Herbie Hancock

by Herbie Hancock

  My friend asked, “Herbie, are you sure you want to do this? It may not be a good idea.” Then someone else standing nearby said, “It’s all right! Let him try it.”

  I said, “I want to see.” So I was led down the hallway into the bedroom, where somebody put a pipe in my mouth and lit it. “Draw it in and hold it,” the person told me. I did. And when the high hit me, it was like nothing I’d ever felt. Crack overloads the pleasure center of your brain, hitting you with a wave of every pleasurable sensation you can imagine, physical and emotional, all at once. I closed my eyes and thought, Oh, shit. I should never have done this. This stuff was obviously way too dangerous to mess with.

  I decided that night that this would be the last time I ever smoked crack. Unfortunately that resolution lasted only about a month before I picked up the pipe again.

  For a while I managed to smoke only once every couple of months or so, and every time I did, I swore it would be the last. I made rules for myself: I’d never do it on tour, or when my family was around. And I never told Gigi—never told anybody, in fact, except the very few people I actually smoked with. I was super paranoid about being found out and having my career, and maybe my life, ruined.

  But I just could not stop doing it, even though months would go by between sessions. I was sure I’d be able to quit at some point, but I had no idea how far in the future that might be. In the meantime, I guarded my secret and tried to keep things under control. As time went on, that would become more difficult to do.

  In 1995 I made a record called The New Standard, the first since I decided to make every one of my records different. I had just signed a new contract with Verve, and one of their A&R guys thought he had a good idea for my next album. “Why don’t you make a record of pop tunes by today’s artists?” he suggested.

  My first instinct was not to do it, because I knew it would smell of trying to make a commercial record for the sake of money, not quality. Over the years I’d heard many people accuse me of doing exactly that, and I never minded because I knew it wasn’t true. But recording an album of pop hits did feel like pandering to the label’s desire for greater sales, so I said no.

  Yet whenever I answer a question with no, it always gives me pause—I have to stop and think about why I’m rejecting something. Part of my training with Miles Davis, and also in my Buddhist practice, was learning the art of turning the impossible into the possible—of turning poison into medicine or transforming lemons into lemonade. Often it’s a matter of perspective, because there’s always more than one way to look at things. As a jazz musician, if you’re playing in a band, you can’t stop and think about whether you like what the guitarist just did, because as soon as you start judging the other musicians, it stops the flow. Whatever happens, you’ve got to accept it as fact, as reality, and then figure out a way to make it work. That’s the nature of improvising.

  So I began to examine whether Verve’s suggestion could have musical merit if seen from another perspective, and wondering whether there was a way to say yes to it while holding on to my musical integrity. I started taking apart the situation like a clock: Verve wanted me to do pop songs, and “pop” is short for “popular.” Popular songs had been part of the jazz repertoire for years—not current popular songs, but ones from the ’20s and ’30s, which are what we call “standards” now. Even though those songs had started out as “pop” songs in their time, nobody today was considered a sellout for playing and recording standards.

  I started wondering, what songs will be the standards of a hundred years from now? Will it still be those same tunes from the ’20s and ’30s? Or will there be new standards—songs from current eras that would have stood the test of time? That’s how I hit on the idea for a record called The New Standard.

  I decided to take songs written by current artists and treat them as though they were originally written as jazz standards. The trouble was, most current pop songs were somewhat simpler than the old standards—they didn’t have as much meat, in terms of the structural elements of harmony and rhythm. Some did, such as Stevie Wonder’s “You’ve Got It Bad, Girl,” which I decided to put on the record. But for the ones that didn’t, I thought, why not restructure these new songs to give them some meat?

  There were many great composers to choose from, but I finally narrowed the list down to Don Henley, Peter Gabriel, the Beatles, Babyface Edmonds, Stevie Wonder, Sade, Simon & Garfunkel, Prince, Donald Fagen, and Kurt Cobain. I spent a lot of time collaborating with the producer, Bob Belden, to rework and reharmonize the material. Some of them, such as Don Henley’s “New York Minute,” don’t sound anything like the originals. Others, like Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” I decided to play pretty straight, with just a bit of my own flavor.

  I put together a band with drummer Jack DeJohnette, percussionist Don Alias, bassist Dave Holland, guitarist John Scofield, and saxophonist Michael Brecker, and we recorded the album over a couple of days at Manhattan Center Studios. After the last take was done, when all the guys had left, I decided to record one more thing—a song that had been composed a quarter-century earlier but that had never been recorded before.

  The song was called “Manhattan,” and my sister and I had co-written it back in the late 1960s. Jean had written great lyrics for “Maiden Voyage” and some of my other songs, but for this piece she and I had collaborated on the melody, too. Both Jean and I loved Tony Bennett’s recording of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” so we decided to present this song about Manhattan to him in hopes he’d want to record it. At some point we did present it to Tony, but for various reasons he never used it. So I put it aside, and over the next twenty-five years I rarely thought about the song again.

