You'll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band

by Bob Gluck

Overview

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.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226300047
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	08/15/2012
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Bob Gluck is professor emeritus at the University at Albany, and author of You’ll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band and The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles, both also published by the University of Chicago Press. He has released twelve recordings of jazz and electroacoustic music on the FMR, Ictus, and EMF labels.
 

Read an Excerpt

You'll Know When You Get There

Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band

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By Bob Gluck

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2012 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30004-7

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Chapter One

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." 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, 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." 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 gig 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. 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. 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. 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 ofJohn Coltrane and members of the black experimental music organization, the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), founded five years earlier. The opening tune "Baraka" opens with quartal 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. 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.

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. 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."

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." 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.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from You'll Know When You Get There by Bob Gluck Copyright © 2012 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction


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


Appendix
Notes
References
Discography
Index

Editorial Reviews

The music, rather than the personalities or life stories of the musicians, is this book’s raison d’etre. Musicians will find transcriptions of value, while non-musicians will not be overwhelmed by the notations and technical descriptions. Gluck goes to great length to describe the music meaningfully to the broader audience, always striving to encapsulate the special qualities of this body of work. . . . As well-known as Hancock is, this book serves as a valuable resource to understanding his progress, and leaves one hoping for official releases of many of the unissued concert recordings discussed here.

Louisville Courier-Journal - Martin Z. Kasdan Jr.

An accomplished keyboardist and electronic synthesist himself, Gluck provides a wealth of insight into Hancock’s music.” 

New York City Jazz Record - Tom Greenland

Perhaps the most enigmatic ensemble to emerge from the Davis school was Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi Band, which today has acquired an almost legendary status. If pressed, most fans of music from this era would cite this ensemble as their favourite of the period—indeed for some it is their favourite jazz ensemble of all time. So how did this band acquire its almost mythical status? It’s a question that no-one has quite been able to put their finger on until Bob Gluck’s exhaustive study, which offers valuable insight into the life and times of this band, with a wide range of interviews from the musicians themselves and those in the business—record company producers, execs, promoters and the like. . . . In detail and breadth this is an impressive volume and is valuable for the insight it offers into the music making process, the artistic milieu of the period, and aesthetic aspirations behind the project.

Jazzwise - Stuart Nicholson

Gluck’s rich tapestry of musicians’ voices and concise, descriptive analyses allows for a reassessment of a period often over-looked in jazz scholarship.”

Jazz Studies - Kevin Fellezs

As I began reading this book I was immediately and pleasantly transported to an exciting place. Bob Gluck writes of a time and of events that I was a part of and of course remember well, but the writer’s uncanny ability to touch on the intricacies of this music and its affect unveils for me a keener insight into the present. As the band evolved the music itself enslaved us. We were not the dictators of the outcome of the performances. The music told us what it needed and we were willing to unselfishly comply, to the point that the end result of the story was as much of a surprise to us as it was to the audience. It was exciting to go to work every night not knowing what to expect. What am I going to be compelled to do tonight? Can I face the challenge? Am I ready and capable? This is not something that can be contrived, not even if it is your prime objective. Our great fortune was the synergy, compatibility, sense of unity, and selflessness that we all shared with each other. Herbie was our leader in every sense of the word. In retrospect, I can see more clearly his great compassion in being a conduit, of sorts, for this magic (if you allow me to be so expressive) to take place. I’m very happy that Bob Gluck took on this great challenge to write this book. I would think it to be a daunting task to say the least.

Buster Williams

Mwandishi's combination of richly woven Afrocentric ideas with advancing music technology had a powerful effect on me. The fact that Mwandishi took on the concept of the Double Consciousness discussed by Du Bois and, at least for a time, took on sociopolitical ideas and was progressively pushing at the boundaries of jazz expression has a powerful relationship to the work that I've done with Living Colour, Masque, and the Yohimbe Brothers. They helped to lead the way forward.

Vernon Reid

In You’ll Know When You Get There, Bob Gluck takes a fascinating look at the development of a musical identity. The book is ostensibly about pianist Herbie Hancock and his sextet’s Mwandishi period—a free-jazz, electronics-heavy evolution of the hard-bop group he formed in 1968—but it really uses Hancock’s story to show how musicians adapt to changing technology, new musical ideas and greater cultural identities. At its core, the book is a study about how an artist accumulates a sound and the experiences that shape his musical views…..Perhaps, with this excellent primer, more listeners will start to unearth the joys found in Mwandishi’s three recordings.

