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

footprints

Play rap!
 

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.

Go to church – piano solo!

Chorus of Ice Cube’s Go to church

Halvard has for a few weeks been very determined to learn to read.  Every night we spend 15-20 minutes on simple textbooks so that he may practice combining letters into words. It is fascinating to witness how many interpretations there are of single syllable, three letter words when you work at the phoneme level such as he does. I am impressed on the progress he has made in a short time, and it is very good to see how much will and effort he puts into this now that he has decided that he really wants to learn how to read.

As a tribute to his recent acheivements, I asked him to sing and record the Alphabet song. I had prepared a simple backingtrack for him in Cubase in the key of D. I have sampled the drum beat from Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean and turned it into a REX file in Cubase. An arpeggiator triggers the vintage Yamaha TX81Z and the “Lately bass” patch. The rest are plugins from my Creamware Scope collection.

Hope you enjoy his singing!  

File: Alphabet song