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Hancock’s postbop composition provided some of the signature sounds of the 1960s. “King Cobra” (My Point of View) relies on both major third and minor third axis progressions, often using a slash-chord vocabulary; several devices at the end of the form enhance its tonal and formal ambiguity. “Dolphin Dance” (Maiden Voyage) maintains an even heightened sense of tonal and formal ambiguity. It begins with major third axis progressions embellished through harmonic substitutions and elaborations; despite local harmonic cadences and goals, the composition suppresses a single-key orientation. “Jessica” (Fat Albert Rotunda) relies on a perfect fifth axis progression in its skeletal melody, and its horn scoring reveals significant details of Hancock’s harmonic vocabulary and harmonic substitution techniques.

This chapter focuses on the author's interview with American jazz musicians Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. It discusses Shorter's stories about the loss of wife, his autistic child, and other emotional pain to which the author could relate to, and explains that it was during this time that his wife asked him to move out of the house.

This chapter examines the musical composition of the album The Sorcerer by the Miles Davis Quintet. It considers the group's practice of placing complete or partial statements of the head's melody between or within solos. It discusses the singles “Vonetta”, “Prince of Darkness”, “Masqualero”, “Pee Wee”, and “Limbo”, analyzing their use of a syncopated harmonic progression which typically appears near the end of the composition's form. It considers how the feature operates as a compositional release, one that operates in the absence of standard bridge sections or harmonic turnarounds at the end of the repeating form. It also highlights Wayne Shorter's improvisation on “Vonetta”, and Miles Davis's and Herbie Hancock's improvisations to “Prince of Darkness.”

On 23 October 1997, Minh’s Jazz Club opened its doors in Hà Nội. It was the first jazz club to open in Vietnam under communist rule. Ever since then, Minh’s Jazz Club has been the place for Vietnamese musicians to indulge in playing jazz for a live audience. Earlier in 1992, Metropole, the reopened colonial era luxurious hotel, had begun to feature a regular jazz act at the hotel’s bar. That jazz act was a Vietnamese band led by Quyền Văn Minh. In 2001, Minh’s Jazz Club was one of four venues that hosted the First European Jazz Festival in Vietnam. In the years that followed, a stream of international jazz artists, including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Yamashita Yosuke visited Hà Nội. Almost every one of these musicians made a stop at Minh’s Jazz Club. There is a bona fide jazz venue in Hà Nội. Jazz could be heard in the political capital of socialist Vietnam.

The chapter supplies three areas for further inquiry into postbop composition: tonal vestiges that connect to earlier tonal jazz practices (through bass motion by descending fifth and descending half step); double axis progressions; and contrapuntal organization. It then describes the evolution of postbop jazz through the notion of schema—a prototype, exemplar, or conventional grammatical pattern. For example, the major third axis schema originally appeared within the constraints of tonal jazz conventions (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “Have You Met Miss Jones”), but once it penetrated to deeper levels of structure (John Coltrane, “Giant Steps”) it became an agent of syntactic change, giving postbop composers a potent point of departure to bypass tonal jazz frameworks.