Most musicians who enter the world of avant garde jazz never move
out of the genre, consumed with exploring their own esoteric world. But Herbie's
muses led him elsewhere, and his longtime habit of looking inward and examining
his own artistic motives eventually led him to explore ever more foreign musical
territory.
"One thing I like about jazz," he says, "is that
it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing. And that
was fascinating, because you could do something different every time. I get bored
easily, but later I learned that it is OK to do something that others have done.
I took a different view of what it was I had been doing before and started to come
to some realizations about the way I looked at life.
"Something was missing from what I had been doing. This was
later on in my career and I had gotten into doing some really avant garde stuff.
It was real elitist and real heavy and serious, and completely removed from anything
else that was commonplace. And I looked at it and I said, 'Now, wait a minute.
I've gotten so far above the ground that, instead of expanding, I'm eliminating.
Something's wrong with this picture. Let me look at this and reevaluate.'
"I mean, looking ahead and examining is what led me to that." He
nods and points to the Buddhist alter. "How you see things is what this does.
I mean, it doesn't show you the vision, it opens you up so that you can see. You
get a better vantage point. I chanted a lot during that period. From '70 to '73
I'd had a sextet, but the band was not self-supporting and I couldn't afford it,
so I broke it up. And then I didn't know what kind of music I wanted to do, because
I was just fed up to here with it. It wasn't fulfilling anymore. It wasn't fun and it wasn't a joy; it was pressure.
"So I
chanted a lot and I started thinking, 'Do I consider myself and what I do better
than what Sly Stone or what James Brown does?' I said, 'No, I never did.' But then
I was thinking, 'Well, would I play that kind of music? No. Well, if I don't consider
myself better than them, what then are my real feelings about this?' And I started
to realize, actually, that I was just as snobbish as the people whose attitudes
I disrespected."
Thinking back over his career, Herbie realized that "something
had happened to me. When I first went to New York, I went with Donald Bird and
he and I were roommates for a couple of years before I joined Miles (Davis). But
Donald listened to a lot of different kinds of music and he played the first electronic
music by.... I can't remember whether Donald Bird turned me on to Stockhausen or
whether Tony Williams did....
"This was in 1961 as a wide-eyed, enthusiastic 21-year-old
kid, so I was wide open to hear anything. I was fresh, newly in New York and I
was just open to everything. It was just fascinating to me; like, all these different
things were happening in music! Then, when I joined Miles' band and I met Tony
Williams.... But Tony was much younger than me and he was already listening to
Ornette Coleman and Elliot Carter and John Cage. Actually, I'd heard John
Cage, but Tony was into it. I was sort of on the outside looking in, but
he was into that stuff. So I was always wondering, 'What's he listening to? What
is he hearing that I'm not hearing?'
"So I hung out with Tony all the time and I kept asking him,
'What is this rhythm? How do you to this, how do you do that?' I used to go to
his place and he'd put on Coltrane records and he'd listen, and he'd hear certain
things and he'd scream. What was he hearing? I'd listen, and eventually, finally,
I could hear what Trane was doing and to open myself up to...
"See, there were certain rules I'd always used, and people
like Trane, they would break those rules. I had to learn how to listen to that.
And also there's an emotional element they open themselves up to that's being expressed."
Herbie
pauses and reflects: "A method that doesn't use what you know. It's
just pure, raw emotion. You don't know what that's going to sound like; you just
do it because the urge is there. And you allow yourself to play off that plane.
You're in this dark room of unknowns, you allow yourself to go there. But through finally getting to hear Trane's contemporary
stuff, then I could hear Don Cherry and then I could hear all those other guys.
"And I loved it, I loved it! I wanted to be part of the newer stuff. As much as
I respected Bird and musicians like Bud Powell and so forth, I wanted to be in
with Miles and Trane, and eventually.... You asked me before about being an innovator and I mentioned
that I've always been some kind of leader. I think it's something I got from my
mom; it's kind of an achiever thing. Still, when I finally left Miles in '68 and
got my own band, it was a logical step; because anybody that left Miles always
had their own band."That was before synthesizers. The first thing I ever heard
about synthesizers, they were being used in rock. I wasn't interested in rock at
all, but I was fascinated by people like James Brown, once he did 'Papa's Got a
Brand New Bag.' That, I liked."
In a roundabout way, this all led to Herbie's first personal exposure
to synthesizers in 1970. "I had just read an interview in Playboy of
Bill Cosby, and in the introduction to the interview it mentioned that he had a
management company. He's a friend of mine from 1963, so I called Bill. He said,
'Good thing you called. I'm doin' an animated thing for television. It's from one
of my concerts, called Fat Albert.' I knew that show was about black kids from
Philadelphia. They weren't into jazz, they were into rhythm and blues. But I did
like that kind of James Brown beat. Bill wasn't on Warner Bros Records anymore,
but he was still good friends with Joe Smith and he played the tape for Joe and
Joe loved it. He called me in New York and I wound up moving from Blue Note to
Warners because of Bill Cosby."
The first album he did for Warners was called Fat Albert Rotunda,
and it's the music from that show, but re-recorded. This time, it was Herbie's
jazz band and not the funk session players from Los Angeles that he'd used on the
show's soundtrack recording, and the record company wasn't happy with the results. "So then they figured maybe if they could get me with a producer
that would kind of edge me toward that funkier stuff that would sell.... They chose
David Rubinson, who came to hear my band to see what he had to do with it. But
the band had not only had gotten away from doing the funkier Fat Albert stuff,
it was much more avant garde. But instead of him pulling us over to what Warner
Bros. wanted us to do, he became like the spokesman for our side, to try to figure
how to keep the music as it was but put it in a form that was palatable enough
to sneak it through Warner Bros. So the idea of using the synthesizer in our band
came to be because he said that the synthesizer is associated with rock.
