Home » Jazz Articles » Jazz in the Aquarian Age » Herbie Mann: An Amalgamation of Everything
Herbie Mann: An Amalgamation of Everything
As far as where it’s all going right at this point, there’s going to be an amalgamation of everything.
By the end of the 1950s, Mann had established himself as one of the top jazz flute players around—recording with
Clifford Brown
trumpetb.1930
Sarah Vaughan
vocals1924 - 1990
Kenny Burrell
guitar, electricb.1931
Phil Woods
saxophone, alto1931 - 2015
Stan Getz
saxophone, tenor1927 - 1991
Charlie Byrd
guitar1925 - 1999
Antonio Carlos Jobim
piano1927 - 1994
Sergio Mendes
piano1941 - 2024
Later in the '60s, Mann recorded two albums of Middle-Eastern-inspired music, and on a visit to Berlin, he teamed up with an 80-piece orchestra for Concerto Grosso in D-flat Blues (Atlantic, 1968 ). He followed that with a hugely popular album, Memphis Underground (Atlantic, 1969), recorded with a top Memphis R&B rhythm section. He collaborated with
Duane Allman
guitar1946 - 1971
Jay McShann
piano1909 - 2006
Jazz in the Aquarian Age: You played a bigger role than most people realize in bringing the bossa nova to popularity in United States in the early '60s. What brings you back to Brazilian music now?
Herbie Mann: Well, the first time I got involved with Brazilian music, I had a basic Afro-Cuban band, with 
Carlos "Patato" Valdes
congas1926 - 2007
Jose Mangual Sr.
bongosb.1924
Everybody started playing bossa nova, and all those people that put it down started playing it. When I got to Brazil,
Dizzy Gillespie
trumpet1917 - 1993
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
Stan Getz
saxophone, tenor1927 - 1991
Then Brazilian music became very fashionable, and it became another opportunity for an improvising musician to find a vehicle to help broaden his appeal. A lot of jazz musicians started playing the bossa nova because all the tunes Jobim originally wrote were influenced by 
Gerry Mulligan
saxophone, baritone1927 - 1996
Chet Baker
trumpet and vocals1929 - 1988
It was time to move on to other things. I changed my bands a lot and traveled quite a bit, and I found other musicians to experiment with. Then I got very involved with seeing if I could take the disco concept and combine it with improvising. I was probably the first improviser to do this. Now, it takes just as much balls to say, "Well screw the Village Voice and screw Downbeat; I have enough balls to try something that if it works is going to be very successful and is gonna be really put down by the critics."
Well, "Hijack" was a very big record. It came out at about the same time as "The Hustle." That was the very beginning of disco music. And it was the biggest single I ever had; it sold 750,000 copies. It was like number ten on the charts. Every ten minutes, I heard it on WABC [the New York City top-forty AM radio station]. Then the mistake was that I tried to follow that success by repeating it, and I did four other albums that were basically disco. Of course, again, what had happened was that everybody else, all the record companies and artists had seen that this was another opportunity to get to the masses. So here was the same thing again; it was all over the place. And now what do I do to save my head from going insane?
So, last year, I met some people from Brazil at the Montreux festival and started listening to some new music from Brazil, and I met a couple of musicians here, like Amaury Tristao, who played on the Brazil: Once Again album. I started getting some new records, and I started hearing that there's a whole new generation of people. It's been since '62—15 years. There were people that were eight and nine years old at the time who are now writing music. So, there was an opportunity, because I'm always interested in rhythmic music. I find it much more interesting than four beats to the measure. Not that we don't do that now. As a change of pace, we're playing standards, and we're playing bebop tunes, and people have never heard them. It's a whole new revelation to all these people.
JAA: Are you doing those kinds of things on your next album?
