Writing an article about the early period of jazz-rock without mentioning Miles Davis is impossible. This article series focuses on the year 1971, and it is unfortunate that his band did not visit a recording studio even once that year. However, his recorded activity the previous year left a huge mark and was inspirational to all artists who released albums in 1971. It is thoroughly documented in these twin articles:
Miles toured consistently throughout 1971 with a formidable group of musicians that included Gary Bartz, Keith Jarrett, Michael Henderson, Jack DeJohnette and Airto Moreira. In the summer of 1971 Ndugu Leon Chancler joined, replacing Jack DeJohnette. Very little has been released over the years from the band’s 1971 live performances. The Lost Septet (Live in Vienna 1971) is a fascinating document of the intense music that was played on stage by this group.
It is not surprising that virtually all the major acts in the jazz-rock genre went through various incarnations of Miles Davis’ groups. In this article we focus on a member of Miles’ fantastic 1960s quintet, who went on to become one of the stellar jazz-rock musicians of the 1970s.
Herbie Hancock – Mwandishi
In 1970 Herbie Hancock’s Sextet, a group he started late in 1968, went through a major lineup change. After recording the R&B and funk-themed album Fat Albert Rotunda, featuring music he wrote for the TV special Hey, Hey, Hey, It’s Fat Albert, four of the sextet’s members left. They were replaced by younger musicians who brought with them fresh musical perspectives, opening new opportunities for Hancock as a band leader. In addition to Herbie Hancock playing Fender Rhodes and Buster Williams on bass, the band now included Billy Hart on drums, Eddie Henderson on trumpet and flugelhorn, Bennie Maupin on various reed instruments and Julian Priester on trombone.
Hancock vividly remembers the very early beginnings on that band: “The magic of this particular combination was evident the very first night we played together. We had gone to Vancouver for a gig, but we’d never even rehearsed as a unit. Buster, Billy, and I played that first afternoon as a trio while Bennie, Julian, and Eddie stayed in the hotel to go over the music.” With zero rehearsal time as a sextet, the group played together for the first time, braving it in front of an audience. While this is not necessarily a rare event in the life of a jazz musician, where an impromptu jam session is a standard affair, this time the experience was different. Hancock continues: “That night, for our first set, the six of us started slow, kind of feeling each other out onstage. Very quickly we started to get comfortable, and just like that the music started to flow. Everybody started to open up, like a flower blossoming. We got freer and freer up there onstage, exploring musical avenues and rhythms with no fear or hesitation, as if we’d been playing together forever.”
The band found a spiritual context that brought them together. They became increasingly influenced by African culture, religion, and music. Hancock adds: “We started wearing dashikis and African talismans, and I began to feel more connected than ever to the civil rights movement and to our shared, collective past as black musicians. This was a powerful transformation, and of course it affected our music.” They took on Swahili names, and Herbie Hancock was aptly bestowed the name Mwandishi (Swahili for composer or author). Herbie Hancock’s Sextet was now known as The Mwandishi Band.
In an interview with Downbeat magazine during his sextet stint at the Cellar Door club in Washington D.C., Herbie Hancock talked about each member of his Sextet.
Bily Hart: “When he swings, when we’re doing a thing that’s supposed to swing, he swings hard. When we’re doing very far out things, I want to have somebody who can do all of that — just play music for the sound of the music, not a guy that can play a bossa nova, a rock beat, or can play this or that, not that, but a guy who has a style that encompasses everything.”
Buster Williams: “When he walks on the bass, he places the notes in exactly the right place in the beat so that he really swings. His musical conception is what really knocks me out.”
Julian Priester: “Julian is probably more steeped in tradition, I think, than the other guys in the group. He worked with Max Roach quite a few years ago, and with Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington.”
Eddie Henderson: “There’s a certain lyrical quality about Eddie’s playing that is the kind of thing I was looking for. He doesn’t just play the changes and run chords off the changes. He constructs melodies that stand alone without the changes, and builds them a lot on composition.”
Benny Maupin: “Benny plays pure sound. He gets inside of the music that’s going around and grabs out the core. He uses the chord changes only as a point of reference in most cases. You hit that point and he goes off someplace else and comes back and hits that point and goes off someplace else.”
While the heads at Warner Bros. would have been happy to see Hancock continue with the commercial style of Fat Albert Rotunda, he went the opposite direction. Influenced by free jazz, and leaning towards the spiritual side of that esthetic, he went for long-form, open-ended group explorations: “I wanted to set everybody loose, to explore more deeply the avant-garde side of jazz music. With these six guys, we were finally arriving at that place. The music was becoming more than just free; at times it felt transcendent.”
In his book Possibilities, Herbie Hancock discusses the risks of going onstage with no real plan and letting the musicians figure it out in front of an audience: “Playing onstage with Mwandishi meant treading a fine line between brilliance and chaos. Everything was intuitive, in the moment. Nothing was planned. We might start with a fragment of a structure, but the sounds we produced on any given day came out of our synchronicity on that day.” Some nights the result was very powerful, and audiences were captivated by the almost mystical connection between the members of the band. As Hancock said, “Making music like this was not for the faint of heart, but we kept pressing outward, looking for weird sounds and unexplored paths, always in search of new experiences onstage.”
