Herbie Hancock

by Herbie Hancock

  One afternoon we had played for about nine hours straight and the guys were all exhausted. But just as we were about to quit for the night, somebody pulled me aside and said, “Chet Baker is here.”

  A few weeks earlier I had invited Chet, who was living in Europe at the time, to sing and play trumpet in the movie. Chet was a brilliant musician, and I knew he’d come across as authentic to the era. But he also had a well-known problem with heroin, as well as a reputation for not always showing up, so even when I asked him, I knew there was a chance it wouldn’t work out.

  Instead of giving Chet a specific time and date, we told him to come at any time in the next two weeks, and we would accommodate him. Unfortunately Chet happened to show up right at the end of a long workday. I thought, How am I gonna get everybody pumped back up for this? We couldn’t just tell him to come back at another time, but the guys were already packing up their stuff. So I hurried over to them and said, “Hey, guess what! Chet Baker just showed up! Let’s record him while we can!” I tried to turn it into the most amazing opportunity ever, and somehow it worked.

  We all gathered back on the stage, and I put sheet music on everybody’s stand. I sat down at the piano, and just as I was about to count off I remembered that Chet couldn’t read music. Oh, shit! I didn’t want to embarrass him, but how was I going to fix this? Everybody was waiting for me to begin, so we could get the song done and get out of there.

  Just then Chet said, “Why don’t you guys play it first, so I can listen to it?”

  “Okay!” I said, and so we did. The song we chose, “Fair Weather,” is a complicated ballad, with unexpected chord changes—not the kind of piece you can just hear once and then jump in and play. But Chet did exactly that, and on the next take he sang it and played a beautiful trumpet solo, finding notes, common tones, and phrases that connected the chords. He was in his fifties at the time, and not in the best of health—just three years later he would be dead. Yet that day he showed all of us the great talent that made him so special.

  Around that time I got a call about possibly doing another movie score for Warner Bros. I didn’t really have space in my schedule to do it, but I couldn’t bear to pass it up, either. Clan of the Cave Bear was an adaptation of the popular novel about an orphaned Cro-Magnon girl raised by a Neanderthal family, and I was really intrigued by the notion of writing music for a movie about prehistoric man.

  I had a brief window of free time toward the end of shooting Round Midnight, so I turned my attention away from 1940s jazz and started thinking, What kind of music and sounds would be appropriate for the Neanderthal period? I wasn’t sure, but I figured that getting in touch with some really ancient part of the earth might help me figure it out. As it happened, I was scheduled to play a gig in Iceland, and I wondered if there was a particular place there where I might be able to get close to something ancient. I did a little research and discovered a glacier called Snæfellsjökull, which was also said to be a vortex, a kind of focal point of spiritual energy.

  I decided to visit the glacier, or to get as close to it as I could, anyway. I wasn’t sure how to do that, but once I was in Reykjavik, I asked around and ended up meeting this redheaded Icelandic guy who knew it well. “You can only fly over the glacier,” he told me. “There’s no place to land, and no other way to get there.” Incredibly, this guy actually had his own plane, a little four-seater, and he offered to take me to the glacier the very next day.

  We picked up two other people, and the four of us took off. I was sitting right next to the window, and I practically had my nose pressed to the glass, hoping to get a good feel for it. Suddenly the glacier came into view, a sprawling mass of ancient ice. And as we flew directly over it, I suddenly started sobbing for no apparent reason. I was completely overcome with emotion.

  I kept staring out the window, trying to hide the fact that I was crying, because the whole thing felt so weird. Tears were streaming down my face, and my shoulders were shaking—but then, as soon as we passed over to the other side of the glacier, it stopped. I instantly went back to feeling normal, and I had no idea what had happened. I wiped the tears off my face and tried to pull myself together, but finally I couldn’t help myself—I turned to the others and said, “I just cried like a baby when we passed over it, and I don’t know why!”

