Then, at the end, the band played a tag, which is a chord sequence that repeats over and over again, like a loop. Miles played on top of it, a different phrase each time—and every one connected with the previous one in a gorgeous way. You’d think that he would run out of ideas, but he just kept going, each idea more beautiful than the last. No matter what he’d been through, Miles was still a genius onstage. I watched that concert in a state of amazement at the level of musicianship and emotion he brought to every song.
But Miles wasn’t feeling well that night, and after the concert he collapsed and was rushed to a hospital. Afraid he was going to die, he told the Spanish doctors, “I don’t want to die here!” The next day he insisted on flying back to New York so he could be at home in his final hours. He didn’t end up dying then, of course, but I’ve sometimes wondered if he felt a hint of his own mortality onstage that night, leading him to play with the depth of emotional intensity he brought to those songs.
Not long after that Miles was too ill to play at a scheduled gig in Rome, so he called me up. “Can you take my place?” he asked.
I was shocked, because I had never known Miles to ask anyone to take his place with his band. Most guys would just cancel the gig, but Miles trusted me to step in. As I was considering what synthesizer to bring, I realized I had one Kurzweil synthesizer that could be programmed to sound like Miles’s muted horn, so I decided to bring that one. I didn’t want to piss Miles off, so I asked the band when I got to Rome whether he’d mind, and they all said, “Cool, go for it!” Someone gave me a rough live concert tape, so I’d know what songs and arrangements the band had been playing, and I stayed up all night writing out sketches of those arrangements, trying to figure out how best to approach the music. The next evening I played with the band, and even though I’d gotten very little sleep, it was exhilarating. Everything just clicked.
In the end, I think that Miles knew exactly what he was doing. Any stand-in trumpet player is a letdown when you’re hoping to see Miles Davis. But getting a keyboard player—at least that brought something fresh to the gig. Miles’s band was hot, with Kenny Garrett playing saxophone and flute, Ricky Weldman on drums, Marilyn Mazur on percussion, and Benny Rietveld on bass. I had a blast being up onstage with them, using that Miles Davis−like sound with my keyboard. No matter how many years had gone by, Miles’s music was still capable of giving me a new and exciting experience.
Miles was always looking forward, never back. When a Spanish journalist asked him in 1984 whether he’d ever want to reunite the quintet, putting together a tour with Ron, Tony, Wayne, and myself, he said, “No. That would be like making love to the first woman over again.” In other words, what’s the point? Once you’ve already done something, it’s time to try something new.
That’s why I was so surprised when, in 1990, Miles suggested reuniting to Wayne, Tony, and me. We’d just played a gig together in Paris, and as we were shooting the shit with some other musicians afterward at La Villette, Miles said, “Okay, everybody else out of the room except Wayne, Tony, and Herbie.” People began shuffling out, and Miles got up and closed the door behind them.
“What would it be like if we got back together?” he asked us. And I could tell that he meant it.
My first thought was That would be cool! because we all had so much more to bring to the table now. All of us had been bandleaders: Wayne with Weather Report, Tony with Tony Williams Lifetime, and me with Mwandishi and the Headhunters. We all had new compositions, new experiences, new ideas. Yes, Miles was in poor health, and he probably wouldn’t be able to execute like he had in the past—but that wouldn’t matter, would it? Because whatever Miles does is always hip.
I didn’t take Miles’s suggestion lightly, but at the same time it didn’t make me suddenly want to drop my plans for the future. It would be tricky pulling together the quintet again, in large part because none of us were sidemen anymore. We’d have to make a serious adjustment, and even then I wasn’t sure the arrangement would work.
In the end, we were all intrigued by the possibility of getting back together, but it never rose above that level. We had played together and had loved it, but then we had all moved on. And we had all learned—from Miles himself—that the secret is to keep moving forward, never to look back. There are always new avenues to explore and new mountains to climb, and for that reason it made me a little torn when Miles suggested getting back together, because it seemed the opposite of what he’d always taught us.
Not long after that I played at a Miles Davis and Friends show at the Zénith outdoor arena in Paris. Before the show Miles told me he wanted to do “Watermelon Man,” and asked me to play my portable keyboard. That gave me an idea, and while we were up onstage I played a little joke on him.
The band had run through the melody, and when it was time for my solo, I switched programs so my keyboard would sound like Miles’s muted trumpet. I had done that with Miles’s band at the Rome gig, of course, but I’d never done it with him onstage. I played a solo riff with that trumpet sound, phrasing it as much like Miles as I could, and Miles looked so surprised that everybody on the stage cracked up.
The joke was over, so I started to switch the sound back to electric piano, but Miles winked and then pointed to me, indicating that he wanted me to play that same muted trumpet sound for the rest of my solo. Now I had to laugh—he actually liked it! So I did as he said, reveling in Miles’s enjoyment of it. I never got tired of playing with Miles, of watching him behave with such generosity toward everybody in his band, and of seeing him acknowledge a shared moment with a wink and a smile.
