Three great Hancock transcriptions – web findings

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 / back up (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.

Ø. Kvinge

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