Herbie Hancock

Herbie Hancock spent part of the autumn of 1962 on tour with Eric Dolphy. He had made his first record as a leader that May, and he took the Dolphy job for a specific reason, which was to find out something about the avant-garde. He was breaking his own harmonic rules on purpose and wondering, in his words, whether that could lead him "to a doorway for some out playing." The tour reached Boston in November, and at a club called Connolly's a teenager was introduced to him as the local drummer everybody was talking about.

Tony Williams was sixteen. He would turn seventeen on December 12. Hancock did not hear him play that night and, by his own account, brushed him off with the politeness of a young professional who has been told about a lot of local prodigies. The correction came a few months later in New York, where Williams had moved in February 1963 to work with Jackie McLean. Hancock walked into a McLean rehearsal at the Blue Coronet, sat down at the piano, and heard the drums start.

The line he added afterwards is the one worth keeping: it was as if he were the little kid. He was twenty-two, with a Blue Note contract and a tune in "Watermelon Man" that Mongo Santamaria would take to No. 10 on the Hot 100 that April, and the seventeen-year-old was the one with the new information. By late spring of 1963 they were both in the Miles Davis band, with Ron Carter on bass, and the two of them were inseparable. Hancock later told Len Lyons that Williams was probably his closest friend in those years, and then gave the age gap its due.

Where the drummer came from explains a good deal. Williams was born in Chicago on December 12, 1945, and raised in Boston, and his father, a saxophonist, carried him into the clubs to sit in before his feet reached the pedals. Max Roach knew the family, because Williams's mother was a friend of Abbey Lincoln, who was married to Roach then, and one summer when the boy was about fifteen she let him come to New York and stay with the couple. Jackie McLean heard him at a session and the hire followed. By the time he left Boston he could sit in with any band, knew everyone's repertoire, and could play the Clifford Brown and Max Roach arrangements from memory, which Roach knew because they were his own. He could hear Art Blakey in the boy's hi-hat and Elvin Jones and Kenny Clarke elsewhere, and what he said about it was that Williams did something different with all of them.

He had studied with Alan Dawson from the age of eleven and worked professionally with Sam Rivers from thirteen. Rivers ran a Sunday ensemble in Boston that improvised against a stopwatch and numbers on the wall, a phrase for two and a half seconds and then the next one, and Williams told Down Beat in 1970 that he kept doing that kind of thing after he got to New York. So the drummer Hancock heard at the Blue Coronet had already spent his early teens inside the most abstract music Boston had to offer.

That is what he passed to the pianist. Hancock learned cross-rhythms and Indian rhythms from Williams, that Williams got him past hearing post-Coltrane playing as "funny notes" and taught him to take it in "like a piece of sculpture," and that the drummer was the one who turned him on to contemporary classical music. The teacher in the relationship was the one who could not yet legally drink.

The Mehegan interview is the earliest document of where Hancock's head actually was during the Miles years, and it is not where the records would lead you to expect. He had recorded Empyrean Isles three months earlier and would cut Maiden Voyage the following March. What he wanted to talk about was electronic music. He said he had first heard it roughly a year before and was only now beginning to hear it properly, and then he described the plan.

He had been listening to Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge, the 1956 piece that mixes a boy's voice with electronically generated sound, and what fascinated him was that he could not always tell which was which. He was honest about the limits of that fascination: he had not yet, he said, been able to absorb it into his emotional makeup, though it had affected him. He had also been taking his own instrument apart. He told Mehegan he had been fooling around with the wires, the sounding board and the pedals, listening to the piano as a physical object rather than a set of pitches, and he had noticed that the bell of his telephone could be made to vibrate the piano's strings if the pedals were down.

The philosophical version of all this was a sentence that could have come from Varèse, whom Hancock had in fact been listening to since his engineering years at Grinnell. Any form of organized sound, he said, can be thought of as music, and the modern musician had to know the whole field of it, because listening to different kinds of organized sound broadened a jazz player's sense of what rhythm, dynamics and timbre could do. He asked Mehegan whether he had ever heard the beauty of sound passing through trees. That was 1964. The synthesizer would not reach a Hancock record for another eight years, and when it did he would have to be talked into it.

The ear had been built the same way, by being confused first. At eleven, four years into piano lessons, Hancock turned jazz off when it came on the radio, because the melodies sounded like they were off the moon and he could not find the beat. Three years later a slightly older schoolmate played him some more, and this time it was still off the moon, but it was cohesive: he could hear that bass, drums and piano were doing one thing together even if he had no idea what the thing was. A friend named Don Goldberg was playing George Shearing, so Hancock took up Shearing, then Erroll Garner, and went home to tell his mother. He enrolled at Grinnell in 1956 as an engineering major, which is the part of the biography that matters most for the rest of this piece.

What kept the experiments from swallowing the day job was Miles. Hancock told Lyons that Davis would take the structure of whatever tune the band brought in and leave them room to breathe and make something fresh every night, and that this was why it was always fun to play with him. Lyons's description of the 1960s Hancock is precise: rich keyboard harmony superimposed over modal patterns. The records that description points to, Speak Like a Child among them, are the ones people know. The oscilloscope is the one they do not.

