Herbie Hancock by Herbie Hancock

Author:Herbie Hancock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Back in 1965, when I turned that Yardley cologne jingle into the song “Maiden Voyage,” I discovered something cool about writing music. I had been completely stuck, unable to figure out the song’s progression, and nothing I tried sounded right. But then I finally stopped trying to write and just listened. And that’s when the song revealed what it wanted to be.

Eight years later, as I began making music with my new group, something similar was happening. My intention had been to start a straight-up funk band, but when the five of us began playing together in the summer of 1973, the music was telling me otherwise. Our tunes just wouldn’t stay in the straight-funk box; we kept getting into this gray area between jazz and funk. At first I pushed back. But I realized pretty quickly that I was better off listening to what the music was trying to tell me than trying to control it.

Anyway, the music we were making was too much fun to try to shove it into some kind of box. We were going in a lighter, more carefree direction than Mwandishi, having fun playing musical games, playing around with the rhythms. Paul Jackson was an unusual funk bass player, because he never liked to play the same bass line twice, so during improvised solos he responded to what the other guys played. I thought I’d hired a funk bassist, but as I found out later, he had actually started as an upright jazz bass player.

Our drummer, Harvey Mason, brought his jazz chops to the music, too, creating new rhythms that were almost the opposite of what you might expect. This was especially true on the first song we started working on, a tune called “Home Grown.”

We got together to bounce around ideas, and I started out writing a bass line, playing it on the Minimoog synthesizer. Then Paul started playing an accompanying figure up high on his bass. We didn’t have a guitar, which was unusual for a funk band, but I had decided I could instead just play guitarlike figures on a Clavinet, which has keys like a piano but is a plucked instrument like a harpsichord. I’d heard Stevie Wonder and Parliament Funkadelic’s Bernie Worrell playing a Clavinet, and I really liked the sound. So in a burst of zeal or maybe naïveté, I thought, We don’t need a guitar!—which is probably another reason we ended up moving away from a straight-up funk sound.

After I wrote the Minimoog bass line for “Home Grown,” I played it for David Rubinson. Now, David was not only a producer and manager, but he was also a drummer. He listened to the line and said, “Why don’t you add a little syncopation?” This was just a minor shift, but it changed the whole feel of the song. David never got credit for it on the record, but that syncopated bass line ended up becoming the defining line in the piece, which we later renamed “Chameleon.”

While

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