HM: Well, we just finished an album, [Sunbelt (Atlantic, 1979)]. On it there's a
Richard Tee
keyboards1943 - 1993
Chick Corea
piano1941 - 2021
Herbie Hancock
pianob.1940
JAA: You also played with
Bill Evans
piano1929 - 1980
HM: Right. Also, Pat Rebillot, and I recorded with Richard Tee. If I could have Richard Tee in my band, then there would be no problems. But you can't have Richard Tee in your band, 'cause he's too busy. I decided I would do without keyboards. So what we have is an airy kind of band. And I've just added a second bass player. We have Frank Gravis playing and
Jeff Berlin
bass, electricb.1953
JAA: This is something you've done before.
HM: But I've never done it with two basses.
JAA: Didn't you record "Comin' Home Baby" that way?
HM: Right. 
Ben Tucker
bass, acousticb.1930
Ahmed Abdul-Malik
bass1927 - 1993
Miroslav Vitous
bassb.1947
Ron Carter
bassb.1937
Jaco Pastorius
bass, electric1951 - 1987
We formed the basic band in January, and we worked very hard for six months. Now we've reached a plateau where we have to move on. We've gotten into a very ethnic, primitive thing that's very similar to what I did in the '60s with my wooden flutes. We've gotten into that because Rafael Cruz has been playing berimbau, which is a Brazilian stringed percussion instrument. We have acoustic guitar, and I'm playing wooden flutes, and then at the same time,
Claudio Roditi
trumpet1946 - 2020
JAA: I'm told that after 18 years with Atlantic Records, you're looking into completing your contractual obligations. Why is that?
HM: I don't think there's anything that can't be resolved, I hope. I think, basically, it's not so much a problem with Atlantic. The main problem right now is that there's such a potential for success in the record industry. Successful records sell more than ever before. All of a sudden, it's a ho-hum item that a record went gold. It's on page 23 of Billboard.
It takes a company to want to not only have successful groups, but also to devote some time to what I consider fringe groups selling below 100,000. Now, most major companies can't even afford to keep them on the roster, because of the amount of effort and time it takes to sell a group. Instrumental music, with very few exceptions, may sell. If it's successful, [it] may sell 200,000 or 250,000.
George Benson
guitarb.1943
JAA: He's also a vocalist.
HM: OK,
Chuck Mangione
flugelhorn1940 - 2025
Herb Alpert
trumpetb.1935
Bruce Lundvall at CBS has decided, or so it seems, that jazz and improvised music is very important to CBS. But not only are they interested in Herbie Hancock and in
Weather Report
band / ensemble / orchestra
Dexter Gordon
saxophone, tenor1923 - 1990
Now, this is not to say that all pop music is bad, because some pop music is extraordinary. I just went down to Florida and played on the new Bee Gees album. And they are very talented writers. They have been for years. I spent one day on 16 bars of one song. Of course, they probably have the greatest budget in history for their next album. But Barry Gibb is a very creative improviser. They improvise everything that they do on their records. They don't ever give anything to an arranger and say, "Make and arrangement." They do it all. They improvise the background, and when they get the backgrounds they like, then they give it to somebody.
When a record like Saturday Night Fever (Polydor, 1977) sells that much, and they're that successful, there's got to be a very good reason for it. They happen to write good music. So does
Paul Simon
composer / conductorb.1941
James Taylor
guitar and vocalsb.1948
Fleetwood Mac
band / ensemble / orchestra
Steely Dan
band / ensemble / orchestrab.1972
Richard Tee told me that they used almost three complete rhythm sections. The only constant thing was 
Chuck Rainey
bass, electricb.1940
Bernard Purdie
drumsb.1939
Steve Gadd
drumsb.1945
JAA: Let's get back to you. I hear that you're playing tenor sax again.
HM: And clarinet.
JAA: The last time you played tenor on an LP was, I think, your very first album for Atlantic, The Common Ground (1961). Very early in your career you were quoted in Downbeat as saying, "Eventually I have to play jazz tenor. I have to get it out of my system." That was 1956. What took you so long?
