You'll Know When You Get There

Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band

Bob Gluck

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226300061
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

As the 1960s ended, Herbie Hancock embarked on a grand creative experiment. Having just been dismissed from the celebrated Miles Davis Quintet, he set out on the road, playing with his first touring group as a leader until he eventually formed what would become a revolutionary band. Taking the Swahili name Mwandishi, the group would go on to play some of the most innovative music of the 1970s, fusing an assortment of musical genres, American and African cultures, and acoustic and electronic sounds into groundbreaking experiments that helped shape the American popular music that followed. In You'll Know When You Get There, Bob Gluck offers the first comprehensive study of this influential group, mapping the musical, technological, political, and cultural changes that they not only lived in but also effected.

Beginning with Hancock's formative years as a sideman in bebop and hard bop ensembles, his work with Miles Davis, and the early recordings under his own name, Gluck uncovers the many ingredients that would come to form the Mwandishi sound. He offers an extensive series of interviews with Hancock and other band members, the producer and engineer who worked with them, and a catalog of well-known musicians who were profoundly influenced by the group. Paying close attention to the Mwandishi band's repertoire, he analyzes a wide array of recordings—many little known—and examines the group's instrumentation, their pioneering use of electronics, and their transformation of the studio into a compositional tool. From protofunk rhythms to synthesizers to the reclamation of African identities, Gluck tells the story of a highly peculiar and thrillingly unpredictable band that became a hallmark of American genius.

When the personnel changed, there was a whole new spiritual feeling with the band that opened up the veins, expanded the playing, the veins of the lifeblood of the playing of the band, into more intuitive playing than had happened with the previous band.

HERBIE HANCOCK, 2008

1

A Defining Moment
November 1970

Herbie Hancock traveled a long distance musically from the closing days of his membership in Miles Davis’s renowned second Quintet. As his first touring band as leader began to coalesce, Hancock was assimilating much from the panoply of new musical experiences he accumulated during his first decade as a professional musician. From 1963 through 1968, Davis’s band had provided an extended opportunity for Hancock to channel the flexibility and openness that Davis sought into his own performance practice. Davis’s band had assimilated a decade of explorations by John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Chicago native Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and others within its own framework. Hancock was keenly aware of Coleman’s and Coltrane’s advances, enhanced by his early experiences performing with Coltrane associate Eric Dolphy. Hancock’s synthesis helped shape Davis’s musical direction. As Mike Zwerin observes, “this pillow of tense, ambiguous sound Hancock devised was the perfect bridge to bring Davis out of bebop toward more open forms.”¹ The fruits of these efforts helped fuel the direction of Hancock’s new Sextet.

Hancock’s first band briefly premiered in November 1968 and went on the road six months later, touring through 1969 and into the late summer of 1970. Its music is explored in chapter 3, as the band’s developments on the road fused what could be gleaned from Davis’s Quintet with Hancock’s growth as an orchestrator whose music deepened harmonically and lyrically, as can be heard on The Prisoner (1969).

During this period, Herbie Hancock was also giving deeper voice to personal and musical implications of black political and social awareness witnessed in at least two manifestations. One was the recording of the rhythm and blues–influenced Fat Albert Rotunda (1969). The second was Hancock’s adoption in 1969 of the Swahili name Mwandishi (The Composer). This occurred within a social and musical context whose fruit included a little-known recording named Kawaida (Tradition), to which we will soon return. The sessions for both recordings took place in early December 1969. To fully appreciate the Mwandishi band, one must consider each of these sessions, the earlier musical directions in Hancock’s career that pointed to them, and the nature of the unusual bond that was about to occur. Describing these experiences and their salient musical features is the task of the opening chapters of this book.

By the second half of 1970, Hancock’s band had begun a dramatic evolution in personnel. Only two members of the Sextet that Herbie Hancock had fronted at the Village Vanguard in November 1968 remained: bassist Buster Williams, who had subbed for Ron Carter during part of that week,² and Hancock himself. David Rubinson, soon to be named Hancock’s producer, felt the palpable change during the new band’s first weeklong engagement at the Both/And in San Francisco: “The music was becoming both tighter and looser. Band members would just start playing. Anyone could start something,” and the others would coalesce into an increasingly elastic musical fabric. Williams had just purchased an electric bass, a large body Fender, and was playing it in addition to his acoustic. Hancock himself was playing more electric than acoustic piano. Sparks were beginning to fly. The band continued to bond personally and musically at their next stop, Vancouver.

