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“What Is The Work?” Thoughts On Cross Disciplinary Art

“What Is The Work?”

It’s not a question we really ponder much as musicians, even though it’s one we would answer quite differently if we delved into the language we use. ‘It’s all about the music, maaan!’… yes, but what is the music?

Live music? That’s the main thing?

Or is it the recordings? Are recordings the thing, and if they are is it making them, or experiencing them? Do we make them to be amazing standalone art, or do we make them to be amazing experiences? Does the theatre of experience (for example, shifts in how and where people listen to music) change the work? What role ‘purist’ thinking in this?

Or is ‘the music’ the songs? Are the songs the thing, and if they are, do we just love recordings and gigs because they bring them into our lives? What of music with no songs?

Is it the experience of playing it? If so, what’s the purpose of an audience? Just money so you can keep playing? Continue reading ““What Is The Work?” Thoughts On Cross Disciplinary Art”

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Finding Inspiration In Denmark…

[this is a VERY long write-up of four days I spent in Demark last week. Hopefully it’ll be worth the effort]

-o0o-

From whence cometh inspiration?

No idea. Not a clue.

I really don’t have a handle on where inspiration actually comes from. Or what it actually is.

But I do know that I can massively increase the chances of stumbling into it by surrounding myself with curious people, especially those who are working in fields other than my own.

Being primarily an instrumentalist, I’m constantly working with an abstract/concrete duality. The purpose/message/inspiration of a particular piece may be concrete, but the interpretation – if it happens without some kind of written/spoken introduction – is at best culturally mediated and often entirely abstract. That so many people seem to hear something of my intention in my music is itself an amazing affirmation that I’m not insane to see it as having a ‘purpose’.

What’s this got to do with the 2nd Inspiration Lab at Cantabile 2 in Stege, Denmark?

Well, everything. The limits of my own musical practice are always where the interesting stuff happens. I’m interested in edge spaces, overlaps, the bits where the circles in the Venn diagram of humanity change colour as they overlap in different combinations.

In the arts, we often gravitate towards influences and influencers who can obviously help shape our own work. Songwriters get into other word disciplines easily, musicians who make records are inspired by films – time delineated documents of a series of events, easy to mulch into a musical expression of a similar aesthetic… it’s often the music in the film that starts the process anyway… Continue reading “Finding Inspiration In Denmark…”

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We Need To Talk About The Drummers…

Drummers! Drummers have always played a massively important role in my music. Almost entirely by their absence. The conversation around what I do – perhaps not surprisingly, but still with some level of irritation – almost always gravitates towards ‘I’d love to hear what you do with a drummer!’. It’s kind of the curse of being a bassist. We’re seen as half of the rhythm section. It’s an instrument that was INVENTED for loud rhythm sections. Its voice was deeply integral to the development of rock and roll, pop, hard rock, prog, funk, soul, R’n’B… It is the sound of pop music. Bass and drums, that’s what makes it not-folk or not-chamber-music. As a voice outside of that, it’s still woefully under-explored…

So my decision to mostly avoid drummers, certainly in the context of my solo work (the decision to see all ‘band’ work as collaborative and never ‘my band’ is a huge part of this) is one that puts what I do apart from what most bass players do. It works as a USP, but has also been a very very useful set of limitations for exploring a new vocabulary for the instrument. I’m not the first to do this, by a long shot, though the degree to which it has dominated my work is unusual. Continue reading “We Need To Talk About The Drummers…”

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Two New Solo Videos!

This is the first of two posts today – the 2nd one will have gig news and some recording news, but first here are two videos that have gone live in the last week.

Yesterday I posted this one, that was recorded as a video test, and turned out rather nice… Was checking whether I could do video and multitrack audio at the same time on my laptop. Turns out I can, as evidenced here.

Lots of lovely pedals are featured - MXR bass preamp (on the floor out of shot), Dunlop Volume Pedal, Markbass MiniDist, Darkglass VMT, MXR Bass Fuzz, MXR Bass Chorus Deluxe, MXR Bass Overdrive, TC Electronic HOF mini, MXR Bass Envelope Filter: Continue reading “Two New Solo Videos!”