  In 1995 I found myself thinking about Jean a lot, maybe because we were coming up to the ten-year mark since her death. As we started recording The New Standard, I suddenly recalled “Manhattan.” It had been years since I’d played the song, but I decided that if we had room, I wanted to put it on the record. When we finished the last session, it still wasn’t clear whether we’d have enough space for it or not, but I said to the producer, Guy Eckstine, “I want to do this.”

  The band was gone by now, so I was alone in the studio. I sat down at the piano, and the song just flowed out of me; it was as if I could feel the connection with Jean. I did the song in one take, and we put it at the end of the record as a sort of finale, a place of honor. It was the only solo piano piece on The New Standard. I was happy to have had a chance to record it, as a kind of tribute to Jean. But I never could have imagined what would happen next.

  Jean and I were nominated for the Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition, in a field that included my friends Arturo Sandoval, Billy Childs, and Wayne Shorter. I thought of how proud Jean would have been to see her name listed as a Grammy nominee, especially in the company of those great composers. Our nomination for “Manhattan” was the only one The New Standard received.

  And then . . . we won. Twelve years after her death, my sister, who’d so badly wanted a career in music, won a Grammy Award. My parents came to the ceremony, even though my mother wasn’t in the best of health at the time. They were thrilled to be there, primarily because of Jean. We all knew that this would have been a dream come true for her, and I’m sure her presence was there with us that night.

  Wayne Shorter and I had been playing together since the early ’60s, and not only was he one of my favorite people to play with, he had become my closest friend. Both he and his wife, Ana Maria, had grown close to Gigi, too, and the four of us had been through a lot together, good times and bad, over the decades.

  Wayne had been there for us when my sister died in the Dallas plane crash. Tragically, in the summer of 1996 we were called to do the same for him when his dear, beautiful Ana Maria and teenaged niece Dalila Lucien died in the crash of TWA flight 800, which went down in the Atlantic Ocean shortly after taking off from JFK airport. Ana Maria and Dalila
were flying to Rome to see Wayne, who was on tour, and unbelievably, just like Jean, they weren’t even supposed to be on the plane that went down. Their original flight to Rome had been canceled, so the airline bumped them up to first class and switched them to TWA 800, which was routed to fly through Paris.

  Ana Maria and Wayne had been married for more than twenty-five years. Her sudden death was a profound shock, but both Wayne and Ana Maria had been practicing Buddhism since the early 1970s, which enabled him to face it head-on with courage and strength. He had also stopped drinking in the late 1980s, after decades of doing it heavily. Consequently he was able to face his grief with a greater degree of physical and mental health. Many of their friends, having difficulty coming to terms with her death, would come to console Wayne—but more often than not he ended up consoling them.

  Less than a year after Ana Maria’s death, Wayne and I decided to do an album of duets. We had played together on dozens of records over the years, but never anything like this, an all-acoustic album with only the two of us. We wanted it to have an intimate, spontaneous feel, so we asked Tomo Suzuki, who was brilliant as both a studio recording engineer and a live concert sound engineer, to come from Japan to my home studio and record us while we played in the living room.

  Instead of trying to write ten brand-new songs, we decided to look at scraps of musical ideas we’d saved over the years. Wayne had some pieces that he’d composed earlier but never recorded, and I had various fragments of ideas that I had never turned into songs. Most of our ideas were written on manuscript paper, though I wrote mine in pencil, while Wayne—who was not only fearless but seemed to have most things figured out in his head—wrote in ink.

  We dug out pieces of music paper from our files, spread them out on a table, and began trying to figure out how to turn these scraps into songs. Just by cutting and pasting, moving things around, changing a key or shifting a chord structure, we were able to create new pieces. If we decided to put one of Wayne’s melodies on top of a structure I’d written, we’d literally take his sheet of paper and tape it onto mine.

  We must have looked like a couple of overgrown kids doing an elementary school project, but when we were done, we had eight songs—including two that were different versions of the same melodic content. The tune was so flexible, we ended up with takes that sounded like two different songs, so we named them “Visitor from Somewhere” and “Visitor from Nowhere” and put them both on the record. To round out the album, we decided to record revised versions of two older compositions: Wayne’s song “Diana” and my own “Joanna’s Theme,” from Death Wish.

  Tomo Suzuki came over and set up a camera facing the Hamburg Steinway piano in my living room. Then he ran audio and video tie lines to the studio, in another part of the house, so he could record there while seeing and hearing Wayne and me playing in the living room. We made the record in a week, playing up to six hours a day. It was so comfortable recording like that, in my living room, as if Wayne had just dropped by to shoot the breeze. We called the album 1+1.

  Wayne and I toured all over the world in support of 1+1, and as soon as we were back Verve had another suggestion for my next record. They wanted me to do a tribute album to one of the Great American Songbook composers, like Rodgers & Hart, George Gershwin, or Cole Porter. Gershwin is one of my favorites, but once again, as with Verve’s earlier suggestion, I wasn’t totally keen on the idea.