  And the redheaded Icelandic guy said, “Yes, you felt it. That’s the power, that’s why they call it a vortex.” He wasn’t surprised at all, which surprised me even more. Even now I really can’t explain what happened to me over that glacier—it was one of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever had.

  Clan of the Cave Bear was about indigenous people, so after the glacier visit I decided to make one more trip, to the Gambia, on the west coast of Africa, to spend some time with an African tribe. I had recorded a song for the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo with a Gambian musician named Foday Musa Suso, so I got in touch with him and asked if he could help me set things up.

  Around the time I left for Iceland, Jim Henson’s company asked if I’d be willing to make an appearance on The Muppet Show. They were planning an episode about Muppets and technology, and since I had developed a reputation as a musician interested in science and had actually made an appearance on Sesame Street a couple of years earlier with the Fairlight synthesizer, they wanted me to demonstrate new musical uses of technology.

  I needed to do more research for Clan of the Cave Bear, so I thought, Why not kill two birds with one stone? I asked the Henson people to fly me to the Gambia, and I told them that if they could send some Muppets there, I could demonstrate a new kind of portable sampling keyboard in a remote African environment—maybe even on a boat, floating down a river.

  I had no idea if they’d go for it, but they said yes. They flew one of their puppeteers to the Gambia with the Muppet characters Miss Piggy and Kermit, and in the meantime I called the Ensoniq Corporation, a musical equipment maker based in Pennsylvania, and asked to borrow their newest product, a battery-powered portable sampling keyboard called Mirage. The Mirage wasn’t on the market yet, so I needed to get one directly from Ensoniq—but it would be amazing exposure for them, of course, to have Kermit and Miss Piggy showing off their brand-new keyboard while floating down a river in West Africa.

  And that’s when Ensoniq told me they had only one prototype, and it wasn’t available. Oh, no! We had made all these arrangements, and the Muppets were on their way to Africa, and now I had no keyboard to show off. I panicked and said, “Listen, you’ve got to send me one, because Miss Piggy and Kermit are on their way here!” But they needed the prototype for a meeting with potential investors that week, to show them the technology. They promised to ship it as soon as the meeting was finished, to wherever I needed it, and with any luck it would arrive in time. So I gave them Sosu’s address.

  That’s how I ended up on a boat in the Gambia with Miss Piggy and Kermit, playing a portable keyboard as we floated on a river, looking for sounds to sample while I improvised a casual conversation with the Muppets, explaining the technology of sampling sounds to use for music. I couldn’t believe how well it worked out, and that I was able to shoot scenes for The Muppet Show while I did my Clan of the Cave Bear research.

  After all that, the Muppets clip never actually aired—and I didn’t get hired to write the score for Clan of the Cave Bear, either. But the Gambia trip was an amazing convergence, of the kind I seemed to experience more and more often since I’d started practicing Buddhism.

  In my Buddhist belief, whenever we’re faced with challenges, we can transform them into opportunities, which strengthens our resolve and builds confidence in our ability to overcome obstacles that will surely arise in the future. Joy and suffering are a part of life, but we can transform suffering into joy through the power in our own life that awakens through our Buddhist practice. Every obstacle contains within it a jewel, and my life felt so filled with jewels right now, I could hardly believe my good
fortune.

  I went back to Paris to finish up final details for Round Midnight, and then, at long last, it was time for a vacation. V.S.O.P. had a gig coming up in Athens, so Gigi and Jessica flew from L.A. to meet me for a week on the Greek island of Corfu. I couldn’t wait to see them, couldn’t wait to share all the wonderful things that were happening. We scheduled a celebratory dinner for August 2, 1985.

  But before that dinner was finished, all our lives would be turned upside down.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Gigi and Jessica were already in Corfu when I arrived, and I was excited to see them. It had been months since we’d had time for a vacation, and I was really looking forward to some downtime with my family. Our friend Maria Lucien had come along, too, and the four of us went to the hotel’s restaurant for the dinner we had planned.