Williams gave the interview in May 1970, and it was printed as a script, with his laughter and fidgeting noted in parentheses. He would not be pinned down on anything. Asked how he identified himself, he said he did not, and let other people do that; asked what category his music belonged in, he called it the best of everything. Then he described the shape of the band he had just walked out of, and on that he was exact.

The quintet, as he described it, had converged on a point like the letter V. It took about a year to get there. Wayne Shorter arrived after the other four had already been playing together for a year, and then the five of them held that point for roughly four years. When Ron Carter left, another bassist came in, and the V started to open out the other way into an X. Williams was careful to say that it was not about money. It was a question, he said, of something that was going to stimulate him. What was stimulating him was electricity, and he was specific about the source.

He also turned down record dates in those years because, as he put it, he had already played with about everyone he wanted to and did not want to record for the romantic feeling of being in a studio. After Coltrane, he said, there had to be something else. Asked what actually caused the separation from Davis, the answer was circumstances, and then, laughing, that his ego was such that he had to do his own thing. He formed Lifetime in 1969 with John McLaughlin and Larry Young, and by the time of the interview the group's second album was being advertised in the same issue.

The cost of that move is in the interview too, and it is the part people quote least. Asked what he was doing about the white musicians in his band, Williams called the question a drag and said he was in the middle of everything: Black militants on one side who wanted an all-Black band, rock musicians on the other who did not consider Lifetime rock and assumed the band was playing up to them. He was not leaving jazz for money either, he said, and he had all of these things coming down on him. He was twenty-four.

Hancock's exit from the quintet was less voluntary. Gluck's account is that he was dismissed, and the version Hancock has told most often involves a honeymoon in Brazil and a bout of food poisoning that kept him from returning on schedule. What he came back to was the Fender Rhodes, which Davis had already pushed in front of him in the studio. Hancock's recollection of that moment, quoted in Gluck's book, was to wonder whether Miles wanted him to play that toy over there. He played it on Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro, and after the dismissal he was back for In a Silent Way as a sideman. By November 1968 he had his own sextet at the Village Vanguard. The first of his three Warner Bros. albums, Fat Albert Rotunda, grew out of soundtrack work for Bill Cosby's cartoon. Gluck calls it a rhythm-and-blues one-off, which is fair, and it gave Warner Bros. a wrong idea of what it had signed.

Only Hancock and the bassist Buster Williams carried over from the 1968 sextet into the band that formed in 1970. Around them he put the trumpeter Eddie Henderson, who was also a trained psychiatrist, Bennie Maupin on bass clarinet, alto flute and piccolo, and Julian Priester on trombones. Billy Hart played his first gig with the group in July 1970 at the Wollman Rink in Central Park, opening for Iron Butterfly, and sitting in the audience that night was a fifteen-year-old Juilliard student named Bob Gluck, who four decades later would write the book on the band.

In November 1970 the band played a month at the London House, a Chicago steakhouse whose brunch-hour regulars did not last long and were replaced by the city's avant-garde listeners. The playing loosened over the four weeks. One night, in the second set, something happened that Hancock has described for fifty years without quite pinning down. He told Bob Blumenthal in June 1971 that this band had given him, that night in Chicago, the greatest musical experience of his life. To Gluck he described it as the musicality of all of the guys coming through him, and said that when the set ended nobody applauded at first, and then the applause went on for fifteen or twenty minutes, and that they could not go back on. He could not, he said, go out there and play another note.

Around the same time the six of them took Swahili names, and the band took its unofficial name from Hancock's. He was Mwandishi, the composer. Henderson was Mganga, Maupin was Mwile, Priester was Pepo Mtoto, Buster Williams was Mchezaji, Hart was Jabali. The translations vary by source, and this site is not going to adjudicate between "demon baby" and "spirit child" for a trombonist. Hancock's own explanation in 1971 was that he wanted to recognize his African ancestry, and that they had not changed their names, merely added an alternative. Priester's was simpler: it made them a family. Gluck reads the names as a deliberate Afrological reference point in a period of heightened Black cultural identity, and notes that James Mtume, nephew of the first sextet's drummer, belonged to Maulana Ron Karenga's organization. Either reading works. The band called itself something, and the something was not English.

The album Mwandishi was recorded on December 31, 1970, at Wally Heider's Studio C in San Francisco, with David Rubinson producing and Fred Catero engineering, on an eight-track machine rigged to behave like sixteen. The pieces went down in single takes. "Ostinato (Suite for Angela)" added a second drummer, Leon "Ndugu" Chancler, and sits in fifteen-eight, a bar of four followed by a bar of seven. Hancock's explanation of why is one sentence long: having fifteen beats in a bar automatically sets up a little tension. Warner Bros., which had wanted three records like Fat Albert Rotunda, did not want to release it. Rubinson played the executives Bitches Brew, pointed at its sales, and they relented.

The reviews tell you what the record was up against. Time listed it among the year's best albums in January 1972 and said it showed what jazz might sound like if it had come up the river from Darmstadt, which was meant as praise and reads, as Gluck points out, like a critic unable to imagine music that was both Black and experimental. Down Beat ran three reviews of the band across 1972 and 1973 and two were hostile. Pete Welding's verdict on Crossings was that the less said about the synthesizer effects, the better.

