Ndugu Chancler: Like Royalty

By Frank Alkyer I Feb. 15, 2018

Leon “Ndugu” Chancler at the Jazz Education Network conference in San Diego on Jan. 16, 2015.
(Photo: Suzette Niess)

Miles was probably the greatest bandleader I ever worked with. First thing is, Miles Davis treated his band first class. Now here’s this young kid, grew up in South Central. I flew to New York; I flew to Europe, first class. The whole band flew first class. That was unheard of for a lot of jazz guys. Ray Charles made his band pay their own hotel bills, but Miles had us in five-star hotels with him. He treated the band like royalty from beginning to end. Limousines came and picked us up for the gigs and everything. He treated the band top-notch.

When you get behind closed doors with these people, they’re different than what you see on stage. What you see on stage is what they use to protect themselves from the public and the masses. Inside, Miles was very humane. He had a lot of humility and was very sharing.

Alice Coltrane—that’s a side of my career that a lot of musicians don’t know. I was committed to avant-garde music. I played with Bobby Bradford and John Carter and recorded with them a lot. I played with Alice.

I like to tell younger musicians that if you’re trying to understand fusion, you’ve got to embrace the avant-garde. You’ve got to go to Sun Ra, you’ve got to go to Albert Ayler, you’ve got to go to Archie Shepp, you’ve got to go to Eddie Gale. I can go on and on and on: Andrew Cyrille, Ed Blackwell, that Ornette Coleman group with Ed Blackwell and Charlie Haden. You’ve got to go there to understand fusion because all Miles did by the time he got to Bitches Brew and Miles At The Fillmore was plug it in. It was that same stuff that Joseph Jarman and the AACM and all those guys were doing. You’ve got to embrace avant-garde music and the freedom of that, if you are going to do fusion music, because there was so much of that in fusion music.

So I’m in a trio with Alice Coltrane and Reggie Workman. Alice and Carlos Santana are part of the same religious sect. They make a CD together. They call me for that session. That was my introduction to Carlos Santana—recording with Alice and Carlos. They record together. Later, Carlos asks me to record Borboletta with Santana. Myself, Stanley Clarke, Airto, we make Borboletta.

So, I joined Santana. Santana was based in San Francisco, so I would spend most of my time in San Francisco, but it was an hour flight, and it only cost like 25 dollars to fly back and forth. You didn’t have to go through TSA or none of that. You went to a ticket machine, you bought a ticket and you jumped on a flight. So, I commuted a lot. I would rehearse with Carlos sometimes during the day and go back to L.A. and record at night. Then, I’d go back up the next morning.

We had a two-month off period, and I was in L.A. doing a Jean-Luc Ponty album at Paramount Studios. Weather Report was rehearsing at SIR two doors down.

So, I’m walking out of the studio at Paramount doing Jean-Luc Ponty, and they’re walking out of SIR at the same time. And Joe Zawinul did the Miles Davis. He said, “Why don’t you come to the studio and record with us for a day?”  That one “day” became two weeks, because they kept calling me back: “Can you come tomorrow? Can you come tomorrow? Can you come tomorrow?”

That’s the way Miles used to do it. Zawinul got that from Miles. When they did Bitches Brew it was the same thing, “Miles wants you to come in today.” If he liked it, “Miles wants you to come back tomorrow.” Now understand, no matter what you had going on “tomorrow,” you’d be there for Miles. So, it just so happens it turned into two weeks.

I made the record, and they were happy with it. So, after that, they mixed the album and all that, Joe Zawinul came to me, and he said [imitating Zawinul’s voice], “Ndugu, what do you want to do with your life? You want to play that ‘toot-toot’ with Santana? Or you want to join the greatest band in the world?” I said, “Joe, I’m going to play that ‘toot-toot’ with Santana.” So, I didn’t join Weather Report, because Carlos was treating me very well at that time.

Carlos was another one of those, like Miles, who had a heart of gold.

When you talk about Michael Jackson, you talk about the team. The team is Quincy Jones and Bruce Swedien. It just so happens after working with Eddy Harris at Shelly’s Manne-hole, Eddy Harris called me to come to Chicago to record. We made Excursions. The engineer on that session at Brunswick was Bruce Swedien. That was the first time I worked with Bruce.

Years later, I’m out in L.A. I’m getting calls to work with Quincy. So, with Quincy, I did Frank Sinatra, James Ingram, Michael McDonald, Donna Summer, George Benson ... . So, I’m doing all of these things with Quincy, and then the Michael Jackson session comes around.

Yeah, I did five songs on Thriller: “Billie Jean,” “P.Y.T.,” “Baby Be Mine,” “Thriller” and “Human Nature.” I’m on all those songs, and then I played on “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” on [Jackson’s 1987 album] Bad.

The standing joke we had in the studio was that Off The Wall had sold 10 million records. So, we were in the studio hoping and praying that we could sell 13 million. 110 million later, the history was made. DB