Jazz Guitar Mindset: Why Did Miles Davis Tell Herbie Hancock Not to Play the Butter Notes?
Miles Davis told Herbie Hancock, "Don't play the butter notes" — and Hancock later read that as the 3rd and 7th of each chord, the two notes that make a progression sound like itself. At VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, Junewon Choi brings up this story in his online jazz guitar lessons because it answers a question learners often get wrong: it does not mean the guide tones are unimportant. It means you are allowed to leave them only after they are in your ear.
What Were the Butter Notes?
According to Hancock's own telling, he was struggling inside Miles's band. He kept playing, wanted to move beyond what he was doing, and could not. Miles's advice, "Don't play the butter notes," came from a leader whose own solos, on close analysis, contain few of the lines that spell out the 3rds of a chord change. Hancock interpreted the butter notes as the 3rd and 7th, and in the demonstrations he has given since, he plays the progression first with those notes, and then without them. The second version sounds immediately more modern and more ambiguous, yet it still belongs to the same song.
Why Can You Only Leave the Skeleton After You Know It?
Because the sound of a chord change lives in the 3rd and 7th. If you are still learning that sound, leaving those notes out gives you a fog, not a style. Hancock and the modal players could do it because they had already absorbed the skeleton, so completely that they could hear it without playing it. Junewon puts it plainly: the guide tones are in the ear, so they no longer have to be on the instrument. You step out of the scale, and the ear keeps the road.
What Does This Say About Jazz History?
Each era answered the one before. After the bebop of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, which was fast and harmonically dense, the next generation did not simply copy it; they could already play Cherokee at tempo, and they already knew a bridge like the one in Have You Met Miss Jones? that anticipates Giant Steps. When players with that background chose a single mode and stayed there, as on So What, they were not avoiding complexity. They had earned the simplicity. That is the difference between a style that is empty and one that is spare.
What Should a Learner Take From It?
You do not need to rush toward the outside. Do the opposite for now:
Learn the 3rd and 7th of each chord in the tunes you play.
Hear them in the melody before you play them in a solo.
Let them sink in until you could hum them in the dark.
Only then experiment with leaving them out and listen to the difference.
Junewon once tried to analyze Miles's solos to find the chord-defining lines and, by his own account, learned little at the time because he was not yet at the level where the lesson was visible. That is useful to remember: some advice lands only after you have done the work. If you want help building that foundation, Essential: Building Blocks starts at the beginning. For one example of how a melody already hands you the 3rd, read Which Notes Matter Most for Voice Leading?, and for the larger story of how the music changed, see Is Jazz the Classical Music of the 21st Century?.
When you are ready to see how far along you are, the Scorecard gives you a clear way to track it, one step at a time.
About the Author
Junewon Choi is a Berklee-trained jazz guitarist and the founder of VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, an online education platform teaching jazz harmony and improvisation through the Functional Diagonal Approach (FDA) — a chord-first method built on voice-leading rather than scale boxes.
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