As you may recall from this post on Seattle-based jazz luminary Julian Priester, Dr. Patrick Gleeson played a crucial role in the creation of Love, Love, the jazz-fusion classic that celebrated its 40th anniversary last year. To round out Priester's reminiscences of that era's incredible creative fertility, Gleeson—who also played synthesizer with Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band along with Priester—offers insights into his musical partnership with Priester.

Please discuss your experiences working with Julian Priester and the Mwandishi band, and the fallout after the latter's dissolution.
Gleeson: I do understand and have experienced along with Julian the feeling of... what's the word I'm looking for? Something like "exile" or "banishment" might get at the pain... of no longer playing with Herbie and the guys in the Mwandishi band. It was, rather amazingly, the first band I'd ever played in (talk about starting at the top!), and, quite frankly, it's ruined every other band experience I've ever attempted. I've worked with some wonderful musicians, but none of them ever inspired me like Herbie and the guys in that band. And the reason's quite simple and basic, really. It isn't because they're great players in the sense of mad chops and conceptions. They are players with mad chops and conceptions, but that's the least of it. The most of it is how hard the guys in that band listened.

Ever since that experience, with the exception of a single engagement with Wallace Roney at the Bottom Line just before that venue closed, I've left every band I joined dissatisfied with the experience. You know, finally, I think, one of the most important graces in life is to feel that you're listened to—not just with music, but with anything. How Herbie listens is his greatest strength. Once you really listen to what the other player is saying, you don't need to make up a response—you're just in the moment and are already responding. Being listened to that way, and then to hear the fullness of the response—is a great blessing, one of the greatest in life, really.

Years afterward, I was part of a "big deal" kind of a tour, and by the time we hit the mid-South, I was so pissed off about the lack of listening—guys were concentrating on clever things to say instead, mostly using too many notes to say it—that I quit in mid-concert. I asked one of the roadies for a pencil, wrote, "You've got it" on the leader's chord chart, and walked offstage.

But Herbie and the band: It was a tough breakup. Having been a businessman (with Different Fur Recording Studios and then later as a film and television composer), I'm slightly more accepting perhaps of Herbie's motives than Julian may be. Having a business—yes, a band is a business in our society—puts particular pressures on you, not only to survive, but also to pay appropriate wages to your employees, which, in the capitalist scheme of things, is what we were to Herbie in the monetary sense. It's a lot of pressure. That was part of the cruelty of the situation, because in another sense we really were a band of brothers. (I'll include myself here as an honorary brother despite my decidedly pale Irish skin...) The contradiction led to bitterness at times.

Even Herbie, who tries, I believe, always to stay on the positive side of reality, has a couple of moments in his recent autobiography [I think Gleeson's talking about this book by Bob Gluck] where you can sense that the lack of a satisfactory conclusion to the Mwandishi band situation is possibly still troubling. The awful truth of the matter is simply that the band wasn't very commercial—it demanded careful listening by the audience, and, as we know all too well, many times in our culture we don't listen well. That wasn't Herbie's fault.

Describe what happened in the aftermath of the Mwandishi band split.
As it turned out I could have stayed with Herbie into the Headhunters era—he did tell me that he was going to keep me and Bennie [Maupin]. But in the course of discussing that, we argued over money, and I left along with everyone else except Bennie. Many years later, I think Herbie and I were actually having a different discussion that night (the argument was after the gig in the parking lot of Berkeley's Freight and Salvage). The real discussion, never uttered, was our realization that (1) it was time for Herbie to take over the synthesizer performances in his band—he'd learned all he needed during the time we were together—and (2) it was time for me to go home, treasure this incredible experience, and begin my life as as a composer—during the time I was with Herbie I'd learned so much and now needed to use it in a different context.

Can you say something about the making of Love, Love that Julian didn't touch on?
One thing that slipped by rather quickly may have been the fact that I took on the production without a budget, paying my own studio for the recording time and without the prospect of any record company interest when I did it. Then, amazingly, I sent the finished product to a single company—ECM. Again, just out of dumb luck or naïveté or good fortune, starting at the top. I guess I did that—despite the usual odds against success—because I thought that between the two of us, Julian and I would come up with something someone would want.

Following your time with Priester, you delved into soundtrack work, scoring films like Apocalypse Now, Crossroads, Plague Dogs, and The Bedroom Window (with Seattle drummer Michael Shrieve) and produced synthesizer-based interpretations of the Star Wars soundtrack and Holst's The Planets, in addition to running Different Fur Studios. You've had a fulfilling career, by all accounts.
I think it's interesting that both Herbie and Julian identify now as artists rather than as musicians. It's a broadening of the artistic experience, I'm sure. But for me, I have no similar ambitions. I came to music professionally late in life—I'd studied piano for 10 years as a child, but then went on to other things and came back to music professionally in my early 30s. Having found my home, I have no intention of leaving it. In fact, in a couple of minutes I'm going to get back to my current musical interest—the opening 20 seconds of the score of an experimental film that I'll be performing live (!) at a showing this summer at the LA Film Forum of experimental films I've scored over the past 48 years.