  About halfway through the meal, the maître d’ came to the table and said, “Mr. Hancock, you have a phone call.” I got up and followed him out of the dining room, and he took me to a phone nearby. This was pre–cell phone days, so it wasn’t unusual for me to get calls at hotels where I was staying. It was surprising that the hotel staff had tracked me down in the middle of dinner, though, so I wondered what was up.

  “Herbie, it’s David,” said the voice on the line—it was my manager, David Rubinson. “I’m sorry to have to ask you this, but have you heard about the plane crash?”

  “No, what crash?”

  “There was a plane crash in Dallas,” he said. “And it appears that your sister might have been on board.”

  “Might have been . . . but maybe she wasn’t?” I asked. He told me that he’d gotten a call from Delta officials who were trying to reach me, and that Jean’s name was on the passenger list, so it seemed pretty certain that she was on the flight. But that wasn’t even the worst of it.

  “Herbie,” David said, “they believe Jean was killed in the crash. I’m sorry.”

  Delta flight 191 had taken off from Fort Lauderdale−Hollywood International Airport in Florida, with a stop scheduled in Dallas−Fort Worth before heading on to Los Angeles. But the flight ran into a thunderstorm on the way to Dallas, and on approach to the airport a sudden wind shear pushed the plane violently into the ground, where it crashed and caught fire, killing 137 people. There were 28 survivors, most of whom were in the rear of the plane. My sister had been sitting up in the front, in first class.

  My brain started racing, trying to process what David was telling me. I was horrified at the thought that Jean was dead, but just as quickly I thought, Somebody has to hold it together here. And it’s going to have to be me. I knew that I would have to go back into the restaurant and tell Gigi and fifteen-year-old Jessica that Jean had died, and I would have to be strong for them, because they were going to be devastated.

  I told David I would catch a flight back to Los Angeles first thing in the morning, and after sorting out a few more details, we hung up. I took a deep breath, trying to collect myself, and started to head back into the dining room. But I ran into Gigi, who’d gotten worried and come to look for me.

  Gigi took one look at my face and asked, “Herbie, what happened?”

  “Let’s go back to the table,” I said. “I’ll tell you there.”

  We walked back to where Jessica and Maria were still sitting, their faces pale with worry. “I’m sorry to say that I have some really terrible news,” I told them. “Jean has died in a plane crash.”

  Gigi burst into tears, clasping her hands over her mouth. She is an emotional, compassionate, empathetic woman, and this news was almost too much for her. She was nearly wailing with grief as Jessica, Maria, and I hugged her. None of us could believe that Jean, who was so vibrant, so alive, and so young—only forty-one years old—was actually gone.

  As I later learned, Jean wasn’t even supposed to be on that flight. She had been booked to fly home to San Francisco the day before, but she’d run into her friend Phyllis in Miami, and they were having such a good time that she decided to stay an extra day. Then, instead of taking the same Miami−San Francisco flight she’d skipped the day before, she decided to fly from Fort Lauderdale to L.A. instead—through Dallas.

  My mother was still living in L.A., but without my family there, and with my father and brother living in Chicago, she was alone. And because Delta didn’t immediately release the names of dead and injured passengers, my mother had no idea Jean was even on that flight.

  My father and Wayman flew immediately to L.A., and we decided that I would call around the time they arrived so we could tell her together what had happened. My mom had been doing really well in Los Angeles, practicing Buddhism and making progress in dealing with her bipolar illness, but this would be the most horrible news she could ever hear. The moment we told her that Jean had died, she just started sobbing. I knew I needed to come home to help her, but I told Gigi and Jessica to stay in Corfu, as I’d be coming back in a few days anyway. I wanted them with me while I was in Athens for the V.S.O.P. gig, and it didn’t make sense to have them make that long trip twice.

  The next morning I flew home to L.A. I had called our friends, several of whom were Buddhists, and asked them to meet my mother at my house, where we would have a gathering that evening to celebrate my sister’s life. After twenty or so hours in transit I finally made it to LAX, and in the car on the way to my house I wondered what kind of state my mother would be in. How can any parent face the grief of suddenly losing a child? I was really worried about whether she’d be able to deal with this.