Hancock immediately realized that something unusual was unfolding. It lay deep in the connection between the band members, a dynamic that could not be described in simple musical terms: “From the first piece I felt something special, something profound, spiritual. The way that the music was moving extracted something that was eminently spiritual. I believe that this was one of the major characteristics of this group, this spiritual element that was evident from the first night.”³ That connection was about a sense of family, of shared musical purpose, of a collective intent to break down barriers. There was something deeply religious, albeit not in conventional terms, that brought them together.

The time was approaching for a defining moment, which occurred during an unusually lengthy month-long November gig⁴ at the London House steak house in Chicago. The duration of the stand and future months on the road would help cement the feeling that the band was a family. But this perception was also grounded in the decision of the entire group to follow Hancock and Williams’s lead by assuming Swahili names. This act simultaneously affirmed a shared black identity and created a family bond. To understand that decision, it helps to return to the context of Herbie Hancock’s thinking back in December 1969 in the context of recording Kawaida.

Kawaida (Tradition)

Percussionist James Mtume, a disciple of Maulana Ron Karenga, is credited with naming Kawaida.⁵ Karenga at the time was chairman of the Black Studies Department at California State University, Long Beach, and founder of the Los Angeles–based black nationalist US organization.⁶ Karenga encouraged black identification with African culture, identity, and spiritual values, as witnessed by his invention of the festival of Kwanzaa. Most of the personnel on Kawaida accordingly assumed Swahili names, among them two members of Hancock’s future Sextet, pioneering bebop drummer Kuumba Albert “Tootie” Heath and bassist Mchezaji Buster Williams. Also appearing were two members of Ornette Coleman’s quartet: trumpeter Msafari Don Cherry and percussionist Ed Blackwell. Other participants included percussionist Mtume on conga, Tayari Jimmie Heath on tenor and soprano saxophone, and future Mwandishi band soundman and driver Fundi Billy Bonner, who played flute and percussion on one track. Herbie Hancock, playing exclusively acoustic piano, is listed as Mwandishi Herbie Hancock.⁷ Two years later, Hancock’s band would be referred to informally after his Swahili name, testimony to that ensemble’s future identification with Africanism.

Kawaida draws on musical tendencies pioneered by various elements in the jazz avant-garde of John Coltrane and members of the black experimental music organization, the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM),⁸ founded five years earlier. The opening tune “Baraka” opens with quartal⁹ harmonies reminiscent of Coltrane’s pianist McCoy Tyner, despite the catchy melody and relaxed beat that follows. “Dunia” follows an opening trumpet phrase with an open-ended improvisation featuring an interwoven saxophone and trumpet duet over driving percussion that calls to mind Elvin Jones’s playing with Coltrane. A percussion jam forms the backbone of the solos that close out the tune. “Maulana” is a free form textural improvisation for flute and bells, over which speakers call out and chant Swahili texts. After 1:30, Hancock and Williams’s arco bass take an elegiac tone, leading to a six-note rhythmic riff, again calling to mind Coltrane. Next we hear an expansive saxophone solo, a more melodically oriented trumpet solo, and then another percussion jam and hand clapping. Ever so briefly, a singing voice adds a layer of complexity over the drums, bass, and bells. “Dunia” and “Maulana” look ahead to musical elements—collective improvisation, textural emphasis, extended solos, and little instruments, particularly percussion—that would play a role in the Mwandishi band.

The final composition and maybe the most distinctive on the recording is a recitation of the seven guiding principles (Nguzo Saba) of Kwanzaa, read by each of the band members in sequence.¹⁰ The backdrop for the recitations is a textural fabric of interwoven flute melodies presaging improvisatory moments in the Mwandishi band.