HM: Well, I wanted to have backgrounds on the album we did, and rather than try to teach somebody else how I wanted it phrased, I did it myself. Claudio played valve trombone, and I played tenor. And it's taken a long time to get my chops back together again. Actually, we recorded two albums together. The first album coming out I just played backgrounds, but on the second album I play tenor on a Carol Bayer Sager/Marvin Hamlisch tune, "Sweet Alibis."I've been getting at it, and I've been working it a little bit together. In fact, yesterday I was in the studio playing on the next Jay McShann album [The Big Apple Bash (Atlantic, 1979)]. Now this is really a fusion record—coming from a different direction—Jay McShann,
Milt Hinton
bass, acoustic1910 - 2000
Connie Kay
drums1927 - 1994
Doc Cheatham
trumpet1905 - 1997
Dicky Wells
trombone1907 - 1985
Earle Warren
b.1914
John Scofield
guitarb.1951
Gerry Mulligan
saxophone, baritone1927 - 1996
One time I stopped playing because I thought I sounded too much like
Zoot Sims
saxophone, tenor1925 - 1985
Al Cohn
saxophone, tenor1925 - 1988
Lester Young
saxophone1909 - 1959
Coleman Hawkins
saxophone, tenor1904 - 1969
Combine that with 20 years of not playing the instrument, and playing very contemporary jazz/fusion, whatever you want to call it. My tenor playing is a very different kind of tenor playing. It has no name to the style that it is.
Now we play standards and there's a whole audience—imagine—from the Beatles or "Comin' Home Baby" that never heard "Embraceable You." We're playing "Walkin.'" We're playing "Scrapple from the Apple." And people are saying, "Wow! What's that song? Who's
Charlie Parker
saxophone, alto1920 - 1955
I'm at the point now where Robert Mitchum was a couple years ago, when he won an Academy Award or something like that, and took a year off and worked in a repertory company in Ireland just to do some classical things. I'm at the point where I now can have some fun. I don't have to go and play in any lofts. I don't have to play in any clubs. I have a built-in audience, and I can now start playing "Lester Leaps In" and things like that—playing on a Jay McShann record. I've only done two sideman dates in the past ten years: the Bee Gees and Jay McShann. You can't go any further apart than that.
JAA: But about five years ago, you said you didn't want to be considered a jazz musician anymore. You said jazz meant to the general public a music that was either outdated or hard to understand.
HM: At the time, I was a little adamant, mainly because critics were saying that I wasn't a jazz musician. So, I said, "You're right, I'm not a jazz musician." To the critics, jazz meant
Count Basie
piano1904 - 1984
Benny Goodman
clarinet1909 - 1986
But probably if I have to categorize myself, I probably have been a jazz musician all along, but improvising on a wider range of music forms than most jazz musicians. I wouldn't consider myself a rock musician. I wouldn't consider myself a symphony musician. If you have to oversimplify, I'll say I'm a jazz musician. I'd rather say I'm a musician, but if you need a category, that's it.JAA: Very early in your career you said one of your ambitions, or maybe your biggest ambition, was to "be as synonymous with the flute as
Benny Goodman
clarinet1909 - 1986
HM: Oh, definitely. I think I have. To the lay public, that mass out there who don't read Downbeat—who read Playboy and other things—there was a time where every flute record they thought was me. Remember when I started, there was nobody else playing it. Now
Hubert Laws
woodwindsb.1939
JAA: Of the many different bags you've been into, I discovered there were a couple you said you would have liked to have gotten into, but never did. An example is American Indian music. Another example is East Indian music. And you once considered contacting George Harrison to do something together.HM: Well, first of all, I found that American Indian music was both rhythmically and harmonically very simple, and there wasn't' much to do with it. I listened to a couple of things. Of course, somebody's going to say, "Well, you haven't heard the northern tribes of northern Michigan—we played bebop long before Charlie Parker." But I found that it wasn't very interesting for me.
As far as East Indian music—it was just one of the many spices that I thought I would like to get into. I would have loved to have played with somebody like
Ravi Shankar
sitar1920 - 2012
Lakshminarayana Shankar
violinb.1950
John McLaughlin
guitarb.1942
Shakti
band / ensemble / orchestrab.1974
JAA: From what I've read, it seems that you came into playing flute—as your main instrument—by accident. After you got out of the Army, you were in a big band in Brooklyn, and the drummer in the group recommended you to Matt Matthews, the Dutch jazz accordionist, as a flautist. You said you had never played jazz flute in your life. Do I have this story straight?
