BURIED TREASURE
Now And Zen
This month’s rediscovered jewel: tantric jazz for the avant-garde.
Lotus position: “seeker” Bennie Maupin in the mid-’70s.
Courtesy of ECM Records
Bennie Maupin
The Jewel In The Lotus
ECM, 1974
IT WAS Buster Williams’s doing. By 1970, the 28-year-old bassist had been with The Herbie Hancock Sextet for nearly two years and, like Hancock, found himself questioning the group’s purpose as they moved from electric Miles funk (1969’s Fat Albert Rotunda) to experimental post-bop (1970’s The Prisoner), and endeavouring to develop a new image that would reflect a new-found interest in African culture; sporting dashikis, African talismans and going by their own Swahili names.
At Williams’s insistence, drummer Billy Hart joined the band on July 31, 1970, to replace Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath. However, following the departure of saxophonist Joe Henderson, Williams and Hart thought the answer to Hancock’s artistic woes might lie in Henderson’s replacement. Both suggested Detroit-born multireedist Bennie Maupin, whom they’d first met in Detroit in 1960.