  These were all great American composers, but why should I make a record celebrating a great white American musician? Especially when that musician had gained fame by creating music in a style that was actually founded by black musicians—who never got the credit, the fans, or the money they so richly deserved. Gershwin’s music was obviously infused with the influence of the African American cultural tradition, which became the American cultural tradition in the ’20s and ’30s “jazz age,” through tap dancing, shimmying, the Charleston, and other popular artistic movements. I knew I’d get flak for it from the black community, and understandably so. What message would it send for me, a black musician who’d managed to achieve a certain degree of stature, to use whatever capital I had to celebrate white composers?

  And yet . . . was there a way I could approach it from another perspective, a way that would allow me to make such a record in good conscience? Once again I started taking apart the problem. Let’s say I chose George Gershwin for my tribute: I understood why Verve suggested him, because he had a broad scope of music, was incredibly talented as a composer and pianist, and was very popular. But I also knew that a lot of that popularity came because he was white.

  Gershwin’s creative output included classical music, Tin Pan Alley, ragtime, jazz—but I didn’t want to buy into the distorted view that made it look like George Gershwin was an inventor of jazz. In Gershwin’s world, in the ’20s and ’30s, jazz music was synonymous with American music, which meant that jazz had a big influence on the majority of Gershwin’s music—and then Gershwin, in turn, made a big contribution to jazz.

  So . . . instead of making an album about Gershwin, why not make it about Gershwin’s world? That way I could include pieces by Duke Ellington and James P. Johnson—pieces that weren’t written by Gershwin but that clearly influenced him. This approach would give credit where it was due, which made me comfortable enough that I could do the record.

  In addition to the Ellington and Johnson pieces, I wanted to include Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in G, by the French composer Maurice Ravel. Ravel had been a big influence on not only Gershwin’s composing but my own. I had Ravel in mind when I was reharmonizing songs for Round Midnight, and I really wanted to record this concerto as a kind of tribute to him as well. But I ran into some trouble trying to do that.

  With nonclassical music, which I was most familiar with, once a song has been recorded, you don’t need permission to make subsequent recordings of it. With classical music, anything written prior to the establishment of copyright laws is in the public domain, so you don’t need permission to record that, either, which is why works by Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach can be recorded without permission, fees, or royalties. However, newer classical music, such as this piece by Ravel, fell within copyright guidelines. This meant that I’d have to get permission from whoever owned the copyright if I played it in any way other than the exact original version. And of course I never play the “exact” version of anything—I was revising and improvising on a lot of the piece.

  Unfortunately I had no idea I needed permission until after we’d already recorded the piece with a chamber orchestra. When Verve asked whether I’d gotten permission for the Ravel, I just about fell through the floor. “How hard will that be?” I asked. They weren’t sure, but they advised me to get in touch with the French music publisher, Durand, which would contact the Ravel family. I soon discovered that the family was known to be very strict about rights, and they almost always said no to these types of requests.

  I was incredibly disappointed, because I had to have that Ravel piece on the record. But I knew what I had to do next, and that was to chant. A representative from Durand was contacting the family to see if anything could be done, so I just sat tight, chanting for hours, hoping we could secure that permission.

  A few weeks later the rep from Durand called me. “So, what’s the verdict?” I asked.

  “It’s very interesting,” he said. He told me he’d given the family a call and discussed with them my plans for the piece. He’d explained to them that I was a respected artist and that having a Ravel concerto on an album by a well-known jazz musician would expose his music to a wider audience. And then the family did something really unusual: They asked him what he thought.

  “That never happens,” he said. “I told them they should do it, and they said okay.” Just like that, my Ravel problem was solved, and Gershwin’s World was saved.

  An amazing group of artists collaborated on that record, including Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wond
er, Chick Corea, and Kathleen Battle. This was the first time since I was a teenager that I was doing anything with an orchestra, and we got a great one in New York’s Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. When it was time to tour, I took a quartet with me and we played with the local orchestras in each city. It was a throwback to my classical music days, but the wonderful twist of Gershwin and jazz fit nicely with my desire to do things I’d never done before.

  But as enjoyable as it was to do Gershwin’s World, another project I undertook in 1998 didn’t turn out so well.

  Twenty-four years after the release of Head Hunters, we reunited the Headhunters band one more time. Bennie Maupin, Mike Clark, Bill Summers, Paul Jackson, and I got together and made a new record, Return of the Headhunters! The guys were thrilled to be back, and I think they hoped to recapture the rush and excitement of those earlier days. When Dave Matthews graciously invited us to open for his band on their upcoming tour, I said yes immediately—Dave has a unique talent, is a true gentleman, and was one of the hottest young artists around in the late ’90s. Opening for him might bring us a whole different audience. I couldn’t wait to get on the road with him and his smoking band.

  Unfortunately fans of the Dave Matthews Band didn’t pay much attention to us. We’d usually do a short forty-minute set before Dave’s band came on, and it felt as if I were back in Central Park, opening for Iron Butterfly, wondering how to get the audience interested. I actually didn’t mind it too much, because I thought it would make us focus more and become stronger as a result. But the guys in the band hated it. I’m not quite sure why—maybe they thought we’d be recapturing the magic of our ’70s funk heyday, but I was never that big on trying to recapture things anyway.

  So the Headhunters reunion tour wasn’t all that pleasant a time for me—but it wasn’t nearly as difficult as what was coming.