HM: Well, first of all, it was a small group in probably a little club on Flatbush Avenue—Flatbush Avenue and Avenue U. I think it was called the Airport Inn, or something like that. Floyd Bennett Field was right down the road. Matt Matthews was working in the next club, and
Carmen McRae
vocals1920 - 1994
Sam Most
flute1930 - 2013
While I was in the Army, I knew I had to do something else. My feeling was, OK, if I was to the point where I was almost as good as Stan Getz or
Al Cohn
saxophone, tenor1925 - 1988
Zoot Sims
saxophone, tenor1925 - 1985
Pete Rugolo
composer / conductor1915 - 2011
JAA: On your very first album for Bethlehem Records, Herbie Mann Plays (1954) you said in the liner notes, "A group that has a flute in it should be a light, swinging, happy- sounding one; these are the qualities of the instrument."
HM: That was at the time. . . The reason I said it should be light and swinging was because that was all I could play— light and swinging. I had no chops. I had no sound. I had to have guitar and brushes and play that way. I say that a flute is equal to any other instrument, and depending on your moods, once you have full control of the instrument, you can play anything. And I have since then. At the time, that was merely a plea for everybody to play that quietly, because I couldn't play any stronger.JAA: In a 1968 Downbeat interview, you quite accurately predicted the impact of the jazz/rock movement. You always seem to be on top of new trends. By coming back to a little straight- ahead jazz, do you see that as a marked trend?
HM: No, no.
JAA: The Brazilian thing maybe?
HM: It's not clear cut to me. Remember that none of those guesses of mine were ever really guesses. They were always calculated based on what I thought was just very logical. I said the same thing with the bossa nova. I said it was going to be the next big thing, and it was.
It also was logical to me when I was the first to record Chick Corea and
Roy Ayers
vibraphone1940 - 2025
Ricardo Silveira
guitarAs far as where it's all going right at this point, there's going to be an amalgamation of everything. But I'll tell you right now—if Barry Gibb called me up tomorrow and said he wanted to produce me, I would be there. Because that's how talented a jazz musician he is. Just as
Stevie Wonder
vocalsb.1950
Stevie Wonder
vocalsb.1950
Who knows, I may end up going to Brazil. I really don't know. There are a lot of things I want to do. This is the best band I've ever had. The idea of having two bass players is very interesting to me. I'm the perennial optimist. I always feel that the current band is the best, and I've always felt that I have all the tools to be the biggest improviser and jazz musician in history. If it'll ever happen, I don't know, but that's how optimistic I am. [Adapted from an article originally published in the Aquarian Weekly, September 20-27, 1978.]
