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Contemporary Musicians May 1996 , Volume: 16 by Daniel Hodges
Occupation: Flutist
Personal Information
Born: Herbert Solomon, April 16, 1930, in Brooklyn, NY; son of Harry C.and Ruth (Brecher) Solomon; married Ruth Shore, September 8, 1956 (divorced, 1971); children: Paul, Claudia; married Jan Cloonts, July 11, 1971 (divorced, 1990); children: Laura, Geoffrey; married Susan Jameal Arison, 1991.
Education Attended Manhattan School of Music, 1952-1954.
Career
Began professional career with Mat Matthews Quintet, c. 1953-4; made first recording with Bethelehem Records, 1955; first album to reach pop chart, Live At the Village Gate, 1962; first song to reach Top 30 on pop charts, "Comin' Home Baby"; 25 of Mann's recordings reached Top 200 pop-album charts; has recorded or toured with Michael Olatunji, Chief Bey, Carlos "Patato" Valdes, Willie Bobo, Jose Mangal, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Sergio Mendes, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Baden Powell, Miroslav Vitous, Ron Carter, Larry Coryell, Sonny Sharrock, Duane Allman, Mick Taylor, Albert Lee, Bruno Carr, Billy Cobham, Jimmy Owens, Roy Ayers, Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shamwell, Eunice Peterson, Ranelle Braxton, Pat Rebillot, Cornell Dupree, Doc Cheatham, Stephane Grappelli, and Ben Tucker.
Not many musicians can claim to have single-handedly created the style of music for which they are famous. Among the select group who legitimately can is Herbie Mann, a seminal figure in the American jazz scene of the 1960s and '70s. Largely on the strength of his talent for improvisation and willingness to experiment, Mann formulated a jazz style for the flute, raising to the rank of lead an instrument which prior to his arrival had been limited to a minor role in the jazz pantheon. In the process, he was to garner a reputation as one of the most eclectic figures in the music world, readily mixing a wide range of styles from African to Brazilian, from Charlie Parker to disco, to create music that crossed boundaries in every sense of the word. Although his experiments did not always endear him to jazz critics, the result was a musical style that was indisputably his own.
Mann was born Herbert Solomon on April 16, 1930 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Harry and Ruth Solomon. Musically inclined from an early age, his first concerts took the form of raucous banging on the kitchen pots and pans. His parents, driven to distraction, decided that young Herbert's energies would be channeled in a more fruitful direction by exposure to popular music; in 1939, his mother took him to see the then-reigning master of swing jazz, clarinetist Benny Goodman. The concert had the desired effect, as Mann, fascinated by the atmosphere and excitement of live performing, left off his drumming and took up the clarinet with enthusiasm.
Be-Bop Synthesis Mann's talent for performing was immediately evident to his teachers and he progressed rapidly. As a teenager, he branched out into playing the tenor saxophone, an instrument that would come to dominate the post-World War II American music scene. For good professional measure, he also learned how to play the flute, a instrument used largely in studios as a backing double. Since flute playing was found almost solely on Latin jazz records, Mann gravitated toward listening to the luminaries of the Latin music scene like Tito Puente, Machito, Charlie Palmieri, or American stars who recorded with Latin musicians such as Charlie Parker.
But the tenor saxophone was Mann's first love, and his guide and inspiration was the dominant figure in the New York jazz scene of the late Forties, Lester Young. As was the case for many other young musicians of his generation, Mann was enthralled by Young's cool, almost low-key, highly melodic approach to rhythm and harmony. Mann carried his passion with him into the U.S. Army, serving overseas from 1948 to 1952, certain that upon returning to civilian life he would make an immediate name for himself as a tenor sax player. But when Mann arrived back in New York, he found that many others had had the same idea and the field was overcrowded with hungry young saxophonists roaming from gig to gig.
It was at this point that Mann's career took the left turn that would change his and many others' ideas about jazz permanently. In early 1953, a friend of his approached him with the news that a Dutch accordionist, Mat Matthews, was forming a group to record with a then-unknown singer named Carmen McRae, and needed a jazz flute player. Mann convinced the friend to put his name forward, even though Mann knew next to nothing about jazz flute playing--a style which had virtually no precedents in the American music scene up until then. In a neat bit of chicanery, in person Mann convinced Matthews to take him on, explaining that his flute was being repaired and he would learn the arrangements on the saxophone. By drawing on Latin music he had absorbed earlier, as well as imitating on the flute the mannerisms of such up-and-coming trumpet players such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, Mann quickly improvised a playing style that would give him a distinct stage presence.
