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

Bob Gluck is professor of music, a jazz historian, and director of the Electronic Music Studio at the State University of New York, Albany. 

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“An accomplished keyboardist and electronic synthesist himself, Gluck provides a wealth of insight into Hancock’s music.”  (Tom Greenland New York City Jazz Record)

“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)

“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)