Herbie Hancock

by Herbie Hancock

  As I reflected on Jean’s too-short life I thought back to our conversation six years earlier about whether she could ever become a professional singer. It pained me to recall the disappointment on her face in that moment, and I found myself wishing once again that I’d been able to encourage her in any endeavor she chose.

  But as I read more of her autobiography I took comfort in the resilience she’d shown in turning her attention to writing songs, and the joy it brought her:

  My brother has recorded two of his melodies with my words (he rarely does vocals on his albums) and one of his jazz standards entitled “Maiden Voyage” has been recorded by four artists with lyrics by Jean Hancock printed right there on the album jacket for all to see.

  Flora Purim, a Brazilian singer, fell in love with and recorded a composition of mine (words and music) on one of her albums. In fact, one of the greatest thrills I’ve ever felt was in 1984 while I was vacationing in Puerto Vallarta. Another guest at the villa was telling a friend about a favorite song of his by Flora that he had heard on the radio and went to great lengths to locate because he liked it so much. He started reciting the song, and in a hot flush of disbelief and joy, I heard him repeating my work . . .

  My world has been full of friends, challenging work, good books, much-loved music, citizenship and appreciation for a flawed but wonderful country, and an awesome realization of how rewarding and pleasant my life has become.

  I didn’t cry when Jean died, but not because I wasn’t sad. From the moment I got that phone call from David Rubinson, I’d felt very focused on taking care of others—Gigi, Jessica, my mother. I was used to holding things back, shutting off emotions so I could take care of other people, but it disturbed me that I still hadn’t cried about my sister’s death.

  Ever since I was a boy I had been trying to control my emotions. I never wanted to feel victimized, so I would just shut down rather than feel them. It’s not that I was incapable of having feelings, or even crying, but more often than not those feelings came from experiencing music or beauty—listening to the record Miles Ahead or flying over the vortex at the Icelandic glacier. When it came to family and relationships, I kept my emotions in check for fear of being hurt. My family meant a lot to me, but I just couldn’t, or wouldn’t, allow myself to get emotional about them.

  But over the years my practice of Buddhism broke through that fear, slowly knocking down the walls I so dutifully put up around myself. Where I had a naturally selfish streak, my Buddhist practice taught me to take others into account. And though I’d never been a particularly compassionate or empathetic person, over time Buddhism began breaking down those walls, too. A few weeks after Jean’s death the emotions I’d been holding so tightly inside finally came out.

  We had gone to Hawaii to scatter my sister’s ashes when the tears finally came. As we sailed out into the ocean I knew Jean’s soul was no longer in her body, but there was a finality to seeing her ashes float away on the wind, then settle on the sparkling water, that finally overcame me. I celebrated my sister’s life and wept that it had ended too soon. Jessica was with me, and she had never seen me cry before. “Dad, are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I told her. “Now I’m really okay.”

  When the film Round Midnight was released, in 1986, everybody raved about Dexter Gordon’s performance. He was so natural in the role, he really seemed to become the character, and people were impressed. As awards season rolled around, critics started naming him as a possible Oscar nominee, which was exciting for all of us who had worked on the movie.

  Tony Meilandt and I were in New York on February 11, 1987, the day the nominations were announced, in an apartment we had rented for business trips to the city. The announcement comes early in the morning, so I was still asleep when the TV news broadcast was about to start. Tony banged on my door and yelled, “Herbie, wake up!” I dragged myself into the living room and sat down on the couch, but pretty soon my blood started pumping—what if Dexter really did get a Best Actor nomination? How cool would that be? Dexter was in his mid-sixties, and not always in the best of health. This would be an amazing honor for him, and I was praying we’d hear his name that morning.

  When Dexter’s name was announced, Tony and I started whooping and clapping, just so thrilled for him. Not long afterward the nominees for Best Original Score were presented—and that’s when I heard my name called.

  What? I was so stunned, it practically pinned me against the couch. As Tony began screaming and jumping up and down, I just sat there, my mouth hanging open—I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. It was really early in Los Angeles, but I had to call Gigi. “You are not going to believe this!” I said. “I got nominated for an Oscar!” And she started shrieking with joy. This was so amazing, it was almost too much.

  The Academy Awards ceremony was scheduled for six weeks later, on March 30. Tony immediately went all out, like Sherlock Holmes, making calls to try to figure out what my chances were. He went under the radar, poking around and doing research, and about a week before the ceremony he said, “Not looking good, Herbie.” Most people expected the great composer Ennio Morricone to win for The Mission. Morricone had been composing music for films since the early 1960s, and the quality and quantity of his work were legendary. By the time he did The Mission, Morricone’s scores included The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; La Cage aux Folles; Once Upon a Time in America; and Days of Heaven, which had garnered him his first Oscar nomination.

  Besides Morricone, the other Best Soundtrack nominees that year were James Horner for Aliens, Jerry Goldsmith for Hoosiers, and Leonard Rosenman for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home—all films that had sold a lot more tickets than Round Midnight. I wasn’t sure whether that made a big difference to voters or not, but in the weeks leading up to the ceremony I had to assume my chances weren’t very good. At the same time I knew how much that Oscar would mean to jazz players, who often feel like the redheaded stepchildren of American music, so I did dare to let a little bit of hope creep in that I might actually win.

