Let me see if I can explain this. There are only three chords in music, period. Minor, major, and dominant. A dominant chord wants to go somewhere because it has a tritone in it. A G dominant chord wants to go to C. That principle is physics. That’s not something that was assigned to music by theorists. When two strings are vibrating together a tritone apart, there are so many overtones that all you feel is tense, and the notes want to squish together into the home chord.
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Herbie Hancock has this thing about an informed vocabulary but a childlike approach. He plays simple, simple, catchy melodies, but all his chord voicings have forty or fifty years of this theory in them. So when he gets onstage it can be all childlike. Not childish. But if you ever stopped a Hancock recording and looked at a few measures of what he’s playing, you’d be floored. The voice leadings are filled with all these ideas. It doesn’t sound complicated, but it’s a more mature, elegant palette of emotions. These guys can hit an emotional chord that a lesser player couldn’t. It’s the same way a great writer with a great vocabulary can bring out subtler emotions.
...
Herbie Hancock has this thing about an informed vocabulary but a childlike approach. He plays simple, simple, catchy melodies, but all his chord voicings have forty or fifty years of this theory in them. So when he gets onstage it can be all childlike. Not childish. But if you ever stopped a Hancock recording and looked at a few measures of what he’s playing, you’d be floored. The voice leadings are filled with all these ideas. It doesn’t sound complicated, but it’s a more mature, elegant palette of emotions. These guys can hit an emotional chord that a lesser player couldn’t. It’s the same way a great writer with a great vocabulary can bring out subtler emotions.
(T.Anastasio - Believer Interview)