When Lights Are Low Following a two-year stint with Matthews, Mann's career slowly took off. Over the course of the 1950s, he passed through a succession of groups, recording extensively as a sideman while enlarging and embellishing his creative mastery of the flute. Just as his style had originally developed out of Latin jazz, he found himself more and more drawn to that idiom's percussive rhythms and raw emotive power, tendencies running counter to the prevailing trend in jazz of the time toward intellectualized, distant compositions. As he explained in a 1973 New York Times interview, "The audience I developed wasn't listening intellectually; they were listening emotionally." Eager to tap into this current, Mann formed an Afro-Cuban sextet in 1958 that featured, among other developments, four drummers backing him. For the next several years, a steady parade of some of the best drummers of the era, such as Candido, Willie Bobo, Carlos "Patato" Valdes, and the Nigerian phenomenon Michael Olatunji, would pass through Mann's group.
With this innovative new sound, Mann began to make a name for himself in the jazz world. His percussion-heavy ensembles, apart from the audience excitement they generated, also proved to be an excellent counterpoint to his flute, the drums creating a wall of background noise against which his solos stood out in sharp relief. It didn't hurt that he was performing in a style that was totally new to most of his listeners; as Mann put it in a Down Beat interview, "... there wasn't really anybody for the people to compare me to... anytime I'd run out of ideas, the drums got it." After recording several albums for Verve Records, Mann signed with a major label, Atlantic, releasing his first album, Common Ground, with them in 1960. In 1962, his live album Herbie Mann at the Village Gate was his first major hit, selling over half a million copies; a song from that release, "Comin' Home Baby," would place in the Top 30 on the pop charts.
In spite of success that most musicians would envy, Mann was still not completely satisfied. Latin music with its dominant two-chord harmonies proved monotonous and ultimately constricting; he wanted a style that would allow him to explore a wider range of melodic possibilities. In 1961, he became interested in bossa nova--a musical phenomenon then little known outside of its native Brazil--after seeing the movie Black Orpheus. His curiosity aroused, Mann persuaded his manager to include him in an all-star tour heading down to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's cultural center, and began jamming with local musicians almost from the moment he stepped off the plane. In this and subsequent tours, he would come in contact with some of the giants of Brazilian music, including Sergio Mendes, Baden Powell, and Antonio Carlos Jobim.
Brazilian music, with its combination of pulsing rhythms and beautiful, varied melodies and harmonies, was a revelation for Mann. Here was the style he was looking for that would allow his solos to soar through elaborate ranges of melody backed by multiple rhythm parts. On his return to the United States, his band became one of the first groups to play bossa nova and went on to record a number of albums with Brazilian musicians. One of these included an English version of the famed hit "One Note Samba," featuring the singing debut of the tune's composer, Jobim. Brazilian music, although not as commercially successful as some of the other musical idioms Mann would work in, remained an undercurrent to which he returned throughout the rest of his career; one of his most recent albums Opalescence, recorded in 1988, is a lyrical and evocative revisiting of contemporary Brazilian music.
Perhaps as important in terms of Mann's artistic horizons, his plunge into bossa nova seemed to have liberated him from the necessity of being associated with one specific "sound." From the early Sixties on, he
would explore a wide variety of musical styles, grafting elements of Middle Eastern, pop, rock, R&B, reggae, soul, and disco music onto jazz to reach a wide audience. Although this approach did not please jazz critics, who often dismissed his work as lacking substance, Mann would string together a spectacular run of commercial successes. In the period 1962-1979, 25 of his recordings placed on the Top 200 pop charts; in 1970 alone, five of the 20 top-selling jazz albums bore the name Herbie Mann on the cover, an unprecedented convergence of hits for a jazz artist.