  The Academy hosts informational meetings for nominees, so they’ll know what to expect on Oscars night. The day I attended they told everybody, “Please write out a speech whether you think you’ll win or not, because there will be a billion people watching you up onstage.” I went home after that and sat down on our porch with a pen and paper, but I didn’t know how to start. It felt strange to be composing an acceptance speech that I probably would never give, but I had to write something. Then I hit on an idea. I scribbled down a few thoughts, and they became the basis of a short speech.

  Finally the big night arrived. I dressed in a tuxedo and folded up my speech, slipping it into my jacket pocket. When we got to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Hollywood, Gigi and I made our way to our seats to find we were sitting right next to one of my heroes, my favorite film composer, Jerry Goldsmith, who had been nominated for his magnificent score for Hoosiers.

  It’s incredible being in the audience at the Oscars, surrounded by some of the greatest actors and musicians in the world. There were three hosts that night—Chevy Chase, Goldie Hawn, and the Australian actor Paul Hogan—and I was laughing so much I didn’t even feel nervous as the first few awards were presented. But when Bette Midler took the stage to award the Oscar for Best Original Score, my heart started pounding.

  Bette started making all kinds of jokes, but the one I remember most is when she said, “I’m honored to present this award because, as you may have heard, I love this category: scoring!” Everybody cracked up, and when she started reading off the five names, I thought, Well, here we go! And then . . . she opened the envelope and announced, “The Oscar goes to” . . . and incredibly, she said my name. It was as if I heard it and didn’t hear it at the same time, but everybody around me started going crazy, so I immediately gave Gigi a kiss. I had to walk past Jerry Goldsmith to get to the aisle, and I felt bad for him. But I had to get up to the
stage!

  Bette handed me the Oscar . . . and it was so heavy I just about dropped it. I had won a few Grammys by then, but they were much lighter. I held the statue in one hand and pulled out my speech with the other, and although my hands were shaking I felt good about what I was going to say, because when I’d been sitting on my porch, pen in hand, I had finally hit on the idea of turning the thank-you speech upside down:

  In accepting this award, I salute the same unsung heroes that you so boldly have chosen to applaud. Some are with us today and some are not. Many have suffered and even died for this music, this greatest of all expressions of the creative spirit of humankind—jazz.

  From their suffering and pain we can learn that life is the subject, the story that music so eloquently speaks of, and it is not the other way around. We as individuals must develop our lives to the fullest, to strengthen and deepen the story that others can be inspired by life’s song.

  I thank Bertrand Tavernier, Irwin Winkler, Francis Paudras, Dexter Gordon, Bruce Lundvall, William Flageollet, and the cast and crew for their sincere efforts through love and respect for this American-born art form called jazz. Praise has been long overdue for Bud Powell, Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and many, many others.

  Along with you, I thank them.

  Along with them, I thank you.

  I didn’t thank Gigi in my speech, but I thought she would understand, since I wanted to accept the award on behalf of jazz and jazz musicians. But even more important, I wanted to express gratitude going both ways, because we owe gratitude to those who would honor jazz, but we also owe a great debt to all the musicians who have continued to develop and expand it, keeping it going strong for all these years. Even though that Oscar sits on a shelf in my home, it truly belongs to the many, many men and women who have poured their hearts and souls and very lives into this original and greatest American art form.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  In the years after my sister’s death I went through some changes in my life. David Rubinson and I ended our working relationship for good, and Tony Meilandt took over as my manager. After living in L.A. for seven years, my mother finally moved back to Chicago. And although I’d made dozens of records over the past twenty-five years, that pace slowed way down as new opportunities in TV and movies began to open up for me.

  Not long after I wrapped Round Midnight, PBS asked me to host a show called Rockschool, which had started out as a BBC program. PBS wanted to make an Americanized version, with each episode covering a different element of rock music—things like tuning, equipment, and music styles that influenced or grew out of rock. I loved doing Rockschool, because it was educational not only for the public TV audience but for me, too. I learned from musicians who appeared on the show, like funk bassist Bootsy Collins and Jamaican reggae artists Black Uhuru.

  Rockschool ran for two seasons, and then I got a call from the producer Ken Ehrlich offering me a job hosting Coast to Coast, a new program that would take viewers behind the scenes of musicians on tour. We’d travel with cameras to wherever an artist was playing, and I’d interview and perform with him or her, showing viewers life on the road. Just as I had on Rockschool, I got to showcase a lot of amazing artists on Coast to Coast: Sting, Van Morrison, Pat Metheny, Rick James, Stevie Nicks, David Sanborn, Joni Mitchell—and the list went on.

  At the same time I was getting requests to do more movie scores. Between 1986 and 1989 I composed four scores in addition to Round Midnight: Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, starring Richard Pryor; Action Jackson, starring Carl Weathers and Sharon Stone; Colors, starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall; and Harlem Nights, starring Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. I enjoy doing scores, but after a while the combination of touring and scoring led to a feeling of burnout. This was especially true when I was doing Colors—I just couldn’t tap into the well, so I ended up getting help from Bill Laswell and Bob Moses, who really deserve the credit for that one.

