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).

The demos:

Demo recording of Dolphin dance

Demo recording of Maiden voyage

Demo recording of Chameleon

Below is my transcription: 

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