Muscle Shoals Nitty Gritty After bossa nova, the next style Mann gravitated toward was rhythm and blues. Fascinated by its improvisational possibilities, he went south to record in Memphis, Tennessee and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, exchanging ideas with and drawing inspiration from some of the greatest R&B studio musicians of the time. The result was Memphis Underground, a 1969 album that was to prove his second great hit of the decade. In 1971, Mann recorded another hit, Push Push, with guitarist Duane Allman, who, as was often the case for Mann, he had met during an impromptu jam in New York's Central Park. Mann's approach to recording and performing in this period was highly eclectic; he would throw together as many musicians with different backgrounds as possible in the hope that something interesting would emerge. At times the result, as one critic writing in Down Beat noted, was a jumble of sound that "looked like fun to do, but wasn't very pleasant to listen to."
In 1972, Mann stabilized his musical entourage by forming the group the Family of Mann, based around David Newman on tenor sax and flute, Pat Rebillot on keyboards, and a floating lineup of New York session players. Although in the first half of the decade he continued to explore jazz/rock fusion and dabbled in reggae, the burgeoning dance craze inevitably began to impact Mann's career. In 1974, his disco single "Hi-Jack," recorded with Cissy Houston and released 24 hours later, was a massive hit. Pressured by profit-minded executives at Atlantic to keep up the winning formula, Mann was deprived of his cherished freedom to experiment and found himself compelled to release records in a style he found more and more distasteful. As the decade progressed, he grew so disenchanted with the direction his career was taking that he began to preface concert appearances with the announcement that he would not be playing any of his disco hits. Finally in 1980, Atlantic and Mann went their separate ways, ending an almost twenty-year association.
Jasil Brazz In the 1980s, Mann entered something of a lean period. While he still toured and played clubs such as the Blue Note in New York City, his recording output, enormous in the prior two decades, withered away to virtually nothing and he disappeared from the position of public prominence he had enjoyed since the late Fifties. His fortunes rebounded in 1991, however, when he founded Kokopelli Records, a small independent jazz label of the sort with which he had always wanted to record. The company is based in Mann's hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico. As of the mid-1990s, he was continuing to perform and record, while working full-time overseeing the production of jazz albums by such artists as David "Fathead" Newman and Jimmy Rowles. The release by Rhino Records in 1994 of an anthology of his recorded work, The Evolution of Mann, has brought the flutist some measure of the attention his work merits.
Herbie Mann's career does not lend itself to easy characterization. His most popular recordings, as critics were quick to point out, were often imbued with a heavy commercial sound bordering on the formulaic. At the same time, though, his recorded work speaks volumes about his ability to merge widely-varying forms into a coherent and appealing style that was accessible to the average listener. Mann could also be described as one of the first "world" musicians; his sensitivity for non-Western musical forms, evidenced by his ability to integrate them into work that could be easily appreciated by a largely Western audience while still retaining the essential characteristics of its origin, has few parallels among the other musicians of his generation. In the final assessment, however, Mann's impact on jazz music does not need to be evoked in words; it can be heard issuing from clubs across North America and the world in musical form, the form that Herbie Mann created, a soaring flute solo floating above the low grind of the drums and the hum of the bass.
Sources
Down Beat, November 28, 1969; April 30, 1970; December 10, 1970;
December 1980; January 1995. High Fidelity, April 1989. Houston Chronicle, April 23, 1995. Jazz Times, January/February 1995. New York Times, November 11, 1973. Stereo Review, April 1988. Additional source material was obtained from Kokopelli Records press release, 1995, Atlantic Records press release, 1975, and from Rhino Records liner notes for The Evolution of Mann, 1994. --Daniel Hodge
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and PortFolio Weekly <http://www.portfolioweekly.com>
July 9, 2002
Herbie Mann's New Groove
*by Jim Newsom*
Herbie Mann talks a lot about "the groove." One of the most commercially successful jazzmen of the last half-century, the 72-year old flutist has spent his lengthy career searching for, and usually finding, "the groove."
In the 1950s, he found it, along with initial success, in Afro-Cuban and Latin music. He subsequently locked into a Brazilian groove in the early '60s, then moved into a funky, soulful groove in the late '60s and early '70s. By the mid-'70s he was making hit disco records, still cooking in a rhythmic groove.