  All these projects took me in different directions—an experience unlike those years with Miles and Mwandishi, when my focus was on touring and recording with one band. By the end of 1988 my deal with Columbia had come to an end, and given the broadening scope of my projects, I wondered whether it was time to enter a different kind of arrangement, one that would encompass the full range of what I was working on.

  I decided to ask Quincy Jones if he was interested in forming some kind of partnership with me. Quincy had been a friend for years, ever since I’d met him playing at Birdland in New York in the early 1960s. He had been an up-and-coming trumpeter as a teenager, and by the time I met him he had played and recorded with Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie. He became the first black senior executive with a major recording label, and he also moved into writing and arranging music and doing film and TV scores, including that for the groundbreaking miniseries Roots. And then his career really exploded.

  In the ’80s Quincy Jones was the man who could do anything. He produced Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which became the best-selling record of all time. He produced and wrote the score for The Color Purple and created the philanthropic pop sensation “We Are the World.” Quincy knew absolutely everybody in music, television, and the movies, and he’d just signed a ten-year deal with Warner Communications to create his own entertainment company, Quincy Jones Entertainment.

  Quincy and I have always had a great relationship. He’s a few years older than me, and he’d always been a source of encouragement, talking about me to directors and recommending me for film scores. Yet even though he was so accomplished, I felt that, between music, film, and TV projects of my own, I brought a lot to the table, too. I also brought something that he didn’t have: technology. Quincy had always been interested in what computers and new electronic gadgets could do in the world of music, but he wasn’t an early adopter, as I was—in fact, he was usually the one asking me for advice. If we combined our strengths, I was convinced the two of us could create a powerful force in the entertainment world.

  I approached Quincy about forming a partnership when I left Columbia Records, but he kind of skirted around the issue for a while. In fairness, he’d only just signed his own deal with Warners, so he was naturally focused on that. Instead he told me, “Let’s start with you making your next record under my label,” Qwest Records. I said, “Okay, Q. Let’s do that”—but I hoped that during the period I was recording that album he would see how I worked and reconsider the partnership proposal.

  For the moment, it wasn’t happening, so I felt a bit at loose ends. I’d been playing professionally for thirty years now, through many different musical styles, instruments, and historical eras, running at a full sprint ever since I first set foot in New York City. There was no blueprint or guidebook for what I was doing; my life and career had just unfolded at their own pace, with their own twists. Now, at the beginning of the 1990s, I wasn’t exactly sure where I was heading next.

  Judging by a conversation I had with Miles Davis around that same time, I wasn’t the only one feeling that way.

  After I left the quintet, I saw Miles off and on through the years. He had a lot of serious health problems, including arthritis, diabetes, bursitis, and ulcers, and for a four-year period between 1975 and 1980 he was so sick and out of sorts, he didn’t play the trumpet at all. Miles started doing too much cocaine during that time, and he rarely left his house. I’d go by and see him occasionally, but he wasn’t well and didn’t seem to be getting better.

  In 1976, after years of suffering terrible hip pain, he finally had hip-replacement surgery. I went to the hospital to visit him, and he was in worse pain than I’d ever seen him in before. He was in such a state, I just wanted to do anything I could to help him.

  “Miles,” I said, “I know you’ll do anything to help ease that pain, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, grimacing. He still never said one word more than was necessary.

 
“Well, the only thing I know that will help is to chant,” I said. He just looked at me cockeyed, as if that were the silliest thing I’d ever said. But I really wanted to get him to say Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, even if he only ever said it just this once. Suddenly an idea popped into my head.

  “Yeah, that would have helped you,” I said, “but I know you can’t say it anyway.”

  “Shit,” Miles said, and looked away. “I can, too.”

  “No, don’t worry about it,” I said.

  “I can say it!” he snapped. And then, his voice quiet, he said, “Nam . . . Myoho . . . ,” and I helped him with Renge and Kyo. I was really happy to hear those words come out of his mouth.

  “You were right, Miles!” I said. “You did it.” I would have hugged him, but he was in too much pain, and, besides, Miles wasn’t what you’d call a hugger. “If you do that a bunch of times, I promise you, it will help,” I assured him. I’m not sure if Miles ever chanted again, but eventually his health did improve enough that he got back to touring and making records.

  In the late 1980s I was scheduled to play a gig in Madrid, and I heard that Miles was in town, too. I got to Madrid the night before our gig started, so I decided to go hear him play—I hadn’t heard him live in a long time, and I wondered how he’d sound after having so many health issues.

  One tune he’d taken up in the ’80s was the Cyndi Lauper hit “Time After Time.” Miles brought a new sensibility to the song, slowing it down and giving it a softer, more R&B-like beat than the original. In the Palacio de Deportes that night I sat in the audience and watched as Miles led his band through the song. It was just unbelievable, what he did—the spaces that he picked, and just how he constructed the whole thing. It was superb, so gorgeous and so perfect, it brought me to tears.