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Gigs Update – London Bass Guitar Show, Moffat Bass Bash, #TORYCORE…

Right, if you’re the kind of person who keeps tabs on my gigs page, you’ll have seen a bit of an update happen… Here’s the next few:

March 7th, 10:30am – London Bass Guitar Show. Aguilar and MXR/Dunlop present… me! Pedals/effects/processing masterclass at this most wonderful of london events – details on the LBGS site. Line-up also features Divinity, Doug Wimbish and Jah Wobble… lots of greatness going on 🙂

March 15th – the Moffat Bass Bash! Yay, Scotland! I don’t get to play up there anywhere nearly enough. It’s 10am-4pm, with me as special guest. All the deets are at www.moffatbassbash.co.uk

April 10/11th – #TORYCORE is back. Two nights of the words of our evil overlords in the appropriately evil setting of some tortuous avant-metal. We’re at Battersea Arts Centre in London, and all the details are on their website.

More gigs coming very soon…

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Creating Spaces Where People Can Respond To Music…

[big gig update blog-post coming later, but this was bubbling in my head so needed writing first… 😉 ]

Right, this was inspired by a couple of brilliant thinker-friends. Partly it was this blog post by Corey Mwamba (an exceptional musician, thinker, doer and advocate for music) about The Family Album, and his audience-focussed rethink of jazz/improvised music programming, and partly by the work of a theatre company called Coney, particularly their co-director Annette Mees, whose thinking on pretty much everything has been of immense value to me over the last while… Their amazing work on new ways of experiencing theatre, of devising experiential work for audiences is truly remarkable (their upcoming show, Early Days (Of A Better Nation) is touring in the run-up to the election, and is unmissable)

Anyway, here’s today’s brain-ramble, on which I welcome your thoughts and input…

…disappearing down a wikipedia wormhole of synonyms for outmoded terminology that appears to have no analog in the useful terminology world, I stumbled on Cymatics – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymatics

cymatics by evan grant.

And I’m now thinking about how it works as a metaphorical space for thinking about visible human/audience responses to music… Continue reading “Creating Spaces Where People Can Respond To Music…”

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5 Inspirational Bass Recordings with No Drums

Spend more than 5 minutes online talking about bass, and you’ll encounter some variation on the theme of ‘groove is king‘ – the idea that the only things that matter for musicians who play bass are those that relate to the function within a normal band line up is pushed pretty hard in most contexts.

But so many of my favourite bits of creative bass playing (in my own career and from others) happen when the bass is freed up from that idea of a ‘role’ and the musician is free to contribute to the music in whatever way works best for the music. Sometimes that’s still very much within the understanding of what the bass ‘should‘ do (as with Pop Pop here) but other times it breaks away from that.

So here are 5 drummerless albums that feature some absolutely exquisite bass playing in the context of wonderful music! (as always these are in no particular order) ::

 

  • Carla Bley, Andy Sheppard & Steve Swallow – Trios

Steve Swallow has one of the most singular, recognisable voices in the history of the electric bass. This trio is possibly my favourite setting for his playing ever. So much space, and his melody work is astonishing. To hear him with a drummer, have a listen to Bartalk by John Scofield. An incredible trio record with Adam Nussbaum on drums.

 

  • Lee Konitz, Kenny Wheeler, Bill Frisell, Dave Holland – Angel Song

One of my desert island discs, everything about this is perfect. It was Bill Frisell that lured me in, but Dave Hollands playing here is exemplary – his tone!!! This has to be one of my favourite recorded bass sounds ever, and his solo on this (the first solo on the opening tune of the album, no less) is just perfect. The feel is beautifully relaxed throughout, particularly in the interplay between Dave and Bill during Bill’s solo. Incredible.

 

  • Duke Ellington And Ray Brown – This One’s For Blanton

Jimmy Blanton changed the way all of us think about about the role of the bass, that much is true. That he died at 23 is mindblowing and deeply tragic. I can’t imagine what he’d have accomplished had he lived. The Ellington band of the 40s that Blanton was a part of is one of the most amazing groups of musicians ever assembled. This One’s For Blanton is a fitting and rich tribute, and who better to take the bass role than one of the true greats who followed on from Blanton’s lead in making the bass such an important instrument in Jazz, Ray Brown.

I can’t embed this video, as it’s blocked on YouTube, but it has to be this track for the unbelievable solo intro, and the incredible elaboration of a standard walking line that Ray goes into – Sophisticated Lady: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZFTDxYV7ss

 

  • Paradoxicon – Gianni Gebbia And Michael Manring

This is a REALLY unusual record. for much of it, the sax is playing a more rhythmic role than the bass, particularly on the opening tune, where Michael is all texture and what groove there is is from Gianni’s sax. Some beautiful writing, and a wonderful space for Michael to explore.