Nowadays, however, Herbie Mann is working in a new and different kind of groove. Diagnosed in November of 1997 with inoperable prostate cancer, he has become a crusader for prostate cancer awareness. Fighting his own battle against the disease, he has formed the Herbie Mann Prostate Cancer Awareness Music Foundation in the hope of saving others from the pain and radical treatments he himself has undergone.
I spoke with Herbie Mann recently at his home in New Mexico for Port Folio Weekly about his musical journey, his cancer, and his crusade. We had a wide ranging discussion, appropriate for a performer with such an eclectic catalog of recordings.
"When Mat Matthews gave me the opportunity to record jazz on flute in 1952," he said, "there was no tradition of straightahead jazz on the flute. There was Wayman Carver with the Chick Webb band, Harry Klee in Hollywood, and Sam Most. That was it. To many listeners and to most musicians, the flute wasn't a jazz instrument.
"So, when Symphony Sid, the DJ in New York, suggested I add conga drums because he was a mambo-nick, all of a sudden the audience understood where the flute was. It was jazz, but it was Latin jazz. In Latin bands, the flute was one of the solo instruments. It had always been the case."
Herbie Mann The addition of conga players brought him his first taste of popularity in 1958. "I had a band with four drummers," he noted. "I thought four drummers would kill the audience, which it did. But then I became a sideman in my own band. Musically, it started getting very generic. The Latin music was basically a two-chord tune. After a while, it started driving me crazy."
A 1961 tour of Brazil changed his life. "I figured that it all came from different parts of Africa," Mann says, "so maybe Brazilian music would be my salvation. And it was. It not only had the rhythmic excitement, for the first time I heard beautiful melodies that were great to improvise against."
He became the first American musician to record Brazilian music in Brazil with Brazilian musicians. In the bossa nova-crazed days of the pre-Beatles early '60s, Herbie Mann emerged as one of the most popular performers in jazz. He was making world music long before that was a recognized musical genre. He took the diverse rhythmic influences of his multinational band lineup and mixed them with the blues to produce his first big hit, "Comin' Home Baby," on the /Herbie Mann at the Village Gate/ LP in 1962.
But Mann has never been content to stand still, and the fertile musical environment of the 1960s offered a great deal of inspiration to a musician with open ears and an open mind.
"It became quite simple for me to go and look at different parts of the world. Every civilization had flute in their music, except American."
But it dawned on him that there was a rich, ethnic music right here at home---soul music, rhythm and blues. And he decided to place his flute in the midst of it.
"I realized that in order to play a specific music, you had to go where the sauce was. I'm not going to do an album where I want real authentic Brazilian rhythms and record it in Jamaica. If I go to Brazil to make a Brazilian record, if I use Latin players to make a Latin record, why don't I go to the place where it's natural for those players to play that groove? So I went to Memphis. I went to Muscle Shoals."
And the results were hugely successful, especially the 1969 album /Memphis Underground/. Subsequent recordings such as /Muscle Shoals Nitty Gritty/, /Mississippi Gambler/ and /Push Push/ continued the string of funky groove-oriented albums.
He formulates his approach succinctly: "All you have to do is find the waves that are comfortable to float on top of."
However, commercial success comes with a price in the jazz world. When Herbie went disco in the mid-'70s, the critics were not kind. His audience shifted as well.
"It's a double-edged sword having some pop records like 'Hi-Jack' and 'Superman' out there," he said. "Pop is a very temporary pinnacle. You can go from having a Top Ten seller to not having anything. In the jazz market, even in the broadest sense, you normally carry your fans along your whole career until they start dying out."
Commercial success gave him the opportunity to work with, and produce records for, other artists he admired. Pulling from his own working band, he was the first to produce Chick Corea, Roy Ayers, Sonny Sharrock and Miroslav Vitous.
It also gave him the freedom to say "no."
"One of the things I did not do, because I really do not feel rhythmically excited about it, is smooth jazz or fusion. I had that choice. The head of Atlantic Records asked me if I'd like to do a record produced by the Crusaders. I said 'no.'
"Growing up where rhythm is the heartbeat of the music, to me the bass player is the heart of the rhythm. With fusion, the bass player's role changed, it stopped being rhythmic and started being melodic. For me, the music stopped grooving.