DownBeat - Jon Ross

Bob Gluck has devoted considerable time, effort, and talent to getting it right, the fascinating story of my old band. At 77, I've been around enough music and political activism that has become history to understand that this is not often enough the case. One usually reads about what purports to be one’s younger self and finds instead a stranger with the same name engaged in a world of the writer’s creation reflecting his/her interests in substitution of what really happened. You'll Know When You Get There is the marvelous exception and it made me cry with joy and longing for this long-lost world brought to life once more. Oh, guys, let's be 30 one more time and do this all over again....

Patrick Gleeson

Bob Gluck's book is a major accomplishment and welcomed addition to jazz literature, shedding light on the days when experimental and popular music flourished as one in America, portraying a great musician during one of his most innovative and creative periods, clarifying musical complexities in a way useful to both musicians and non-music-reading listeners, and even contributing to an understanding of that mysterious element—funk. Bob has gained insight from Herbie Hancock's fellow musicians, uses his own personal experience wisely (and modestly), and makes me want to hear the albums he discusses again. You'll Know When You Get There gets me there, not as a look back but with a view to what I'm hearing now.

Howard Mandel

In the forty years that have passed since I saw the Mwandishi band in Kansas City as a teenager, I have heard and even been able to participate in a lot of great music. But nothing I have experienced since has had more of an effect on my life than what those guys brought to the bandstand on those KC nights. To me, that band was the epitome of everything that jazz has ever promised to be. Collectively and individually, they brought together a sound that was so deeply in and of that moment in time that it became thus transcendent and timeless. They inspired me and a generation to aspire to their level of creativity and commitment. Herbie has always been one of my major heroes and still is. He has been great every step of the way from the beginning, but there was something really special with this band and the way it intersected with the culture that was unique and important. This book takes an in depth look at every detail of what made that amazing collection of musicians what it was. With his exhaustive research and detailed interviews, Bob Gluck brings the nature and workings of this amazing and influential ensemble to life.

Pat Metheny

Even though Herbie was the leader, with the Mwandishi band he let the music lead. Here was this  mountain of a musician, one of my heros, with so much experience and knowledge, just letting the music go by itself. He was a servant of the music. That made a huge impression on me and on my life. It's about time somebody wrote a book about this important band.

Bobby McFerrin

Time has revealed Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band to be one of the most exceptional and successful achievements of both a transformative musical era and Hancock's own long and varied career. A triumph of ‘fusion’ in the most comprehensive sense of the term, Mwandishi merged the acoustic and electric, the exploratory and fundamental, and the musical and social in a manner that has rarely been duplicated. Bob Gluck does an inspired job in helping us to hear, and understand, every step of Mwandishi’s process.

Bob Blumenthal

Gluck has just enough actual experience and theoretical smarts to travel down the multidirectional vectors of the sonic experiments conducted by Herbie and his group and report back the totality of his findings. . . . Some of the most compelling sections of You’ll Know When You Get There are those which reveal how the group’s kinetic trajectory as an Afrodelic electroacoustic improvising unit was fully technologised and turbo-boosted in the crucible of the mix. . . . Gluck’s interviewees attest to how advanced all this was for the time. In terms of process, groups such as Can or those led by Miles Davis were monolithic jam bands whose records had to be assembled into alien artefacts in the editing suite. On stage, The [Herbie Hancock] Sextet was already a shapeshifting time machine, moving from zero gravity tonal abstraction to quantum funk via dynamic thematic material and on-the-fly programming and processing, and the records documented electric real-time performances being expanded via the alchemical science of the console room. It was, as trombonist Pepo Mtoto Julian Priester states, ‘a whole that was unified.’

The Wire - Tony Herrington

Gluck’s You’ll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band is a welcome addition to the slowly growing bodies of scholarly literature on both post-1967 electric jazz and on iconic bands and recording projects. In addition, Gluck takes a step towards filling a mighty gap in jazz scholarship—biographical and analytic research on Herbie Hancock. For researchers, Hancock and his several closest collaborators have been difficult interview subjects, so this book, which blends hard-gotten author interviews with previous published material is extremely valuable to anyone interested in Hancock and his music in general, as well as the Mwandishi Band, which was a pioneer in electric/electronic jazz and musically adventurous.”

