Bilbo

Just thought of another underated electric bass player with a creditable jazz pedigree of a sort. Kermit Driscoll. Anyone remember him? His technique was not the issue - his creativity was. The man was undoubtedly an original and his work with Bill Frissel is immediately recognisable (try 'Have A Little Faith' first). Is it jazz? Who cares?

The one pictured is the one most jazzers now use as the Real Books we all refer to are too heavy for the smaller models and are they are thus prone to collapsing mid-tune. They aren't that cumbersome. I can't believe you'll hump a 48kg bass cab and then moan about a music stand!

Some great jJazz biographies for anyone who is interested: 'Straight Life' by Art & Laurie Pepper - biography of a jazz musician/sociopath but, first and foremost, a great read 'Miles Davis: the definitive biography - a critical biography' by Ian Carr 'Milestones' by Jack Chambers - another Miles Davis biography 'Mingus - a critical biography by Brian Priestly' Anything by Gary Giddens Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus by Gene Santoro - grest writing Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit, 1920-60 by Lars Bjorn and Jim Gallert - Jim has been really supportive of me in my own efforts at writing a biography so I want to give him a mention Myself Among Others: A Life in Music by George Wein & Nate Chinen Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This: My Life in the Jazz World by Val Wilmer - great writing As Serious as Your Life: John Coltrane and Beyond by Val Wilmer Friends Along the Way: A Journey Through Jazz by Lees, Gene John Coltrane: His Life and Music by Lewis Porter (Lewis has also been supportive of me) I could go on and on - I read more than I practice (its quieter and I can do it on public transport!)

Zero Frets - works for me Welcome!

Aren't people who nick gear the scum of the earth?

Guitar, backing voxs, percussion (surdo, agogo etc) - all servicable not great - sufficient to record demos and explore ideas etc. Just got my first gig on guitar tho', after years of thinking I could do better than the guitar players around me. Part of it is about realising that you don't have to be a virtuoso to 'play' an instrument and about having the confidence to be mediocre! How good is good enough? As for b. vocals, we can pretty much all do it if we try. You don't have to be Ella Fitzgerald to justify singing! Its yours and its free. Just do it.

There is a standard MU contract that covers this. As I recall there is a sliding scale dependent upon the length of time between cancelation and schedueld gig. I have received payment for cancelled gigs several times on this basis.

Wal Cusom Fretless 4-string bought 25/4/86 from Monkey Business. Still keeps me [i]very[/i] happy. 4 basses ever - my first Hondo II Precsion copy (1980), replaced fairly quickly by an Aria SB700 (1981) followed by the Wal. Since had a Status 6-string but its on the wall most of teh time and only comes out if an MD demands a low B (2/3 times a year). Amps - Sound City to Frunt (remember them!!) to Trace Eliot AH250 to GK MB150S (stoeln) to SWR Electric Blue head to Eden Metro (2001). Amps are more likely to get changed due to improvements in technology/differing needs in terms of playing situations but the bass stays put.

[quote name='BigBeefChief' post='158129' date='Mar 15 2008, 07:17 PM']I also tend to like those albums recorded in weeks rather than months.[/quote] Ha ha ha! I love the idea that a 'raw' and 'unpolished' product can be recorded in weeks! What a lot of people don't realise is that most jazz is recorded in one take over an afternoon! Miles Davis recorded the greatest selling jazz lp of all time (Kind Of Blue) in two afternoons (around 6 hours) - no rehearsal, no overdubs and only a couple of re-takes. And what's more, the musicians got paid accordingly - Paul Chambers got about $350 for the whole thing. And it out-sold some of Simon and Garfunkel's LPs. Look at any one of 1,000 Blue Note cds and they will give the date of the recording as one day - look at the discographies and you will see that the sessions produced up to a dozen or more tracks. All the musos got paid union rates with no royalties (except the composers). Those great JOhn Abercrombie Trio recordings are all one day sessions - fantastic! Things are no different today. Gwizdala's cds are all recorded on one day, even if they are mixed and mastered on another. Session musicians get the gig because they can deliver in one take what other take ten or a hundred to achieve. If the product is soulless, blame the producer - he chose the musicians and 'managed' the arrangements. I did a session once and didn't hear the results until a year or two later and I had to be told it was me because I couldn't remember it at all (and I was stone cold sober!). I know that is not uncommon for other players. We have to remember, as I said elsewhere on this forum, that lots of music that is recorded is often for different audiences than sophisticated afficianados and a polished performance in one arena would grate in another.