"Listen to /Memphis Underground/ or /Push Push/. That's the epitome of a groove record. The rhythm section locked all in one perception. Fusion music didn't have that unconscious groove. For lack of a better definition, the groove stopped being reefer and started being cocaine."
Since leaving Atlantic Records at the end of his commercial heyday in 1979, Herbie Mann has continued to tour and record. (He headlined Norfolk's Town Point Jazz Festival in 1984 and 1988.) But the pace is different. After averaging two or more albums a year in the '60s and '70s, he's released eight recordings in the last twenty-one years. He moved to New Mexico from New York with his wife Janeal in 1989. But he's continued his musical search for the groove. 1995 was an especially productive year for the flute man. That spring he recorded what is perhaps his finest album, /Peace Pieces/, a tribute to pianist Bill Evans, with whom he'd recorded thirty years earlier. He also produced a weeklong series of concerts at the Blue Note in New York City to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday, out of which he culled two excellent discs, /Celebration/ and /America/Brasil/.
After being diagnosed with inoperable cancer, he began looking in a different direction for inspiration.
Herbie Mann '88 "When that happens, you immediately start thinking that it's the end of your life," he explained. "What do you want to be remembered for. And it dawned on me that I've played music I loved all my life, but they've all been assimilations. I'm not Brazilian, I'm not black, I'm not Jamaican---I'm a second generation Eastern European Jew. So why don't I look at that music and see if there's anything in there I can use."
So he started listening to the music of his own ethnic heritage. He met some of the musicians, formed a new group called Sona Terra that includes his son Geoff on drums, and began exploring another musical groove. The initial results can be found in his most recent CD release, /Eastern European Roots/, which he originally put out on his own label and sold over the internet and at concerts. It has just been issued by the nationally distributed Lightyear Entertainment label.
His plans include a trip to Hungary to record with Hungarian musicians. "All of these guys grew up under Communism," he remarked. "They had to secretly listen to the Voice of America. Now they are using this knowledge to play their own harmonies and rhythms based on their folk music. It's a totally different genre. This music gives me the same kind of goosebumps like the first time I heard Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Charlie Parker?and Brazil."
When I spoke with Mann in May, his plans were to make that trip in June. However, the prostate cancer got in the way. He developed blood clots in his lungs, and had to postpone the European trip until the fall. His cancer had been in remission for two years, but his PSA level went up to 70 a few months ago. (See accompanying interview with Paul Schellhammer, MD, for more on PSA levels.)
"I'm going to start some new treatments," he said. "I've done radiation, chemotherapy, hormonal therapy. We're talking about a median prognosis of two to five years, but I don't accept that. I'm starting a regimen that will include bone defense chemo and then some radiation and pills." The Mann family is personally fighting the cancer battle on two fronts: "My wife Janeal had a lumpectomy. They had to remove twenty-one lymph nodes and one had a tumor. So, she's starting a four-month regimen of chemotherapy. She's stage two, so her prognosis is not the best but it's not the worst."
And through education and information, the couple are trying to save others from the kind of ordeal Herbie has endured. "My foundation raises money to do concerts. We have onsite PSA blood tests for free. Everybody that gets a blood test gets a free CD." He encourages men to get their PSA level checked. "If you are connected to any other human being," he says, "it's your responsibility to take care of yourself for them."
Herbie Mann's music continues to inspire and entertain. There are currently more than fifty of his albums in print, from all the different stages of his career. And now, he hopes to use his celebrity and his music to inspire and inform others about the importance of early cancer detection. In his case, by the time his cancer was discovered, it had spread beyond the prostate gland, and thus was inoperable. He hopes to help keep others out of the same predicament.
He sums it up with this message on the Herbie Mann Prostate Cancer Awareness Music Foundation website: "I would not have had to have endured such radical treatment if I had known about the PSA---if I had been armed with the information that would have detected the disease before it had spread. This knowledge would have dramatically altered the course of my life."
(copyright ) 2002 Port Folio Weekly. Used by Permission.
"The Answers to Your Questions About Prostate Cancer" <prostatecancer.html>
- Dr. Paul Schellhammer discusses prostate cancer -