The synthesizer got there by accident. Hancock told Coryell that the idea was Rubinson's: the tracks for Crossings were done, the instrument was new and hot on the pop scene, everybody was into acid, and the synthesizer was, as Hancock put it, associated with acid and freakiness and all that. Rubinson knew a man named Patrick Gleeson who ran a studio called Different Fur, and proposed letting him add something. Gleeson, a former literature professor out of the San Francisco Tape Music Center orbit, patched a Moog III to Maupin's "Quasar," played the part himself, and when Hancock heard it and said keep going, stayed up for what he estimated at thirty hours to finish it. He then did the same to "Water Torture." At the first rehearsal with the band, one member said the instrument sounded like a big vacuum cleaner. By the spring of 1972 Gleeson and his keyboard-less ARP 2600 were on the bandstand at the Village Vanguard, and a sound man named Billy Bonner, hired first as the driver and known as Fundi, was running a quadraphonic PA with an Echoplex on the mixer, moving each soloist's environment around the room while they played.

Nobody in the band had to be told how to play, which was the Davis method carried over, and it made substitutes impossible because every member was load-bearing. Priester's description of the approach was leaving their egos out of the process and responding to what the group invented, sometimes for twenty minutes before the written melody appeared. Then there was the chanting. Buster Williams's sister had introduced his wife to Nichiren Buddhism, and in 1972, at the Penthouse in Seattle, Williams chanted before a set and then played a long bass solo on "Toys" that stopped the room. Hancock asked him afterwards what he had been doing. Williams told him, and by his own account the two of them have chanted every day since. Sextant, recorded at Wally Heider's and Different Fur (jazzdisco dates the sessions to 1972, Wikipedia to early 1973) and released by Columbia in March 1973, is the most electronic of the three studio records. It is also the last.

The band was bankrolled, in Gluck's account, by Hancock's royalties from advertising jingles, and touring usually lost money. That was one reason. The other was that the leader had started listening to Sly Stone and James Brown, and told Coryell what he said to himself: look, I want to find out what this is, and I am going to go as far as I can. So, in his words, he got some cats who can play funk, and it was really funny, because he knew he had never heard jazz players do it. Eddie Henderson's version of the same ending has no funk in it at all. It was self-evident, he said, that the band had come to a pinnacle in its development, and then it came to that pinnacle and vanished. Gluck adds that the final performances grew in intensity right up to the end, and that the group also recorded the soundtrack to The Spook Who Sat by the Door that year. His distinction between what came before and after is the cleanest available: Mwandishi was a collectivity that happened to be Hancock's band, and the Headhunters were Hancock's band.

Head Hunters came out in the autumn of 1973, "Chameleon" became an AM radio hit, and the record sold on a scale no jazz album had. Coryell frames the turn through Donald Byrd, Hancock's old boss, whose commercial success in the same years was an inspiration rather than an embarrassment. The oscilloscope story closes here too. After Head Hunters, Hancock told Coryell, he decided to try the synthesizer himself, and he did it, and it worked. The man who in 1964 could not tell the boy's voice from the electronics on a Stockhausen tape was now programming his own. Lyons, writing in 1983, noted that after the gold record Hancock abandoned the acoustic piano for several years.

He came back to it in public on June 29, 1976, at the New York City Center, in a Newport Jazz Festival concert George Wein presented under the name V.S.O.P., which stood for Very Special One Time Performance. The one time became a band: Hancock, Shorter, Carter and Williams, with Freddie Hubbard in the trumpet chair, toured something like twenty-five cities the following summer. Hancock's remark to Contemporary Keyboard at the time, repeated by Coryell, was that the tour showed another side of the value of jazz-rock. Crossover music had not been made for the purpose, but it was the first jazz a general audience could relate to, and listening to it had become a stepping-stone to hearing the rest.

Three days before the tour's Berkeley date, on July 13, 1977, Hancock, Carter and Williams spent a day at the Automatt in San Francisco and recorded enough for two albums. One set went out as Herbie Hancock Trio in Japan that September. The other became Ron Carter's Third Plane, which includes Williams's "Lawra" and a new "Dolphin Dance," and which this site rates as the best record on either of the Carter pages. Len Lyons interviewed Hancock the same year, and the harmonic questions in that conversation appear to refer to a session he was in the middle of recording. It is a reasonable guess which one.

Tony Williams checked into Seton Medical Center in Daly City on February 20, 1997, with stomach pain, had his gall bladder removed, and died of a heart attack on the Sunday, February 23, while preparing to go home. He was fifty-one. His last record, Wilderness, had orchestral writing and a quintet that included Hancock. Many of his New York colleagues learned of the death only when WKCR started playing his records around the clock. Greg Robinson interviewed Max Roach for JazzTimes on March 10, and Roach talked about the Boston kid whose father took him to sit in, and about the drum set as a four-limbed monster that Williams had conquered young and in his own way. Roach did not mention Hancock, or the quintet, or Mwandishi. He did not need to. His closing line covers all of it.