My master thesis is going in the direction of investigating the shared knowledge on music, on Herbie Hancock in particular, made available in informal digital lerarning spaces, such as discussion forums, YouTube and optionally also FaceBook (where I am not a member yet). This far I have contributed and taken part in discussions on Allaboutjazz.com. There, I have commented existing threads and shared my transcription of Dolphin dance and Stitched up, among other things. So, in a sense, my own activities are fullfilling my expectations of the knowledge content of the forum.
Now, to my great surprise, I have recently found 3 great transcriptions of 3 Hancock compositions which are on the repertoire of my quartet. These are published in forums and on homepages, and hold a great level of accuracy and precision.
I found the full Fender Rhodes solo of the original recording of Chameleon at this place (where the chord changes are Bbm9 – B/Db). The site seems to be an abandoned project from 2002, last updated in 2007, aiming at publishing transcriptions made by the host R. Toledo. He expresses that he can make transcriptions on request, so there is a business idea behind. Nevertheless, the Chameleon transcription is excellent. We did a demo of this tune, and prior to that, I made a transcription of Hancock’s solo off a bootleg from 1973, from a recording studio in New York. Now I have 2 sources for analyis to understand Hancock’s style.
Next, a musician named Pascal Le Floch has uploaded to his site numerous transcriptions, of particular interest is his notation of Bill Evans’ solo on Dolphin Dance from the album “I will say goodbye” (1977). Again, a very accurate transcription, lots of useful additional informatoin on how to approach the changes. A great supplement to Hancock’s original solo which I have copied myself.
Finally, at the forum of Jazzguitar.be, I found what appears to be a perfect transcription of the original solo of One finger snap (from Empyrean isles). I attempted on transcribing the same solo in August 2009, and got less than half way through. The solo is a fantastic example of uptempo post bop flow with advanced arpeggois, approach notes, some playing outside, etc. The publisher is Matt Warnock, who runs his own blog Guitarplayerdaily, and his own homepage. He teaches, among other places at Western Illinois University, US.
To summarise, by finding these 3 transcriptions, I have come across sources which will help me understanding 3 songs which I have attempted transcribing myself, which are on our repertoire and which we also did a demo recording of. The findings also exemplifies that there is a sharing culture among highly accomplished musicians of musical material which the internet enables the distriubution of. The sharing of these documents would not be possible to this degree without the internet and the open user centered forums, or in my view informal digital learning spaces.
On Friday December 11th, the band Dukat was booked for playing at the annual christmas ball for the seniors at the Vitalitetssenteret in Bergen. Most of the job consisted of playing background music, which we did for nearly 3 hours, from 6 pm to 9 pm, followed by one set of dance music from 9 – 10 pm.
For the backgroung playing, we chose repertoire of traditional christmas song, both norwegian and international, and added some evergreens, mainly pop songs from the sixties. This proved to be a great opportuniy to play trio jazz in an informal setting. Our approach to the songs was to play through the form a few times to present the theme, then to treat the song as any standard jazz tune. We only had one rehearsal in advance, so most of the job was done sight reading.
An old, and to us unknown tune, is The Coventry Carol, an English carol. It suits well to improvise on the form, as a slow jazz walts. In a mionor, ending on an a major, we did not make an alternative turnaround, but stayed within the original harmonisation. We did Mitt hjerte alltid vanker, which is an old scandinavian tune dating back to 1732, . This lent it self very well to improvisation. I have cut the theme in the uploaded file to get straight to the solo. Not much of a christmas song, but still a good piece for trio playing, is Bo Kasper’s Hon er så søt når hun sover.
Of the more traditional christmas-jazz-tunes, are The christmas song and When you wish upon a star. None of these are reharmonised, but played straight off the Tenn Lys! song book. In general, the chord material has been modified by simply altering the dominants and playing the chords adding as quartal chords. Finally, Cry me a river was added to the repertoire. A great composition and a great chord progression for improvisation.
In August, the quartet met at Peter Sæverud’s studio to make a demo of the Hunting for Hancock project. Since all was to take place during 1 day, we had to limit ourselves to 4 tunes, and these should represent different modes of Hancock’s music.
To start with, we did Dolphin dance, his mid tempo swing classic. This tune represents a challenge in makin coherent phrases through the rather challenging chord progressions and modulations. To assist me, I did a full transcription of the original solo of Hancock’s album Maiden voyage (1965). The learning experience of transcribing the piece was great, since I was able to reveal the link between the material of the phrases and the chord progressions.
