Jazz legend Herbie Hancock is delivering this year's Norton lectures at Harvard. He follows in the footsteps of luminaries like T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Igor Stravinsky, and over the course of six lectures he plans to explore the "ethics of jazz." In an interview last week with the Globe's Arts section, Hancock explained, "itâ€™s ethics in a broad sense. When youâ€™re playing with other musicians, your task is to make whatever happens work."

Hancock's first lecture was Monday in Sanders Theater, and it included an interesting anecdote. He began by explaining that some years ago he found himself in a musical rut, "playing the same stuff over and over again." One night during that time he was onstage with the Miles Davis Quintet, at Lennie's on the Turnpike in Peabody. Davis, sensing Hancock's frustration, leaned over to him and said, "Don't play the butter notes." After some thinking, Hancock realized that Davis meant, "don't play the obvious notes because I figured butter might mean fat, and fat might mean obvious." He goes on to explain that the most obvious notes in a chord are the third and seventh notes, and that after Davis's comment, he omitted them, and the audience loved the result. Implicit in Davis's advice is the counterintuitive idea that having fewer options actually expands the creative possibilities available to a musician, because you have to work extra hard to make up for the absent notes.

You can listen to the whole story in the clip below, and read more about Hancock's first lecture in this story from the Harvard Gazette.