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All about percussion

What’s hocketing?

What’s hocketing?

About half way through Where will it take you? Jason Yarde takes a familiar tune and gives it an unusual twist…

This melody, from near the beginning of the song Where will it take you? reappears at various points throughout the song – it’s an important recurring theme.

Here’s one of the more unusual reappearances. See if you can hear what’s going on in the melody, using this Explorer close-up.

If you listen to the tenor saxophone and trombone together, they’re playing the same melody as the piano plays, earlier on in the song. But if you listen carefully, or look at the waveforms on the Explorer close-up, they’re not playing the same thing together.

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Try fading down either the Tenor saxophone or Trombone parts, with the music playing. The two instruments are basically sharing the notes of the melody – alternating between one and the other. This is quite an unusual technique, called ‘hocketing’.

But at two points in this passage, they play the melody together – each point is at the end of a four-bar phrase. What Jason’s doing is to bring together two untidy parts into one stronger part at the end of the phrase, giving a sense of direction towards the end of each phrase.

A musical conversation

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