 

  • Rickie Lee Jones – Pop Pop

This kind of breaks the rules, in that 3 of the tunes on the album have percussion on, but the rest of them are so great, and Charlie Haden does drummerless bass playing SO well that I had to include it. I also really wanted a great vocal record in here to show what can happen when you free bass up from the ‘groove’ obsession in a song context. Charlie Haden may well be my favourite drummerless bassist of all, every note he plays is exactly where he wants it to be. The economy of notes is counterbalanced by the obvious care and attention given to every part of every note. Astonishing.

 

Over to you – what are your favourites?

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5 Solo Bassists Who Shaped My Musical World

It’s a truism that most solo bass struggles in ‘pure’ musical terms. It’s so easy to get caught up justifying our ‘right’ to play solo by doing clever acrobatic things that the meaningful deployment of those acrobatics, or the avoidance of them for more musical ends gets lost along the way, and YouTube ends up as a fumbling bass-circus.

For this reason, there are very few solo bassists in my list of musical influences. But those who are there are towering monuments to what’s possible on this amazing instrument of ours, and their influence on my music and musical outlook is massive.

So, in no particular order, here’s 5 solo bassists who shaped my musical world: Continue reading “5 Solo Bassists Who Shaped My Musical World”

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2014 – A Year In Music

2014 has been another fun-packed year of musicking – solo gigs, collaborations, recordings and launching a subscription service to help people keep track of my rather accelerated release schedule 🙂 . In the UK and abroad, so much has been going on. So let’s grab a few highlights, eh?

The year started in traditional fashion, with a trip to California and a run of shows with Daniel Berkman and Artemis. After releasing the 10 album FingerPainting set in 2013, we’ve held off on releasing any of the 14 shows we did this year, but there’s some magic in there, and it’s in the queue for future release (though not all 14 shows of it, I learned my lesson last time 😉 )

I also did a duo show with bassist Steve Uccello while in California, that resulted in a couple of wonderful duets that will see the light of day very soon.

Oh and on the eve of my trip to California, I released What The Mind Thinks The Heart Transmits – my first ‘proper‘ ambient recording, which has proved very popular this year:

Continue reading “2014 – A Year In Music”

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Favourite albums of 2014…

Over the last week or so I’ve read a whole load of different sources talking about the decline in music. Either the music economy has tanked or pop music is dead, or no-one’s buying albums, or only posh people make music…

Well, as an alternative to that, I think I’ve bought more new music this year than any year ever. And SO much of it is fabulous. Here’s my list of favourites from 2014, in absolutely no particular order:

  • Up – Stanley Clarke

I probably wouldn’t have bought this, for the simple reason that I’m buried under amazing new music. But I was sent it to go along with an interview that I did with Stanley for Bass Guitar Magazine (coming soon!) and I’m SO glad I heard it, cos it’s fabulous. Here’s an artist growing older, still learning, still evolving and having a whole lot of fun. It’s a wonderful album.

This one I discovered after meeting White Empress’ fabulous bassist Chela Rhea Harper at the Warwick Open Day in Germany in September. A fantastic extreme metal band, formed by Paul Allender who used to be in Cradle Of Filth. It avoids all the purile shock-tactics-that-appeal-to-12-year-olds bullshit that CoF traded in, and instead contains some incredibly progressive writing, more riffs than most metal bands’ entire careers, and of course some killer bass playing. Love it.

  • Goliath – Steve Taylor & The Perfect Foil

I backed this on Kickstarter about 10 years before it came out (or that’s what it felt like) – SO long awaited. Anything Steve Taylor does is hotly anticipated round here, and Goliath delivers on every level. Amazing songwriting, production, lyrics, everything. Love it.

Another artist getting better and better with every album. I wasn’t sure how Rosanne could top The List, but I guess by applying the same level of care and attention to an album of all-original material (as opposed to the all-covers remit of The List) she gets even deeper inside her own work. It’s astonishing, deep, beautiful. A remarkable album.

I’ll buy anything Polar Bear ever do without even hearing it first, such is my trust in Seb Rochford’s taste and judgement. This one has a lot more Leafcutter John on that before, and it’s for the good, if you ask me. They get further from anything people would normally associate with jazz with every release, but perhaps deeper into the experimental progressive tradition of jazz at the same time. Wonderful.

