First rehearsal on Hancock’s material

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

Ø. Kvinge

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