When talking about the experience of playing with the Mwandishi band, Hancock described it many times as being high. Not on drugs, mind you, but rather from the elation of making music at that level with other musicians. This is what he said at the time: “Music is supposed to make you high, to give you an experience so that you can transport yourself from wherever you are so that you can gain a little more consciousness. It would be impossible for most of my early music to do that, just from the very nature of the material. But my new music is set up to do just that. It’s set up to make you high.”
Many of the band’s spaced-out collective playing were rooted in Buster Williams’ hypnotic low-end grooves. He would start vamping on an intricate bass line, sometimes in odd-time meter, and hold it for a long period of time, modifying it slightly as the song moved along. Trumpeter Eddie Henderson recalls: “Buster was kind of the spark. He would change bass lines and just open up a new door, and it wasn’t written down! It was just spontaneous. The band and Herbie would follow along.” The gifted bass player added: “I would come up with one of these lines and everyone would jump on it. These rhythms, these lines, these motifs would morph into something else. Sometimes it would happen because I mistakenly played it wrong. You know, I always remembered what Monk and Art Blakely told me: if you make a mistake, play it again and it ain’t a mistake.”
All band members have fond memories of their experience playing in the Mwandishi band. It allowed them a level of free expression that is rare within such a tightly knitted ensemble. Trombonist Julian Priester recalls: “There were no restrictions. Everyone was listening to each other, leaving our egos out of the process, just responding to what the overall group invents.” Drummer Billy Hart: “It was almost a miracle musical experience. You could say it was spiritual, but it was so sensually pleasurable that I dare not put it in the same words.” And lastly, Eddie Henderson expanded on the group’s concept of freedom within structure: “Mwandishi required you to be spontaneous and work in the moment rather than trying to play something preconceived ahead of time. I’ve really learned how to listen to work within that context. You had to blend in with the other members of the band. The concept of soloists standing out front and the rest of the group supporting them didn’t apply. Instead, with the Mwandishi band, everyone made a more active collective effort to make something. The emphasis was on interplay – a conversation – between everyone in the band.”
In March 1971 the band released their self-titled debut, simply called Mwandishi. It was produced by a perfect man for the job, a jazz enthusiast who worked with some of west coast’s best emerging rock acts. David Rubinson had worked with Moby Grape, Taj Mahal, The Chambers Brothers, and produced Santana’s excellent debut album. Warner Bros., expecting Herbie Hancock’s group to deliver a record that continues the style of Fat Albert Rotunda, hired Rubinson as producer. He started attending their lives shows and quickly understood that they moved on light years beyond their previous album. He had a plan: “What I wanted to do was put Herbie and his band in a hothouse, in a laboratory, and let them create the music they wanted, and then capture it in the studio. So we went into the studio with Mwandishi to record the music the way they played it live. He had this organic band he’d put together, based on collective consciousness, organizing around African cultural roots, and spiritual mutual respect. They were a union.”
As Hancock said, the music was not for the faint of heart. The opening track, Ostinato (Suite for Angela), sets the tone for the whole album. Dedicated to the political activist Angela Davis, it is in 15/8 time signature. In addition to the sextet, it features percussion played by Leon “Ndugu” Chancler and José “Chepito” Areas, then with Santana.
Mwandishi / Herbie Hancock – Fender Rhodes piano
Mchezaji / Buster Williams – bass
Jabali / Billy Hart – drums
Mganga / Eddie Henderson – trumpet, flugelhorn
Mwile / Bennie Maupin – bass clarinet, alto flute, piccolo
Pepo Mtoto / Julian Priester – tenor trombone, bass trombone
with:
Leon “Ndugu” Chancler – drums and percussion on “Ostinato (Suite For Angela)”
José “Chepito” Areas – congas and timbales on “Ostinato (Suite For Angela)”
Ronnie Montrose – guitar on “Ostinato (Suite For Angela)”
In its January 3, 1972 issue, Time magazine selected Mwandishi as one of their ten best LPs of 1971 (five of them were classical), interestingly squeezing in one of the best-known avant-garde music festivals when describing the album: “Miles Davis protégé Herbie Hancock shows what jazz might have sounded like if it had come up the river from Darmstadt, that European mecca of the avant garde, instead of New Orleans.” Hancock called Mwandishi, “My favorite record of all the records I have ever made.”. That is quite a high praise from the man whose recordings include such milestone albums as Maiden Voyage and Head Hunters. Continuing to describe the music captured on Mwandishi, he said, “None of the tunes have chords. After we play the melody, then we can go where we want to. Usually, the structure of the melody leads you in a certain direction, so at least you’re not walking off of a cliff. I’ve found a way of structuring the material so that there are no guidelines to follow, there’s enough of a catalyst in the writing to give you something to go on.”
Sources:
You’ll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band, by Bob Gluck
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