Where are all the jazzers?? Electric 1. Steve Swallow - electric bass innovation with Gary Burton and others 2. Percy Jones - Jaco wrote the book, Jones tore it up and started again 3. Anthony Jackson - 'For The Love Of Money' quietly introduced some new sounds to the instrument 4. Mark Egan - not the greatest player ever but a clear voice on early Pat Metheny Group LPs 5. Alphonso Johnson - grooves just as hard as Jaco and often overlooked. Acoustic 1. Marc Johnson - earliest recordings with Bill Evans in 1978. One of the best sounds in bass history if my ears are worth anything 2. Dave Holland - 1972's 'Conference Of The Birds' was, in my view, seminal 3. Stanley Clarke - 1972's Light As A Feather gave us at least 3 jazz standards if not 6/6 and all this before he started slapping 4. Ron Carter - a great decade for him even if the media wasn't looking 5. Eddie Gomez - got a Grammy for Chick Corea's 'Friends' in 1979.

[quote name='queenofthedepths' post='156876' date='Mar 13 2008, 05:34 PM'][pedant]Surely there are only 7 notes in any key? If you include the octave as well as the root, that's 13 notes in an octave! So it's not quite 66%...[/pedant][/quote] You are, of course, correct. It is, in fact, 58.3333% not 66%. I stand corrected. That's far too risky! Don't do it

[quote name='dlloyd' post='157227' date='Mar 14 2008, 09:37 AM']Apart from the fact that there are truly tone-deaf people who cannot understand music past a vague, superficial aesthetic, I'd agree.[/quote] I was once told that someone who is genuinely tone deaf cannot hear the difference in frequency between a dog bark and bird song. I think real tone deafness is actually very rare. The rest is learned helplessness - people who are repeatedly told they are tone deaf to the point where they believe it and proceed accordingly. The concept of excellence in singing, for instance, is a Western phenomenon. Asking someone is Africa if they can sing is like asking them if they can chew. Its not an issue.

Nice one, Paul C. Now there is NO reason for people not to understand this stuff.

[quote name='cheddatom' post='156834' date='Mar 13 2008, 04:47 PM']I don't see how knowing theory will make you more able to play a teapot, a shirt, or a piglet.[/quote] That's the point. Pascoal knows all the theory you need. He is a great player and composer in the conventional sense but is also one of the most creative musician on the planet - his swimming pool, vocal, underwater tube trio is a must! Harmonic and melodic theory in the sense it has been discussed here is ethnocentric - a thumb piano is an African invention so has no use for the tempered scale. Nor has a piglet.

[quote name='2wheeler' post='156634' date='Mar 13 2008, 12:06 PM']I stuck to a walking bass line through "Straight, No Chaser", got lost a few times but got through it and had a very good time most of the time.[/quote] I still get lost after 28 years of playing it. Its kind of part of the deal. At the stage you are at you just need to get out there and make a noise - remember; there is no such thing as a wrong note, just a poor choice. If you are lost, just keep goign until you find it again. There are 12 notes in an octave and eight in any given key. That's a 66% chance of hitting a 'right' note even if you try it randomly. Noone is listening to you anyway, you're the bass player! BE LOUD, CONFIDENT and WRONG! Just play, play, play and have a ball!

Let's put this in perspective. Look up Hermeto Pascoal on YouTube (but don't stop at one video as you won't get where he is coming from unless you look at several) - now tell me whether theory stifles your creativity!! Saxophonist Iain Ballamy once told me that he saw Pascoal play music on a shirt. Other instruments include piano, melodica, teapot and piglet - yes, piglet. Hey BBC! - you're gonna LOVE it!!

They're juss makin' it up as they go along....

[quote name='jakesbass' post='156110' date='Mar 12 2008, 03:57 PM']We live in an age where we have to pussy foot around for fear of upsetting the sensibilities of one person or another.[/quote] Do we? I must be missing something, snot box!!!

The problem with finding your true path as a musician is recognising the fact that you are already on it. If you practise every lick, trick and song of your favorite musician, and nothing else, you will still not sound like him/her. You can' t help it - so being an individual is not the issue. But, using the drum analogy, you can get quite credible without 'learning' anything but I bet you any money your playing will fill up with cliches very quickly whether you like it or not because the music you LISTEN to will be cliche-ridden. We are the sum total of our experiences and those experiences aren't only our practice schedule; it is also our listening. So unless you listen to original (i.e. not genre specific) music, you will inevitably fall into the boom chuck boom chuck school of drumming and sound very unispired. You may have a whale of a time but the listeners won't hear anything worth talking abou! I also agree that technical players are not always the best - I think, for instance, that Jeff Berlin, despite his astonishing technique, lacks the genre specific skills to play anything other than what he does. Despite his endless efforts to the contrary, he has not got a massive list of sessions to his name because can't nail grooves idiomatically correctly like someone like Lee Sklar, who is a lesser player in terms of superficial dexterity but grooves like a mofo. Technique is not everything but it helps.