American Studies

With You’ll Know When You Get There, jazz historian Bob Gluck breaks down Hancock’s days with the Mwandishi band as it blurred the lines between jazz, rock, classical and electronic music. It’s expertly researched and it features interviews with Hancock, close associates and all of the members of Mwandishi band. It’s a perfect primer to what turned out to be the most experimental and innovative phases of Hancock’s career.

The Interrobang

You’ll Know When You Get There fills an important omission in jazz scholarship. In fact, the thin body of literature on a jazz figure as imposing as Herbie Hancock makes this book a matter of some urgency. Filled with meaty stuff, good quotes, and insightful conclusions, Bob Gluck’s book is a substantial and needed look at an important era of American music.

Steven F. Pond

Gluck gives a keen sense of Hancock’s wide-ranging curiosity and eager assimilation of influences, embracing diverse African and Asian musics, the Klangfarbenmelodie of the European avant-garde. . . . and contemporary directions in funk and pop. We get insights into Hancock’s successful attempts to forge a new musical language, as well as his involvement in post-production and his delight in gadgetry. . . . There is a vast amount of information in You'll Know When You Get There, including interviews with and brief biographies of the band members. While they stress the collective dynamic of the group— ‘we were a family’—their individual achievements read like a who’s who of hard- and post-bop jazz. There are also tributes and reminiscences from eminent successors such as Bobby McFerrin and Pat Metheny. We are given clear explanations of the converging styles and forms and the band’s open but disciplined approach to improvisation. . . . The influence of the Mwandishi Band persists to the present day, beyond jazz, and this book does a good job in explaining how and why.”
 

Times Literary Supplement - Lou Glandfeld

Bob Gluck deserves much credit for choosing to write a book on, quite possibly, the most futuristic band of the last half-century. The music of Herbie Hancock’s ‘Mwandishi’ period still stands, over 40 years later, as some of the most advanced and fearless music of all-time.

Christian McBride

In You’ll Know When You Get There, Bob Gluck takes a fascinating look at the development of a musical identity. The book is ostensibly about pianist Herbie Hancock and his sextet’s Mwandishi period—a free-jazz, electronics-heavy evolution of the hard-bop group he formed in 1968—but it really uses Hancock’s story to show how musicians adapt to changing technology, new musical ideas and greater cultural identities. At its core, the book is a study about how an artist accumulates a sound and the experiences that shape his musical views…..Perhaps, with this excellent primer, more listeners will start to unearth the joys found in Mwandishi’s three recordings.

— Jon Ross

DownBeat

"You'll Know When You Get There fills an important omission in jazz scholarship. In fact, the thin body of literature on a jazz figure as imposing as Herbie Hancock makes this book a matter of some urgency. Filled with meaty stuff, good quotes, and insightful conclusions, Bob Gluck's book is a substantial and needed look at an important era of American music."--Steven F. Pond, Cornell University

"As I began reading this book I was immediately and pleasantly transported to an exciting place. Bob Gluck writes of a time and of events that I was a part of and of course remember well, but the writer's uncanny ability to touch on the intricacies of this music and its affect unveils for me a keener insight into the present. As the band evolved the music itself enslaved us. We were not the dictators of the outcome of the performances. The music told us what it needed and we were willing to unselfishly comply, to the point that the end result of the story was as much of a surprise to us as it was to the audience. It was exciting to go to work every night not knowing what to expect. What am I going to be compelled to do tonight? Can I face the challenge? Am I ready and capable? This is not something that can be contrived, not even if it is your prime objective. Our great fortune was the synergy, compatibility, sense of unity, and selflessness that we all shared with each other. Herbie was our leader in every sense of the word. In retrospect, I can see more clearly his great compassion in being a conduit, of sorts, for this magic (if you allow me to be so expressive) to take place. I'm very happy that Bob Gluck took on this great challenge to write this book. I would think it to be a daunting task to say the least."--Buster Williams, Mwandishi band member