[Herbie Mann continued working in a contemporary Brazilian vein through the '80s with his band, Jasil Brazz and America/Brazil from the '90s is an especially notable later recording. Beyond Brooklyn, Mann's last recording, was released in 2004, a year after he died, and brought him back to a solid jazz setting, teaming him up with bebop master
Phil Woods
saxophone, alto1931 - 2015
Selected Discography
Herbie Mann / Phil Woods, Beyond Brooklyn (MCG Jazz, 2004) Herbie Mann, 65th Birthday Celebration (Lightyear, 1997) Herbie Mann, America/Brasil (Lightyear, 1997) Herbie Mann, Peace Pieces (Lightyear, 1995) Jay McShann, Big Apple Bash (Atlantic, 1979) Herbie Mann, Hold On, I'm Coming (Atlantic, 1972) Herbie Mann, Push Push (Atlantic, 1971) Herbie Mann, Stone Flute (Atlantic, 1970) Herbie Mann, Memphis Underground (Atlantic, 1969) Herbie Mann, Live at the Whiskey A Go Go (Atlantic, 1968) Herbie Mann, Mann: Concerto Grosso in D Blues (Atlantic, 1968) Herbie Mann, Muscle Shoals Nitty Gritty (Atlantic, 1967) Herbie Mann, The Wailing Dervishes (Atlantic, 1967) Herbie Mann, Do the Bossa Nova with Herbie Mann (Atlantic, 1963) Herbie Mann, Live at Newport (Atlantic, 1963) Herbie Mann and the Bill Evans Trio, Nirvana (Atlantic, 1962) Herbie Mann, At the Village Gate (Atlantic, 1961) Herbie Mann, The Common Ground (Atlantic, 1961) Herbie Mann, Flute, Brass, Vibes and Percussion (Verve, 1960) Herbie Mann, Great Ideas of Western Mann (Riverside, 1957) Herbie Mann, Yardbird Suite (Savoy, 1957) Herbie Man / Bobby Jaspar, Flute Flight (Prestige, 1957) Herbie Mann / Sam Most, Herbie Mann-Sam Most Quintet (Bethlehem, 1955) Sarah Vaughan, Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown (Emarcy, 1954) Herbie Mann, Herbie Mann Plays (Bethlehem, 1954)
Photo Credits
Page 1: Courtesy of Atlantic Records Pages 2, 6: Tom Marcello Page 3-4: Courtesy of Sutton Artists Corporation Page 5: Courtesy of A&M Records
Tags
Herbie Mann
Jazz in the Aquarian Age
Bob Kenselaar
United States
New York
New York City
Clifford Brown
Sarah Vaughan
Kenny Burrell
Phil Woods
Stan Getz
Charlie Byrd
Antonio Carlos Jobim
Sergio Mendez
Duane Allman
Jay McShann
Patato Valdes
Jose Mangual
Dizzy Gillespie
Miles Davis
Gerry Mulligan
Chet Baker
Richard Tee
Chick Corea
Herbie Hancock
Bill Evans
Jeff Berlin
Ben Tucker
Ahmed Abdul Malik
Miroslav Vitous
Ron Carter
Jaco Pastorius
Claudio Roditi
george benson
Chuck Mangione
Herb Alpert
Weather Report
Dexter Gordon
Paul Simon
James Taylor
Fleetwood mac
steely dan
Chuck Rainey
Bernard Purdie
Steve Gadd
Milt Hinton
Connie Kay
Doc Cheatham
Dicky Wells
Earl Warren
John Scofield
Zoot Sims
Al Cohn
Lester Young
Coleman Hawkins
Charlie Parker
Count Basie
Benny Goodman
Hubert Laws
Ravi Shankar
L. Shankar
john mclaughlin
Shakti
Carmen McRae
Sam Most
Pete Rugolo
Roy Ayers
Ricardo Silveira
Stevie Wonder
Comments
PREVIOUS / NEXT
Support All About Jazz
All About Jazz has been a pillar of jazz since 1995, championing it as an art form and, more importantly, supporting the musicians who make it. Our enduring commitment has made "AAJ" one of the most culturally important websites of its kind, read by hundreds of thousands of fans, musicians and industry figures every month.
Go Ad Free!
To maintain our platform while developing new means to foster jazz discovery and connectivity, we need your help. You can become a sustaining member for as little as $20 and in return, we'll immediately hide those pesky ads plus provide access to future articles for a full year. This winning combination vastly improves your AAJ experience and allow us to vigorously build on the pioneering work we first started in 1995. So enjoy an ad-free AAJ experience and help us remain a positive beacon for jazz by making a donation today.
New York City
Concert Guide | Venue Guide | Local Businesses
| More...
Showcase
Featured
Darwin AI: Surivior Choice
By Alex Otey buy
Giveaway
Featured Playlist
Premium
Weekly newsletter
Get more of a good thing
Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories and includes your local jazz events calendar.
New York City
Concert Guide | Venue Guide | Local Businesses | More...Showcase
Buy Now
Featured
Darwin AI: Surivior Choice
By Alex Otey buyGiveaway
