Being there, doing that: Herbie Hancock

Later that evening, John Brown, visiting director of the Jazz Studies program, welcomes us back to Reynolds for the master class, in which Hancock will publicly critique the performance of local students. "I struggle with how to introduce a person who needs no introduction," he says. "We truly are in the presence of a legend."

"All right!" a voice screams, and the audience erupts with applause. Aficionados abound: teens hoarding the posters they've torn down in the lobby; expressionless men in black dress shirts, black trousers, black shoes. But it's a mixed crowd. The youngest fan present is a little skeptic in a floral T-shirt, very verbal--and she brought coloring books just in case. When Hancock won his last three Grammy Awards for the 1998 album Gershwin's World, she hadn't been born.

The program refers to tonight's intergenerational attraction as "An Open Workshop"; Hancock calls it a "show." The show nominally belongs to the student combos Brown has put together this semester: electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, biomedical engineers, physicists, and chemists who play for fun--and, lest listeners get the wrong impression, a public-policy major, a political science major, and a couple of grad students, including a Ph.D. candidate from the B-school--jamming alongside first-years and alumni who have lingered in the Triangle.

The players launch out, their music pleasant, their solos classic and controlled. The pianist, Jules van Binsbergen, the Fuqua student, watches his own hands intently; all the musicians avoid eye contact. As the horns in their dapper business suits pass calculated riffs forth and back, they could be at a particularly grim job interview instead of wailing for a high-spirited crowd of Herbievores. After a couple of tunes, they stop, and Hancock rises from his seat in the fifth row to mount the stage.

"Look, it's a conversation," Hancock tells the combo with a wave of his hand. "Just because one guy has a solo at the moment doesn't mean the rest of you have to lie back. You could be swapping ideas in the background--a kind of call and response.

"And each of you has an individual story that you're telling with your instrument. What makes a small group fun is when each person is listening to what the other musicians are doing, and asks, What can I do that can have a shape?"

He sits at the keyboard and demonstrates. Suddenly van Binsbergen grins: Those syncopated chords could follow their own imperative and might push the envelope without treading on the saxophone soloist's toes. "The piano," Hancock assures him, "is actually an orchestra. So, hey, you could have a flute line going." His right hand wanders playfully up and up and up the keyboard. (He knows something about orchestras: His first public performance was a Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony at age eleven.)

Now the bass player is grinning, too, and he plucks experimentally as Hancock tries a countermelody. The Master turns to the drummer. "Things can happen in those little stops," he tells him. "You're so polite. Don't always wait for the end of the phrase--give the soloist a little kick in the behind!"

The group takes up Thelonious Monk's "Ruby, My Dear," and, sure enough, the drummer gives the bass an aural kick in the behind during his solo. The bass player smiles angelically. Van Binsbergen and trumpeter Roger Diebold, a Pratt School sophomore, listen to each other more closely now, teasing and tossing each other intervals, rhythms: copying, varying, daring. A game of tag gets going; people nod. When they finish, Hancock jumps up. "That trumpet solo was great--it had a storyline! That's hard to do--make a complete statement instead of just following the changes."

The changes are the harmonic progression, a song's structural skeleton, and every jazz improviser first learns how to follow them intelligently before learning how to subvert them creatively. Miles Davis long ago had advised Hancock to avoid the "butter notes"--the fat, obvious tones such as the third or seventh of the chord. The result: One listener likened a Hancock accompaniment of a Miles Davis trumpet solo to hearing a double concerto--two melodic lines intertwined in an aural double-helix.

Later, Hancock bluntly tells another student pianist, freshman Pulsar Li, that his accompanying skills need work. "You play a lot of roots"--the bottom note of the chord--"but the bass is already doing that stuff. The things you put in your right hand you could put in your left, and do different things with your right, for color." In some of his recordings, Hancock favored right-hand improvisations so strongly that he eliminated the left hand on solos, leaving the rhythm section to take care of infrastructure.

He tells saxophonist Eric Diebold, a Pratt School senior, "You're ready for Jazz 102," then plops down and works out an example from Sonny Rollins' "Doxy," which they have just performed. "Instead of C7 going to G7, I played C-sharp minor," Hancock says. "You can do that! It sounds dissonant, but because it resolves to the same place...." He plays it, and Diebold nods. "And here, if you start from a B-flat 7th chord, go up a minor third, up a minor third, up a minor third--the roots all relate to each other."

But he turns and apologizes, first to the players, then the audience. "I was just talking about technique. That's craft. I don't want to leave you with craft. I want to leave you with feeling." He gropes for another way to say it. "Music is not about music. Music is about life. Yeah, right now you got to learn the mechanics. There's a thing called scales that go with certain chords. Sometimes there's a tendency for musicians to surround themselves with music and have that be the center of their life. But your life is about more than music."

To trombonist Jillian Smith, a freshman: "You're also someone's daughter, friend, maybe one day a mother. Bring that to your playing. The goal is to make magic happen--magic that instills hope--and build something in this strange but common language we call music."

The crowd turns pensive, thoughtful, silent..