  When the car arrived at my house, my mother was sitting on the front steps, waiting for me. I got out of the car and walked up to her, and she looked at me and said something funny, some little affectionate joke about Jean. And at that moment I knew she was going to be okay. I hugged my mom, feeling relieved, and then the two of us went inside, where the celebration of Jean’s life had already started.

  As person after person got up and talked about how incredible Jean was, I realized that I had never fully appreciated that fact. We often don’t realize how amazing people are, especially those who are close to us, until they’re gone, and that was certainly true for me where Jean was concerned.

  It wasn’t until she died in that plane crash that I started to really think about and appreciate the remarkable things she had accomplished in her life. Jean was gifted at everything she attempted, including sports like waterskiing and snow skiing and tennis. And from becoming one of the first black flight attendants to helping develop the ATM, to writing lyrics and music for songs, to teaching herself to play guitar, she truly was an extraordinary person.

  Less than a year before her death Jean wrote a short autobiography for a class she was taking. When I read it, I was floored: In addition to everything else, she was a beautiful writer. She described her life, her work, and her dreams so eloquently that the essay was almost painful to read. And it was especially difficult to read her musings on air travel, turbulence, and plane crashes—all subjects she’d been obsessed with since her years as a flight attendant.

  In the late 1960s, during the Vietnam War, Jean had worked on charter flights carrying soldiers to and from Southeast Asia. She saw excited young men going to war and the devastated veterans who returned. Here’s how she described it in the autobiography:

  World Airways carried those young men to their one-year tour of duty, and brought them home—sometimes as changed men, sometimes even quieter, encased in coffins in the belly of the plane. . . .

  Although they were only one year older chronologically, we now had a group of changed men. I expected happy, celebrating soldiers, glad to be on their way home, but found quiet, subdued, almost haunted passengers. We were all accustomed to being flirted with, barraged for details on what was happening back home, summoned for inane questions just to detain us for a time on an armrest . . . these soldiers sat stolidly and stared out of the window or down at their hands. Food was refused mo
re often than not, and even the cartons of fresh milk from the States were accepted without comment.

  She wrote about trying to comfort these soldiers when the returning planes hit bad weather:

  The only times that I dreaded were when we would hit turbulence in the winter skies. Sometimes it would be quite severe, and I would see the men go stiff, gripping their chairs, staring straight ahead. I knew the shaking would pass without event, but to them it seemed a possible, horrible irony—that they had endured Vietnam but would die at the hands of a Pacific storm. The crew always wished for a smooth sky, to save the soldiers from that final fright.

  Jean had been through turbulence hundreds of times as a flight attendant, and she always knew that the plane would make it through. I wondered if she’d felt any differently on that Dallas flight, or whether she’d faced the final moments of her life with the same stoicism she’d shown in front of those returning soldiers.

  Later in the autobiography she described her feelings about air travel. She was fascinated with crashes, but that never put a damper on the thrill she felt at being in the sky:

  Because of my experience as a flight attendant, I’m committed to air travel and maintain very close relationships with friends in cities around the world. I read every book that I can about commercial aircraft, with particular interest in reports of air crashes or unexplained phenomena (such as the Eastern Airlines Flight 401, which went down in the Florida Everglades but resurrected through ghostly apparitions of dead crew members on other flights).

  I shunned the DC10 long before the Chicago disaster [a May 1979 crash in which all passengers and crew died] because of my knowledge of cargo door problems encountered on a Canada run. I’ve experienced engine fires on takeoff, severe turbulence in the center of a thunderstorm, and being hit by lightning.

  At World, we flew Boeing 707s exclusively, and in my opinion, it is the best airplane made. I came to believe unconditionally in the structural integrity of that aircraft. The rumble of those massive Pratt [&] Whitney engines became a favorite, comforting sound. I never tired of staring out of the window at the swept-back wing, the ailerons and flaps rising and retreating in aerodynamic combinations, guiding the steel ship through the thin, cold air.