Next, we did Maiden voyage from the same album. The choice was made to add modal jazz to the repertoire. I did not attempt at transcribing the original solo, but aimed throughout my own solo to sparsely implement the idea of playing outside my moving to levels thirds above the underlying chords. I will try to pick up ideas from some of Herbie’s solos on this tune at a later stage.
Thirdly, we did Chameleon from his album Headhunters (1973), to move to the electric funk area. As a fifth element in our quartet, we added my laptop running the synth bass riff of the opening part of the tune, triggered as a clip in Ableton Live. This riff, I have captured from a bootleg recording of Hancock and stripped down Headhunters band. It is actually a broadcast concert from the Ultrasonic studios in Hempstead, New York on October 1st 1973. As you can hear from the demo, some applause from audience is audible as part of the end of each cycle of the loop. I made 2 presets on my Yamaha S80 to resemble Hancock’s real Fender Rhodes piano. The first preset is a Rhodes patch with my footcontroller connected to the filter cutoff parameter, This way I can imitate Hancock’s wah-wah effect. For the solo part, on the chords Bbm7 - B/Db, I use the same S80 Rhodes patch with added delay and distortion.
We also taped One finger snap from his album Empyrean isles (1964).
At the forum of the site allaboutjazz.com, a user asked for inputs on the tune “Stitched up”, which Hancock released on his album “Possibilities” in 2005. I explored the tune using Wavelab and could give some feedback. The user asked spesifically for the chord in the break after the opening, which is a G13 sus. I also transcribed Hancock’s solo on the bridge section, which I typed into Finale 2010 and further exported to JPG for insertion in the posts on the thread on the allaboutjazz.com page.
On Tuesday June 16th, our jazz quartet met for the first time for quite a while. We agreed that our project next autumn and spring will be to rehearse a repertoire of Hancock standards from his early sixty recordings until his latest releases.
I will use digital tools in my attempt to learn to play the songs in a convincing style. One idea is to record the rehearsals and publish excerpts here in my blog. Hopefully, over time, this will document an improvment and stylistic developent of the band both in terms of comping and soloing. I will also explore how digital tools such as the applicationWavelab, or any other audio editor can be used as tool for transcribing the original music.
For preparations for rehearsals, I will use Ableton live, Cubase or Band in a box to create accompgnement for the selected songs. This will enable me to pratice in the right key, time and groove and to listen to my acheivements. I believe listening to one self is a majour source for learning.
At our first session, we quickly ran through Maiden Voyage, Speak like a child, Dolphin dance and One finger snap. In august we will make another demo featuring the four songs and a modern style tune where we will integrate digital music tools such as Ableton live running on a lap top. This is a requirement to play tunes from the albums like Diz is da drum. We will also consider playing the mega challenging Actual proof from the album Thrust (1974).
Maiden voyage – first attempt, recorded on Minidisk in Jan Tore Ness’ basement studio on June 16th 2009
Dolphin Dance – first attempt, recorded on Minidisk in Jan Tore Ness’ basement studio on June 16th 2009
Last October, I received an SMS asking me to join a band which on the subsequent Friday were booked to play 2 sets of the music of Wayne Shorter at a Bergen jazz club, Jazz Box. The group consists of piano, bass, sax and drums. We managed to rehearse one time before the gig and were left to do the gig in a very jam like style. The organisers and audience approved of what we did and booked us for another evening, March 20th 2009. Here is an example of what we sound like – “Footprints” by Wayne Shorter, recorded in the drummers well equipped home studio, January ‘09.
Now that I have created a working backing track, I will present some possibilities which music technology offers. As I have shown, Cubase is an example of a kind of software which allows the user to record and play back music, both in the format of MIDI and audio. From a learner’s point of view this opens up many new possibilities.
Within the field of jazz and improvised music, music technology allows the musician to create a customised harmonic and rythmical musical setting. This may on one hand represent a “safe” rehearsal space as part of preparations for a live gig. It may also be particularly designed to targed standard concepts within jazz theory, such as leaning the standard key changes shuch as “Rythm changes, “Coltrane changes” og other standard progressions.
The music technology lets the learner practice in a customized musical settig and listen to what s/he just played. The possibility to use one’s own ears to jude and assess one’s owen musical performance is just one advantage which the music technology represents.
As an example I have recorded a few rounds of piano solos on the already made backing track. A musical challenge is to create more open tonal space in a tune which is composed only by using minor and major tridads with no references to jazz.
I opened up the character of the chords by suspending the thirds of all chords. By playing all chords as 11ths, I got the sound which I associate with 70s jazz rock idiom.
Chord progression is added to the movie in a separate overlay.