Also a contender for gig of the year, Phronesis are outliers in my listening taste, as I usually like my jazz languid, ambient, mellow, ECM-ish… They play frenetic, complex, heavily written jazz, though tend to avoid walking bass and straight-up swing tunes. Jasper Hoiby is an astonishing bassist and band leader, and I love everything I’ve heard from them.

Comeback of the year? Quite possibly. A brave, stark, amazing record. Neneh’s voice and therefor words are so exposed here, and the two-piece band provide an amazing, beguiling context for her songs. Amazing.

‘Jonatha Brooke makes amazing album’ isn’t really much of a surprise, but writing an amazing musical about your mother’s journey into dementia is something that raises an eyebrow even from Jonatha. How does that work? Buy it and find out. Another collection of amazing songs. Every little thing she does is magic.

The 2nd extreme metal album in my list, and the 2nd one influenced by meeting the bass player at the Warwick Open Day. Nick Schendzielos is the latest in a distinct line of fretless players in extreme metal bands, and has carved out a sonic space for himself in the band that adds SO much to the sound of the band. Complex, heavy as shit, and with a great deal of light and shade. One of my favourite extreme metal albums ever.

Anything by Julie is going to be great, right? Right. In Marco, she’s found the perfect writing partner/foil. They compliment each other brilliantly, and Marco’s fretless alongside Julie’s signature riff ideas works perfectly. Fusion from the future.

  • Now – Gary Husband/Alex Machacek

I had SUCH high hopes for this, and it exceeded even those. Two musicians at the very top of their respective trees worldwide. Piano and elec guitar duets with just the right amount of additional manipulation from Alex. Love this so much.

Dan’s last project, Modular, is one of the greatest things I’ve ever bought on Bandcamp. So this was a must. And it’s great. A lil’ bit Frisell, a lil’ bit Torn, a big bit Phelps. Incredible instrumental guitar writing.

Another contender for metal album of the year – instrumental extreme metal, with a strong streak of classic rock harmony guitar running through it. The first of two great albums this year with Alex Webster on bass…

From the ashes of Little Fish comes Candy Says. Grown up disco pop perfection.

Ben channelling everything that was great about singer/songwriters in the 70s through the lens of the tracks that he sang lead on in Everything But The Girl. At least as good as you’d imagine that to be, possibly better.

About as mature and assured a debut album as you’ll ever hear. Acoustic singer/songwriter with just enough vaudeville/murder ballad/Nick Cave/Tom Waits-iness to give it an edge. Properly beautiful, and not even out yet 🙂

Jonas exploring further the intersection between improvised music, metal and indian music. With utterly stunning results.

  • Mira – Arild Andersen, Paolo Vinaccia, Tommy Smith

Sax, bass, drums. Spacious, exquisitely written and recorded, and by far my favourite Tommy Smith recording ever. Arild as amazing as ever. Includes the theme tune from Alfie. True story.

Lou’s vocals are SO refreshingly devoid of all the hystrionic fauxmotional melisma of every post Aguilera/Whitehouse female singer, it’s like a palette cleanser. Lamb do what Lamb do better than pretty much anyone.

Loud, angry, scary, dark, relentless. Pretty much everything you’d expect.

  • Black Messiah – D’Angelo

Album of the year? Quite possibly. An astonishing, audacious, near-perfect comeback, dropped at a days’ notice in mid December. Questlove and Pino have never sounded so great. Adore this so so much.

The all-acoustic version of this record was already one of my favourite albums of the last 5 years, but was never released. Andrew’s since taken it and added all kinds of other instruments, layers, production, and has lost none of the magic. He keeps making astonishing records. And there are a number of songs here that make me cry. So that’s good.

  • Roam – Trevor Exter

Trevor plays cello and sings. Here he does just those two things to stunning, world-beatingly great effect. Another contender for album of the year.

more amazing jazz that originates from the UK. Bassist Ruth Goller is one of my favourite bass playing musicians on the planet, and is also one of very few musicians whose presence on a recording makes it worth listening to purely due to her being there. A dizzying mix of heavy writing and heavy improv with some stellar guitar playing. And Ruth’s killer bass.

Cannibal Corpse’s only competition ever is their own back catalogue. They’re in a league of one. And this is definitely their best *sounding* record ever, and one of my favourites compositionally too. They just keep getting better. Which after 25 years as a resolutely non-progressive death metal band, is a truly unique and remarkable feat.

Imagine how great an album of two banjo players, one of them also singing, could possibly be, and multiply that. By six.

There you go. Something for everyone 🙂

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