That night was the last time I ever played with Miles. He died on September 28, 1991, and the following year, ironically, the rest of us did have that reunion when Tony, Ron, Wayne, and I went out on a “Tribute to Miles” tour. We hadn’t toured together in many years, but I felt the need to honor my musical mentor, and who better to do that with than the rest of the quintet? It was amazing to be back on the road with some of my best and oldest friends in the world. Gigi came, too, and Wayne’s wife, Ana Maria. We traveled by tour bus with the young trumpeter Wallace Roney, laughing and joking our way across Europe, going out to restaurants with our wives, catching up, and just generally having a really cool time.
All of us except Wallace were experienced bandleaders by now, but you wouldn’t have thought that, watching Tony in his free time. Because entering into the fourth decade of his career, even with all the amazing success and accolades he’d received, he still sat on the tour bus every day, studying music. He was taking lessons in orchestration, so he had books and notepads out and was constantly scribbling. If anything exemplified the spirit of Miles, it was Tony’s ongoing effort to improve himself as a player and learn something new every day.
People still ask me if I miss Miles. The honest answer is, I don’t. But that’s only because I don’t think of him as being gone.
For me, Miles never went away. He may not be here physically, but he’s still here, because he’s in me, he’s in Ron, he’s in Wayne—he’s in all the people who played with him over the years. Miles’s artistic expression is reflected somehow, in some way, in everything we do, in our music and in our lives. As long as there are people playing music, stretching themselves and exploring new ideas, Miles Davis lives on.
In 1990, while I was talking to Quincy Jones about pairing up, I’d already started working on a new record. We had agreed that Q’s label, Qwest, would put out my next album, and I had thought this would be the one. But before it was finished, Qwest released A Tribute to Miles, a combination of studio and live recordings from our tribute tour, and the partnership I’d hoped for didn’t seem to be happening. So I decided to take my new record to a label that had a connection with technology, because I wanted it to have a technological component that no other record had ever had.
I wanted to make the songs interactive, enabling listeners to make their own ch
oice of bass line, background, drum beats, and so forth. There was a lot of new technology out there—MIDI, CD-ROMs, erasable CDs—since the days when Bryan Bell was jury-rigging computer systems for me. The electronic world had expanded, and I wanted to be on the cutting edge of the new technologies. I thought if we made a CD-ROM of a record, with listener options for each song, people would flip for it. I also wanted to make it in quadraphonic sound, or “surround sound.”
The two labels I thought might be capable of doing this were Sony and PolyGram—but I’d just left Columbia, which was now owned by Sony. I didn’t want to go back there, so I set up a meeting with Polygram, and I went down to their offices one afternoon to talk about my ideas. PolyGram was owned by Philips, an electronics company, so I figured they’d be receptive to the idea, or at least not throw me out of the room for being crazy.
At the meeting I asked whether they had anybody at the label working on new technologies. When they told me they did, I said, “Great! Because I want to do something nobody’s tried before.” I explained my concept of letting people construct the songs they wanted to hear, and the executives seemed intrigued, so we set up another meeting with their technology guy to find out what was really feasible.
This tech guy was amazing, just full of creative ideas. One I remember was that he wanted to put all of PolyGram’s music on a server, so customers could download songs directly. This was long before iTunes, so it was a radical concept. And he had a lot of other ideas, too—none of which PolyGram ever instituted. In fact, PolyGram was so closed off to this guy’s ideas that he ended up quitting before my record, which we titled Dis Is Da Drum, was even released.
To be fair, it took a lot longer to finish Dis Is Da Drum than I ever imagined. When I first started working on it, with a group of musicians that included Bill Summers, we started putting together a song that we named “Call It ’91.” With each year that went by, we had to keep changing the title—“Call It ’92,” “Call It ’93” . . . and by the time the record finally came out, the song was titled “Call It ’95.”
One reason it took so long was that I kept trying to figure out how to record all the different bass and drum lines we wanted to include. At the time I had a Neve mixing console, which was a top-of-the-line analog device. But it had only thirty-two tracks, and for some of the songs that wasn’t enough.
So in the middle of making the record I sold my Neve and bought a Euphonix console, which had more tracks because it was digital. One of my songs actually had seventy-two tracks—and there was no medium at that time for recording seventy-two tracks! The closest was a Mitsubishi forty-eight-channel recorder, and that thing was so big, you needed a forklift to pick it up. I had to figure out a way to piece together different storage mechanisms in order to play back all the tracks simultaneously.
Ultimately we weren’t able to create the interactive CD-ROM version of Dis Is Da Drum, but I was proud of the record and had one other idea for how to make it special. I knew a producer at Industrial Light & Magic who was a fan of my music, so I decided to ask him if ILM would be willing to make a video for me.
ILM was founded by George Lucas, the visionary behind the Star Wars films, and his team created some of the most amazing special effects in the movies. Along with John Lasseter and Pixar, ILM was a pioneer in putting computer-generated (CG) characters on screen, using CG special effects, and integrating live action with CG characters. For a tech geek like me, the people at ILM were like superheroes. All I could think was how cool it would be if they’d do a video for me.