'This Must Be Love' Alphonso Johnson's line on Phil Collins 'Face Value' LP/CD Yum Yum Pigs Bum!

I guess the worst thing is technique without knowledge of theory - Yngwie J Malmsteen!

I have to agree that I think the not learning theory to maintain creativity argument is moribund. It is nothing more that a justification that allows individuals to watching more tv without feeling guilty. Of course uneducated polayers are capable of being creative - its part of the human condition. But, if you give 1,000 monkies typewriters.... Sorry, that was facetious but I accept that many uneducated players have done some great things but relying on pure inspiration without perspiration is like relying on a lottery win to feed yourself - you may be lucky but I wouldn't want to rely on it. In simple terms, to suggest that not doing something improves your playing is, in my view, anathema.

[quote name='cheddatom' post='155854' date='Mar 12 2008, 11:17 AM']Ok - If learning theory is all about internalising knowledge to the effect that you can play without thinking surely this can be attainable without actually learning the theory in the first place. If theory teaches you where the right notes are, but you can hear where the right notes are anyway, couldn't you just use your ears to accomplish the same thing that theory teaches?[/quote] Yes, of course yout can but its a much slower route and an uneducated musician is inevitable limted by his own internal constraints. The study of theory can help you to 'hear' things you might not otherwise have heard. I have a simple rule - Knowledge is power. Ignorance is bliss. Your choice.

The difficulty in applying theory to improvised music rest in the head and not the hands. The performance of jazz requires you to listen to what is happening around you as you play and using the information you hear and the things you know about the music to inform your own decisions about where you take the music. If the soloist goes up a scale, you may chose to go up with him or to go in the opposite direction. You may choose to play a pedal tone a fourth below the root of the key centre of the changes being used (eg the first eight bars of a bebop rhythm changes tune in Bb can be accompanied by a pedal F to great effect) or you may choose to hold a note and suspend the forward motion of your line as another tension creating device. You could change a funk tune into a jazz tune, or a rock tune into Latin. You may think, a Latin groove woudl sound nice now but, becasue you knwo your drummer can't play a Latin groove, you may abort the idea. The options are infinte and are only bounded by your imagination, your knowledge of what works and the circusmtances around you at a given moment. The use of youre favourite Nuno licks will not even begin to meet the demands of improvised music. Classical musicians are trained very differently. They are capable of some very sophisticated and complex playing but they do it mostly by rote and not spontaneously. Also. their 'creative' choices, in terms of their performance, whilst potentially informed by the conducters 'interpretation' of the ensemble delivery, are not defined by it in the way that a jazz players is. More to the point, the ensembles note choices are predetermined and not informed by anything other than the 'script'/chart. I guess the difference between jazz and classical performance is like the difference between a debate and a speech. The skills sets are very different. There are some classical musicians that can improvise but they are rare and generally not a the top of the game - Wynton Marsalis is respected in the jazz field but he is strictly B-list in the classical world. Nigel Kennedy's 'jazz' is excruciating! Whatever his strengths as a player, I suspect Gwilym Simcock is not a contender in the classical field (I have not yet heard him). A knowledge of music theory will NEVER undermine your ability to perform creatively. What will, however, is the ability to apply that theory. If you have to process the information yoiu hear before you make choices about what you play, the concious application of theory to your given improvisation will inevitably delay your decision making and disable your creative choices completely. The secret is to learn the thoery, knowl how to apply it and then forget about it. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to write if you had to think about every muscle movement, spelling, sentence contstruction, tense etc? Music theory is no different.

[quote name='FJ1200' post='155311' date='Mar 11 2008, 02:27 PM']I've just bought a £2.99 4-CD set for the car to try to get my head round it[/quote] It's no wonder jazz has such a bad name - these £2.99 compilations do so much harm for jazz its unreal. 4 cds for 3 quid? Let me guess: Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, Dave Brubeck, Peggy Lee - all on wax cylinders - am I right? Not necessarily bad artists but these reciordings are almost always obscure outtakes, early left overs, dodgy live cuts. - Its like judging all Sci-Fi on the basis of 'The Mouse On The Moon'. DESTROY IT!! DESTROY IT!! Buy a copy of 'Jazzwise' and look for something that takes your fancy!