"David got this guy named Patrick Gleason and we let him
do the intro to Crossings. I listened to what he had done and it was so
gorgeous! It was fantastic! These sounds were so interesting, and we were into
sounds. Well, after I put Patrick all over the record I asked him
to join the band. He said, 'Travel with a band?' I said, 'I know, it's never
been done.' There had been no jazz groups with synthesizer players and I think
even rock groups didn't carry synthesizer players with them. This was before programmable
synthesizers, so he could only do weird bleeps and squawks and a lot of white noise
things. Because it wasn't programmable, how were you to move from one sound to
the next while the music was still going? He eventually figured out some sort of
choreography, but he was still very limited because he had to patch this stuff.
I broke up that band in '72.
"Now, I had never played synthesizer but I'd asked Patrick
millions of questions. So finally I was actually able, through the Arp company,
to get an Odyssey out of them—I was endorsing Arp. I had just recently moved
to California and I didn't bring my acoustic piano from New York because it wouldn't
survive the trip. I figured I'd already started endorsing stuff, so maybe I could
endorse an acoustic piano and get a free one. I didn't know it doesn't work that
way for acoustic pianos! So for seven years I didn't have an acoustic piano—but
I was able to get some synthesizers.
"Finally, I did the Headhunters record, and I did
it myself. The difference between Sextet, the first LP for Columbia,
and Headhunters was night and day. For Headhunters what happened
was that I decided I was tired of this heavy, heavy music and trying to be an innovator,
trying to be sort of... although I never really put myself in this category. I look
back and who were the innovators? There's Charlie Parker and there's Miles, there's
Trane. I'm none of those guys, so why am I beating myself up trying to find the
lost chord all the time? Why don't I relax, play some nice music that people could....
"Another thing I began to notice: I'd go to a party
somewhere and I'd say, 'Oh, I just finished doing my record.' I'd put it on and
it interfered. It was so weird people couldn't talk anymore. So I said, 'Something's
wrong.' The only way you could listen to that music was if you sat down and did
nothing else and devoted your attention to doing this. It wasn't functional. Who
in the hell has the time to sit down and do nothing but listen to music? People
listen to music in their car, people put music on when they're doing housework.
I said, 'No wonder my records have no sales. Life is hard enough as it is, why
should I make it more difficult?'
"So I said, 'OK. I like Sly Stone, I love Sly Stone.
So why don't I just try to do some kind of a funk record?' And I sat back and I
realized that I could lose all the audience that I had. It may not be good, I may
not even gain a new audience. But I had just a very, very strong urge to do this.
I said, 'I like funk and I'm curious to see what I can do in that area and I want
to try it. And if I don't try it, I'm a coward.' But it wasn't a funk record, it
was a jazz-funk record. I wasn't trying to make a jazz-funk record; I
didn't know what jazz-funk was!
"It kept integrating with these jazz elements, so after a
while I stopped fighting. I kind of liked the direction we were going in; it was
nice. And then we put the record out and it sold, I mean it sold a lot. I was shocked
that I had a record on the pop charts—number 10 on the pop charts! Playing concerts
in front of a lot of people, and they came to see me. I was a headliner!
It was really something.
"At that time I also met Stevie Wonder who was recording Songs
In The Key Of Life. He was recording in a studio called Crystal and any time
I'd come in there he had something to lay on me. One time I went over to Crystal
and he had this prototype of a synthesizer: you could get chords on it, four-voice
chords! It was an Oberheim four-voice synthesizer. But it was a prototype, all
the synthesizers before that were monophonic. When this four-voice came out I
bought it and used to take that along to a few gigs.
"I met Tom Oberheim and he told me he was trying to figure
out a way to make it programmable. I said, 'What do you mean?' I didn't know what
he was talking about. Then one day, I guess he took a vacation or something, and
he came back and said, 'I was sitting on the Bois de Boulogne in Paris and I figured
it out.' Then he added four more voices and he had an eight-voice programmable
synthesizer. Ah, that was more than anybody could hope for, it was incredible!
"Finally, I had to have a real technical person because I
started to get heavy into technology then. So I hired this guy named Brian Bell.
Brian had a mentor whom he could turn to, that was like Brian's god. So one day
Brian said, 'OK, we've got to get a computer.' I said, 'Really? What kind should
we get?'"
Nowadays, in addition to the acoustic grand piano in the living
room, Herbie has a room out behind the house that is stuffed full of computers
and disk drives and boxes of new music software and MIDI hook-ups and keyboards
and emulators and tape decks and mixing boards and every manner of electronic music
gadget imaginable at the time.
But will he return again to acoustic jazz?
"Why do people always ask me that? I always have the same
answer: Why would I stop? I've always been doing it. What I always wonder is, why
is it that whenever I make a record they think that whatever that thing is on that
record, that's the only thing I do? Why do they think that I'm not going to also
do acoustic records? Music is sound. I can change clothes, too, but nobody ever
asks if I'm ever going to go back to wearing a T-shirt!"
Herbie's guiding vision, through all his learning and searching
and creating is that "as a musician I feel you have a responsibility to other
human beings to provide a service that always leads somehow toward the uplifting
human experience. Somehow be constructive rather than destructive. Or else you're
not fulfilling your raison d'être as an entity."