Because ILM was used to working with huge budgets, the first thing I said to my friend there was “This is the record business, not the film business. You can forget about the kind of budgets you’re used to.” If they were going to do this video, they’d have to do it because they wanted to. He told me, “I think I can get a team together—but you won’t be able to call it ‘Industrial Light & Magic.’” I didn’t mind that at all, of course—I was doing this for the magic behind the name, not the name itself.
I went back to PolyGram and told the executives, “I have people from Industrial Light & Magic who are doing the video. And they’re doing it within our budget.” They thought I was out of my mind! They didn’t believe me, so I said, “Okay, call them yourselves. Here’s the guy I’m dealing with.” I gave them his information, but when one of the PolyGram people called him, he asked the wrong question: “What does Industrial Light & Magic charge to do a music video?”
The answer to that particular question was, of course, way too much, so the PolyGram exec just decided I’d made the whole thing up. I was eager to do the video, but I hadn’t heard anything back from the label, so I finally had to call them and ask what was happening. It took a while for me to straighten everything out, but I finally got the ball rolling. The “unofficial” ILM team created the video for “Dis Is Da Drum,” and it was a visual feast, with morphing totems, plants, snakes, and dancing African figures. The ILM guys even used software modifications that weren’t on the market yet, creating strange morphing bubble forms. It’s fantastic to watch, a psychedelic jungle come to life.
By the mid-1990s I came to a conclusion: I wanted to make every new record absolutely different from any I’d done before. And different from any record anybody had done before.
I was fifty-five now, and I had been playing music seriously since the age of seven. It’s rare for a person to find the thing he wants to do for life at such an early age, but ever since my parents bought me that first piano, I considered myself a musician. When I graduated from elementary school and we had to write little captions for our yearbook photos of what we wanted to be when we grew up, I wrote “concert pianist.”
Twenty-five years after becoming a Buddhist, I thought of myself as a human being first and a musician, father, and husband next. Ever since making that change, I’d been thinking less about just writing tunes and more about my purpose in creating a musical project. What could I create as a musician that would have deeper purpose and meaning? How could I serve humanity in some way? One way I knew was to translate that idea into musical expression.
My perspective had been changing over time, and I finally came to the inevitable conclusion that I should never do the same thing twice. If music, and Buddhism, had taught me anything, it was that the world is full of infinite possibilities, and there are infinite numbers of ways to look at things. This is what jazz improvisation is all about, and it’s what Miles Davis demonstrated to all of us every time he played. Miles looked at every note, every sound, as an opportunity rather than an obstacle.
I tried to do the same thing, incorporating new sounds and rolling with the punches whenever anything surprising popped up. Once, when I was playing at a jazz festival in New York, I sat down at the piano to discover that one of the keys didn’t work: Instead of emitting the correct note, all you could hear was a dull thud, because the string was broken. I could have raised a fuss, but I decided I liked the sound of that broken string. It gave me an unexpected slap of percussion at the touch of a finger! So I incorporated that sound into the songs we were playing, just to see how it came out, opening up a whole new avenue of possibilities that I didn’t usually have on an acoustic piano.
When you never stop exploring, you stay active and vital, no matter what you may be doing. People stop exploring in their lives for various reasons—fear of criticism, of failure, of disappointment. But even if you decide you don’t love the direction in which you’re moving, you can always change directions. Making every record of mine completely different from any other record would be the ultimate expression of exploring every facet of myself. With each record I wanted to jump off the cliff in a different spot.
Unfortunately, around this same time, I ended up jumping off another, different kind of cliff. And before I was even halfway to the ground, I realized that I had made a huge, terrible mistake.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
One night I drove to a friend’s place in Beverly Hills for a birthday party, and as I was parking I saw two women I knew getting into their cars. “Are you leaving?” I asked.
“Yeah,” one of them said. “You might not want to go up there.” Before I could ask what she meant, the car started up and they were gone.
I decided to head in and see what was happening. When I walked into the apartment, I didn’t see my friend and didn’t know most of the people there. They were mostly standing around, talking and drinking, but there was also cocaine on the coffee table. I got myself a drink, and after a while I noticed that people were coming in and out of one of the bedrooms. It seemed like they were trying to hide whatever was going on back there, but when they came out of that room, I could see that they were high.
Somebody finally asked me, “Have you ever smoked cocaine?”
“Nooo,” I said. “I’m afraid to do anything like that.” For me, there was a clear line between snorting cocaine and smoking it. Crack cocaine was a relatively new drug, but to my mind it fell on the same side of the line as heroin, which I would never touch. I knew what heroin had done to musicians like Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, and John Coltrane in his early years. It wasn’t a drug you could take recreationally; it was a drug that took over your life, and that was my impression of crack, too.
As the party went on, though, I found myself getting more and more curious. What is this thing that people are talking about that’s so bad? Crack was a cocaine derivative, and I didn’t have a problem with cocaine. What was so different about this drug? After a while I couldn’t contain my curiosity. “Hey, I changed my mind,” I said. “I want to try it.”
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