"Bob Gluck deserves much credit for choosing to write a book on, quite possibly, the most futuristic band of the last half-century. The music of Herbie Hancock's 'Mwandishi' period still stands, over 40 years later, as some of the most advanced and fearless music of all-time."--Christian McBride

"Bob Gluck has devoted considerable time, effort, and talent to getting it right, the fascinating story of my old band. At 77, I've been around enough music and political activism that has become history to understand that this is not often enough the case. One usually reads about what purports to be one's younger self and finds instead a stranger with the same name engaged in a world of the writer's creation reflecting his/her interests in substitution of what really happened. You'll Know When You Get There is the marvelous exception and it made me cry with joy and longing for this long-lost world brought to life once more. Oh, guys, let's be 30 one more time and do this all over again...."--Patrick Gleeson, Mwandishi band member

"Bob Gluck's book is a major accomplishment and welcomed addition to jazz literature, shedding light on the days when experimental and popular music flourished as one in America, portraying a great musician during one of his most innovative and creative periods, clarifying musical complexities in a way useful to both musicians and non-music-reading listeners, and even contributing to an understanding of that mysterious element--funk. Bob has gained insight from Herbie Hancock's fellow musicians, uses his own personal experience wisely (and modestly), and makes me want to hear the albums he discusses again. You'll Know When You Get There gets me there, not as a look back but with a view to what I'm hearing now."--Howard Mandel, author of Miles Ornette Cecil--Jazz Beyond Jazz

"Even though Herbie was the leader, with the Mwandishi band he let the music lead. Here was this mountain of a musician, one of my heros, with so much experience and knowledge, just letting the music go by itself. He was a servant of the music. That made a huge impression on me and on my life. It's about time somebody wrote a book about this important band."--Bobby McFerrin

"Gluck's You'll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band is a welcome addition to the slowly growing bodies of scholarly literature on both post-1967 electric jazz and on iconic bands and recording projects. In addition, Gluck takes a step towards filling a mighty gap in jazz scholarship--biographical and analytic research on Herbie Hancock. For researchers, Hancock and his several closest collaborators have been difficult interview subjects, so this book, which blends hard-gotten author interviews with previous published material is extremely valuable to anyone interested in Hancock and his music in general, as well as the Mwandishi Band, which was a pioneer in electric/electronic jazz and musically adventurous."
-- "American Studies"

"Mwandishi's combination of richly woven Afrocentric ideas with advancing music technology had a powerful effect on me. The fact that Mwandishi took on the concept of the Double Consciousness discussed by Du Bois and, at least for a time, took on sociopolitical ideas and was progressively pushing at the boundaries of jazz expression has a powerful relationship to the work that I've done with Living Colour, Masque, and the Yohimbe Brothers. They helped to lead the way forward."--Vernon Reid

"Time has revealed Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band to be one of the most exceptional and successful achievements of both a transformative musical era and Hancock's own long and varied career. A triumph of 'fusion' in the most comprehensive sense of the term, Mwandishi merged the acoustic and electric, the exploratory and fundamental, and the musical and social in a manner that has rarely been duplicated. Bob Gluck does an inspired job in helping us to hear, and understand, every step of Mwandishi's process."--Bob Blumenthal, author and music critic

"With You'll Know When You Get There, jazz historian Bob Gluck breaks down Hancock's days with the Mwandishi band as it blurred the lines between jazz, rock, classical and electronic music. It's expertly researched and it features interviews with Hancock, close associates and all of the members of Mwandishi band. It's a perfect primer to what turned out to be the most experimental and innovative phases of Hancock's career."-- "The Interrobang"

"An accomplished keyboardist and electronic synthesist himself, Gluck provides a wealth of insight into Hancock's music." --Tom Greenland "New York City Jazz Record"

"Gluck gives a keen sense of Hancock's wide-ranging curiosity and eager assimilation of influences, embracing diverse African and Asian musics, the Klangfarbenmelodie of the European avant-garde. . . . and contemporary directions in funk and pop. We get insights into Hancock's successful attempts to forge a new musical language, as well as his involvement in post-production and his delight in gadgetry. . . . There is a vast amount of information in You'll Know When You Get There, including interviews with and brief biographies of the band members. While they stress the collective dynamic of the group-- 'we were a family'--their individual achievements read like a who's who of hard- and post-bop jazz. There are also tributes and reminiscences from eminent successors such as Bobby McFerrin and Pat Metheny. We are given clear explanations of the converging styles and forms and the band's open but disciplined approach to improvisation. . . . The influence of the Mwandishi Band persists to the present day, beyond jazz, and this book does a good job in explaining how and why." --Lou Glandfeld "Times Literary Supplement"