Kawaida and Fat Albert Rotunda display very different musical leanings, yet share black cultural affinities. When one considers the sensibilities of these two recordings and Hancock’s experiences with the Miles Davis Quintet, it is clear that a constellation of new ideas was coalescing to shape Hancock’s current musical conception. It is not a tremendous conceptual leap from many aspects of Kawaida to the music, however far more open-ended, played a year later by the Mwandishi band. As Hancock later described the music to come:

What we were looking for was to play a music that was based essentially on intuition. We had melodies and a certain number of chords at our disposal but we used them as little as possible. . . . [Thus] our music became more and more spontaneous, different from one night to the next. Sometimes we prepared ourselves to play certain themes and we started with an improvised introduction, but we found that having done that, we went so far that the introduction lasted three quarters of an hour! After a while I would realize that we had never played the melody in question . . . [or] not exposed the melody until the end, having made an incredible voyage. When this group was functioning at full tilt, when the different intuitions were harmonious with one another, it was magic, pure and simple. The music that we were playing was thus so powerful that it literally transported the listener on the same voyage. It was a sort of fantasy.¹¹

The London House

The Herbie Hancock Sextet played the London House for four weeks, five days a week, with Mondays and Tuesdays off. The club was located in a downtown Chicago apartment building on Michigan Avenue and catered mainly to a business crowd during the dinner hour time slot assigned to Hancock’s band. Formal dress was expected, and dinner was expensive. Typical bookings included Barbara Carroll, Eddie Higgins, Oscar Peterson, Errol Garner, George Shearing, Mel Torme, Sarah Vaughan, Jim Hall, and vibraphonist Cal Tjader.¹² Pianist Ramsey Lewis played there often; Peterson and Vaughan recorded there.

Hancock recalls that the two club owners, the Marienthal brothers, were expecting to hear songs from Hancock’s lush, melodious recording Speak Like a Child (1968), “a much softer, more gentle kind of sound. [For that album,] I was trying to come out of a Gil Evans influence.” The club owners “knew I had a sextet with that basic instrumentation and they thought it was going to be that kind of thing,” yet “[by the time we came to London House] we were already into the avant-garde, into playing sounds and exploring new sonic territories.”

The shows at the London House were certainly not what the owners anticipated, as Hancock explains:

We played “Maiden Voyage” and those tunes, but we had some other tunes, too! We didn’t play any of it like what he had heard on the record. We were much further out than that. And he wanted us to play a dinner hour! And I said: “I don’t recommend it!” So, we did a first day and he understood what we were talking about and he said: “OK, you don’t have to play the dinner hour.”

Hancock recalls the owners sounding “kind of disappointed we weren’t playing what he expected. But . . . we were all determined to somehow break through to that audience.” Despite their surprise, the owners adapted and kept the band on for a full month. Co-owner George Marienthal treated the booking as an opportunity: “Herbie’s music doesn’t appeal to the usual cocktail crowd. And he mystifies many of my dinner customers. But we have a lot more people of all ages coming out late at night to hear him. And that’s a good sign.” Marienthal added: “Now I’m looking for other talented groups like Herbie’s.”¹³

The Chicago Tribune offered a positive report, with hints from reviewer Harriet Choice that something unusual was taking place: “They are a tight and happy group, and even if diners are a little bewildered by the free form music . . . [they are] a combo that swings—and that’s the essence of jazz.”¹⁴ The sharp contrast with the conservative nature of most London House bookings meant, as drummer Thurman Barker relates, that “when Herbie was going to be there, it was a hell of an event. I know the night I was there, all the tables were filled. I had to stand at the bar.” Chicago-based bassist Reggie Willis remembers, however:

It was unusual for a supper club like the London House to have such a musically expansive and experimental group as the Mwandishi band. I’m sure their music was a little ear shattering for audiences who were used to sitting and eating steak and lobster. Herbie’s band was one of the most experimental bands of the time, demanding serious listening and attention. Herbie and the members of the band were really stretching the sound barrier.

