s, from Scientology to Transcendental Meditation to the Moonies, and a lot of people would dabble in one thing or another and then move on.
But my mother saw that I had become a dedicated practitioner of Buddhism, so when I asked her if I could put an altar and my Gohonzon in their apartment when I came to town, she didn’t hesitate. I noticed her watching me sometimes, so one day I just asked her, “Would you like to chant with me?” And she said yes.
After that we chanted together whenever I was in Chicago, including Gongyo, a simple but profound ceremony performed twice a day, and before long she started chanting on her own. I’m always happy whenever anyone starts practicing Buddhism, but I was particularly pleased about my mother, who’d had such a hard time with her bipolar disorder over the years—not that we knew there was a name for her mood swings. No one had thought her behavior was caused by an actual illness, because that just wasn’t part of the vocabulary. But sometime in the late 1970s she was finally diagnosed as suffering from manic depression, as it was then called. She started taking medication, and although that helped, she was still having trouble with her moods.
It was my sister, Jean, who recognized that my mother’s condition seemed worse when she was at home in Chicago. Jean had recently moved to Los Angeles, and she asked me, “What if Mom moves out to L.A. for a while and sees a psychiatrist here?” Our hope was that spending some time on her own, in addition to psychiatric care, might improve her condition. So my mom packed some clothes and came out to L.A. for what we thought might be a six-month stay. While she was here, she and I chanted together, and she got connected to the community of SGI Buddhists in L.A. I was really happy about this development, but my sister wasn’t as enthusiastic.
In fact, Jean had a pretty negative attitude about my practice of Buddhism. We had gotten along well as kids, apart from the occasional squabble, but as we got older we seemed to get into arguments more often. Like my mother, my sister knew how to cut with her words, and she wasn’t afraid to do so. She didn’t object to Buddhism itself, but she had an attitude about the fact that I was practicing it. “You call yourself a Buddhist,” she’d snap at me, “but you behave like you’re the only person in the world.”
My sister seemed to have complicated feelings about me, and in particular about my success. Maybe she felt that things had come too easily for me; I’m not sure. But I know that things definitely hadn’t come easily for her. She was a brilliant young black woman in a world that didn’t appreciate either her race or her gender.
Jean was the smartest person I ever met, but she had to fight for every ounce of respect she got. After leaving American Airlines, she’d taken a job working for IBM in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she was actually one of three women who developed IBM’s first automated teller machine. This was a top-secret project while she was working on it, but even after ATMs were being installed on every street corner, she still never got credit for it.
She had an engineer’s mind, as I do, and she got good jobs working in data processing and programming. But she really wanted to be a singer. And that was the other thing that caused strife between us: Jean felt I wasn’t supportive of her dream to sing professionally.
Jean respected me as a musician and wanted my approval of her musical ambitions. Maybe she even hoped I would help her get a leg up in the music business. But I had been around some of the best singers in the world, and even though Jean had a nice voice, her pitch control wasn’t the greatest, and I couldn’t ignore that. So I didn’t take the steps she apparently had hoped I would take, and consequently her feelings were hurt.
At some point in the late 1970s Jean got frustrated that I hadn’t done more to help her. Whenever she would ask, I would kind of hem and haw, but finally she backed me against a wall. “Herbie, tell me the truth,” she said. “Do you think I can ever make a career out of singing?”
I tried to be diplomatic, saying that as a pianist I wasn’t a good judge of vocal ability. But my sister was too smart, and too good of a debater, to let me get away with that. “Simple question, Herbie,” she said. “Yes or no.”
So I told her the truth. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” She looked as if she’d been slapped in the face. I wished the conversation could have gone another way, but that was how I felt, and I wasn’t going to lie to her—I’ve never felt comfortable lying. But Jean was very, very hurt by my reply. I think she just felt completely cut down, and she never asked me about singing again.
When I think about that conversation now, I wish I hadn’t been so blunt. There are plenty of singers who know how to deliver a song, even if their pitch isn’t the greatest. Jean was a good singer, and she had a lot of heart, so who was I to say she couldn’t do it professionally? She might have ultimately found that out for herself, but that would have been a whole lot better than her feeling that her brother had cut down her dream. I’m not the kind of person who spends time regretting, and I understand why I answered her the way I did. But I wish I could have found a way to respond that hadn’t hurt her so much.
My sister did end up finding her place in music, but not as a singer: She wrote songs that were recorded by Earth Wind & Fire, Booker T. & the MGs, and Nnenna Freelon. She also wrote lyrics for some of my songs. But our relationship was never the same after that conversation. I honestly didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, because I figured things would just play themselves out over time. Neither of us could have known it, but Jean didn’t have much time left.
In the years since I started practicing Buddhism, I’ve come to certain realizations about myself. One is that in my life I’ve had a tendency toward selfish behavior. I didn’t want to lie to Jean because I felt that it wasn’t the right thing to do, but in protecting my own needs, I hurt her. I didn’t have to be so rigid in judging her abilities—she would have loved it if I had found a way to encourage her efforts. Instead, I did what I felt I needed to do, but it was primarily, if unconsciously, for my own sake.
A few years after that conversation with Jean, my mother came with me to a Buddhist meeting. At these gatherings people would often stand up and speak about an experience they’d had, or a lesson they’d learned as a result of their Buddhist practice. I stood up and talked about discovering that there was a deep-seated selfish nature in me, which I hadn’t been aware o
f until my practice of Buddhism revealed it to me. And you know, most of the people there said things like “Really, Herbie? You don’t seem selfish.” They were all very supportive.
But out of the corner of my eye I could see my mother nodding her head. She knew it was true.
As human beings we are often good at hiding, or not recognizing, our weaknesses. But my mother knew me better than anybody, and she confirmed what I suspected about myself. Ever since then that tendency toward selfishness is something I’ve tried to be aware of and to overcome.
I should add one more thing about that conversation with my sister. Ironically, around the same time I was telling her I didn’t think she could make it as a singer, I was about to become a lead vocalist myself. I wasn’t really a professional-quality singer, either—but a new piece of equipment would make it possible for me to sing lead. It would also take me another step further into electronic music.
One day in 1977 I looked around my studio and realized I had a problem. I called in Bryan Bell and said, “Man, we have to do something!” I had at least twenty-five synthesizers and so many keyboards that they were stacked together on their sides like planks.
Bryan just looked around the room and exhaled a big sigh. He knew what I was about to say.
“I want to have a setup where I can play any synthesizer in this room—with just three keyboards,” I told him. This had never been done before; normally you’d need more keyboards, because they weren’t equipped to switch back and forth easily among multiple synthesizers.
Now, the interesting thing about Bryan was, he never said, “This can’t be done,” when I asked him to do something. He might dampen my enthusiasm by saying, “Okay, but it will take two years and four million dollars,” but he knew that if he simply told me something wasn’t possible, I wouldn’t let it rest. It’s my Buddhist nature—if somebody tells me, “This has never been done before, and it may be impossible,” my first response is to say, “Well, then, there’s a perfect opportunity for victory!” Buddhism is about finding ways to turn obstacles to your advantage. As Bryan liked to joke, “There are no excuses when you have a Buddhist boss.”
Herbie Hancock Page 21