"Gluck has just enough actual experience and theoretical smarts to travel down the multidirectional vectors of the sonic experiments conducted by Herbie and his group and report back the totality of his findings. . . . Some of the most compelling sections of You'll Know When You Get There are those which reveal how the group's kinetic trajectory as an Afrodelic electroacoustic improvising unit was fully technologised and turbo-boosted in the crucible of the mix. . . . Gluck's interviewees attest to how advanced all this was for the time. In terms of process, groups such as Can or those led by Miles Davis were monolithic jam bands whose records had to be assembled into alien artefacts in the editing suite. On stage, The [Herbie Hancock] Sextet was already a shapeshifting time machine, moving from zero gravity tonal abstraction to quantum funk via dynamic thematic material and on-the-fly programming and processing, and the records documented electric real-time performances being expanded via the alchemical science of the console room. It was, as trombonist Pepo Mtoto Julian Priester states, 'a whole that was unified.'"--Tony Herrington "The Wire"

"Gluck's rich tapestry of musicians' voices and concise, descriptive analyses allows for a reassessment of a period often over-looked in jazz scholarship."
--Kevin Fellezs "Jazz Studies"

"In You'll Know When You Get There, Bob Gluck takes a fascinating look at the development of a musical identity. The book is ostensibly about pianist Herbie Hancock and his sextet's Mwandishi period--a free-jazz, electronics-heavy evolution of the hard-bop group he formed in 1968--but it really uses Hancock's story to show how musicians adapt to changing technology, new musical ideas and greater cultural identities. At its core, the book is a study about how an artist accumulates a sound and the experiences that shape his musical views.....Perhaps, with this excellent primer, more listeners will start to unearth the joys found in Mwandishi's three recordings."--Jon Ross "DownBeat"

"Perhaps the most enigmatic ensemble to emerge from the Davis school was Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi Band, which today has acquired an almost legendary status. If pressed, most fans of music from this era would cite this ensemble as their favourite of the period--indeed for some it is their favourite jazz ensemble of all time. So how did this band acquire its almost mythical status? It's a question that no-one has quite been able to put their finger on until Bob Gluck's exhaustive study, which offers valuable insight into the life and times of this band, with a wide range of interviews from the musicians themselves and those in the business--record company producers, execs, promoters and the like. . . . In detail and breadth this is an impressive volume and is valuable for the insight it offers into the music making process, the artistic milieu of the period, and aesthetic aspirations behind the project."--Stuart Nicholson "Jazzwise"

"The music, rather than the personalities or life stories of the musicians, is this book's raison d'etre. Musicians will find transcriptions of value, while non-musicians will not be overwhelmed by the notations and technical descriptions. Gluck goes to great length to describe the music meaningfully to the broader audience, always striving to encapsulate the special qualities of this body of work. . . . As well-known as Hancock is, this book serves as a valuable resource to understanding his progress, and leaves one hoping for official releases of many of the unissued concert recordings discussed here."--Martin Z. Kasdan Jr. "Louisville Courier-Journal"

"In the forty years that have passed since I saw the Mwandishi band in Kansas City as a teenager, I have heard and even been able to participate in a lot of great music. But nothing I have experienced since has had more of an effect on my life than what those guys brought to the bandstand on those KC nights. To me, that band was the epitome of everything that jazz has ever promised to be. Collectively and individually, they brought together a sound that was so deeply in and of that moment in time that it became thus transcendent and timeless. They inspired me and a generation to aspire to their level of creativity and commitment. Herbie has always been one of my major heroes and still is. He has been great every step of the way from the beginning, but there was something really special with this band and the way it intersected with the culture that was unique and important. This book takes an in depth look at every detail of what made that amazing collection of musicians what it was. With his exhaustive research and detailed interviews, Bob Gluck brings the nature and workings of this amazing and influential ensemble to life."--Pat Metheny

From the Publisher