Drummer Alvin Fielder, like Willis and Barker, was an original AACM member. Fielder, who had befriended and played with Hancock a decade earlier, recalls:

I was in Chicago to visit my in-laws while Mwandishi was at the London House. I knew Billy Hart was with the group and Billy was a good friend. I had heard him with Jimmie Smith and Wes Montgomery and I was in admiration of his looseness and his conception. I went to see Mwandishi and sat on the bandstand near Billy to watch it. The music was special, different and right on the edge. The music covered many bases touching on bebop, post-bebop, avant-garde, Latin, colors [a broad sound palate], and so forth. What I heard from Mwandishi was new to me, and my ears. The music was everywhere and the flow was just phenomenal. Everyone in the group was strong, precise and creative, which is what happens when all the musicians are in synch. I especially remember the sound of Billy and his floating feel, his touch and how he would stretch rhythms. His time was like a rubber band. In any musical situation, I knew I would love his swing, feel and conception. Also, he’s such a warm and humble person.

Trumpeter Eddie Henderson, however, remembers London House regulars “gagging” and not returning, and the composition of the audience shifting toward a more receptive group: “We brought all these jazz enthusiasts and a lot of the black avant-garde musicians from Chicago. They were there every night.”

Word must have spread that an unusual band was playing at the London House, but many of the more experimental musicians in Chicago seemed unaware that the shows were ongoing. Barker adds: “If I had known, there was no way I wouldn’t have come back often. For instance, when Miles was at the Plugged Nickel, I went out four nights.” Apparently, Barker, Fielder, and Willis were among very few AACM members to attend these shows. This may seem surprising since AACM members were among the most forward-looking musicians in Chicago, except that the London House had a reputation for conservative bookings and it was an expensive club. Barker points out: “AACM members were pretty opinionated about a lot of the music at the time. I know this from being a teenager listening to the older guys talking about the music and about who they would go hear.” Some AACM members had also left for New York and so were no longer in Chicago for the London House shows.

Members of the Sextet, however, regularly went out to see AACM groups perform on their nights off. Barker remembers: “Julian Priester and Billy Hart were always there when they were in town. Bennie Maupin came one or two times. . . . I knew Billy Hart from when he came to Chicago with the Montgomery Brothers in the early 60s. Julian Priester and Roscoe Mitchell go way back in Chicago.” Fielder recalls: “I first met Billy Hart at an AACM concert. I was working with Anthony Braxton and Kalaparusha and Charles Clark. He’d come by a concert and I’d let him play. He’d let me play at his gigs with Wes Montgomery.” The impact of the AACM on Hancock himself seems indirect since the organization was formed four years after he relocated to New York. Hancock was familiar with the key players prior to their more experimental stage, among them “Malachai Favors, Richard Abrams—when I knew him he was Richard [and not yet Muhal Richard] Abrams—[as well as Sun Ra associate] John Gilmore. I played with some of them in jam sessions. When I knew Richard Abrams, he was more a bebop player.” Elements of the AACM musical approach and cultural concerns had permeated the musical avant-garde, and its influence can be heard in the music of Kawaida and on recordings of the Sextet in live performance. Important features in common included the use of little percussion instruments and flutes, increasing attention to timbre, extended instrumental techniques, a collective approach to music making, and a celebration of African cultural roots.

Thurman Barker describes what he witnessed at the London House in greater detail:

I had been following Herbie as much as I could, especially when he came to Chicago. . . . I saw his Sextet twice, once at London House and once, a year later, when they played at Joe Siegel’s Jazz Showcase. Fortunately the personnel were the same on both occasions. There are many things that I remember about the music at the London House show; clearly, it was very different from what Herbie had been playing with Miles.

First of all, B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. A Defining Moment: November 1970
• 2. Becoming Herbie Hancock
• 3. The First Sextet
• 4. New Musical Directions
• 5. Moving toward Mwandishi
• 6. Mwandishi: The Recording
• 7. Crossings
• 8. Quadraphonic Sound System: Patrick Gleeson on Tour and Sextant
• 9. Musical Collectivity and Open Forms
• 10. Life on the Road, 1971–73, and the Critical Response
• 11. Endings and Unexpected Recordings
• Epilogue. Reminiscences and Legacy
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Discography
• Index