Arts & Entertainment, Music
Expanded Improv Techniques
Lesson time 16:56 min
Have you ever thought about music as a series of images? Herbie shares techniques that will push the boundaries of your improvising.
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Topics include: Transforming a Theme • Finding Freedom • Inspiration Is Everywhere • Keep Growing Every Day
Teaches Jazz
Learn to improvise, compose, and develop your own sound across 25 video lessons.
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Well, here's how I was fooling around. I played something. Something came out, and then I used that something as kind of a theme and built a kind of composition based off of that theme. And a part of it was. [PIANO PLAYING] And then that, and then. [PIANO PLAYING] And I did it in different keys. [PIANO PLAYING] But then I did the same thing on the left hand, but I use consistent textures to make sort of a foundation to connect three statements of that idea. You know, I made those connections harmonically to be similar. Like I think I did something like, something. [PIANO PLAYING] Then something like that. [PIANO PLAYING] And then I put in what could be kind of a release from that, which is part of that-- [PIANO PLAYING] --but in a third key, and I just used part of that phrase and repeated it. [PIANO PLAYING] I don't remember how I did it now, because I improvised it. But I kept kind of subdividing this melodic material and harmonic material. And then I found a way to make an ending. A question of, like, how did a lot of material appear? Actually, I just sat down here and touched some notes that just came out of my fingers. That's what it felt like. It could have come from some other part of me, but I wasn't aware of it. My fingers just went there, and then I decided to kind of make something out of it, make some connections, change the placement of some basic melodic material that I started with, and did the same thing with the harmony. But this is not something I could have done in the earlier part of my development. It's taken many years to get to the point where I could do that without thinking too hard about it. And I didn't know what it was going to be until I actually finished it, and I went, oh, that was nice. You know? That's what I did inside, because it sounded OK. [PIANO PLAYING] One of the first groups I worked with in free-- in the area, the genre of free jazz was Eric Dolphy's group. It was a kind of a protest music. I mean there was a fight for civil rights and human rights of all kinds. There was a protest against the Vietnam War, a lot of things that were either happening right then or coming down the pipeline. But in a way, this was inherently, at least what we were doing in Eric's group, was fighting or protesting against being trapped by conventional ways of playing, keeping people confined to conventional ways of not only performing, but conventional ways of listening to music or listening to music only within certain kinds of guidelines. So let's-- that was something we felt was really worth fighting for. I had heard some music that was considered to be free jazz prior to that, and I had no idea what they were doing. And it just sounded like a bunch of notes to me. So I thought, how can I free myself so that-- where's the doorway for me to kind of enter into the free jazz arena, an area that I had never explored before? And an...
About the Instructor
Herbie Hancock's jazz career started in his family's living room, listening to his favorite records and trying to play along. Now, he's one of the most celebrated musicians in the world. Join Herbie at the piano as he shares his approach to improvisation, composition, and harmony. Gain access to 10+ original piano transcriptions, including 5 exclusive solo performances.
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Herbie Hancock
Learn to improvise, compose, and develop your own sound across 25 video lessons.
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