Tag: Solo Bass

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Monday night

Another fine gig – I thought the crowd was going to be a bit smaller given that it was a Monday, but once again we were over 35 (36, to be precise). The audience-vocal-percussion-loop track went very odd thanks to the jazzshark starting the loop with a couple of (albeit very accurate) dog barks. The sounds that followed were equally strange, and the whole thing went very odd. But it worked, and went down v. well. I’m getting into a bit of a stride with the show, which feels good (though apparently last night I slipped back into an old habit of twiddling on the bass with the sound off while I was talking – a bit distracting for the audience, and one that I thought I’d got out of… must try harder).

Flyering is becoming more fun, as more people stop to say they’ve had the show recommended to them by friends. Weird flyering moment of the day was when the owner of The Pleasance (huge venue complex on the fringe) came out to ask me not to flyer outside his venue. I was about to get all defensive and tell him it was a public street and I could do what I like, when he said I’m happy for you to go inside and flyer in the bar if you like’! What a nice man. The spirit of the festival, indeed.

Still haven’t got to see any shows. Tonight will be an interesting one in terms of how hard we have to keep working, given that the last two nights have had a ‘two for one’ ticket promotion running, and now we’re back to normal, so we’ll see if the numbers stay up, or if we drop back again.

Met a lovely lady in the Fringe Press office who will hopefully help point press peoples my way. I’ve not had any reviews so far at all, which is odd given how well the show is going. Must work harder to make that happen (if you’re a press peoples reading this, PLEASE COME TO THE SHOW!)

TAGS – , , , .

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Italy post no. 6

(written 24/7/05 10.45)

I’ve just arrived at the venue for todays, gig and it’s unbelieveable – it’s in the grounds of a huge chateau, known locally as ‘little versailles’ – beautiful gardens, an 18th century stately home, and a massive great covered venue in the gardens – huge stage, lighting rig. Ripe for some solo bass loveliness.

The range of acts playing is pretty broad for a bass-centric event – from me at the start, through to a big band playing some of Jaco’s big band stuff at the end, with Michael Manring as featured guest. It’s going to be a fun day.

As well as that, there’s a bit of a gear expo going on – lots of freaky looking high end basses, gadgets and amps galore. The problem with having a set-up that I’m as happy with as I am is that gear loses its appeal, unless it does the same thing only smaller.

Michael and I have been talking a lot in the last couple of days about how to reduce our processing setup down to a laptop and a handful of pedal controllers. The idea of taking two basses and one bag to gigs, especially once I get my powered Accugroove speakers, is sublime. I’m definitely going to start investigating what’s possible, and checking out possible pitfalls like latency. It’d open up all kinds of other options for loopage and processing too – being able to use the Ohm Boys filter live would be a dream, as well as being able to have the tail on a reverb or delay carry on fading whilst switching to a whole other channel to carry on playing, with different reverb and delay settings. Geek heaven!

Today is definitely going to involve a lot of sitting around not doing much, but I can’t think of a nicer place to be sitting around doing nothing in.

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Pavement art

Thanks to Not-At-All-Evil-Dann for sending me an email full of this guy’s art, Julian Beever is his name, and he does amazing perspective based artwork on the streets of Europe.

here are a couple of examples –

Check out some more of his work here – great stuff. I’m always inspired by artists thinking outside the box – being a solo bassist, you HAVE to think outside the box given that a) there’s no repetoir for the instrument, b) so much of what has been done solo on bass is horrible and c) most people think you’re mad, and will actively avoid the idea of solo bass, so you need to take them by surprise…

So when some crazy Belgian dude starts drawing cool perspective stuff on the streets of London, it inspires me to take my music elsewhere…

Soundtrack – Prefab Sprout, ‘Andromeda Heights’; Gillian Welch, ‘Time (The Revelator)’.

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terms to ease the conscience…

Just been reading a blog entry by the lovely gareth, in which he refers to ‘winning’ an ebay auction. Ebay themselves use the term on the page after the auction – ‘you’ve won!’ it proudly displays.

So, would someone tell me in what sense being willing to pay more than anyone else for a certain item is winning? Surely it’s just shopping? Does anyone do a victory lap round Sainsbury’s after laying out £100 on a week’s groceries? ‘yay, I won some fantastic organic food!!!’

Ebay is chance-inflected-shopping in the same way that the stock market is Ladbrooks for people in suits. ‘Investing’ in the stock market is just like having a flutter on the horses, only you have to buy the FT to follow the form instead of the Racing Post. Either way you’re throwing money at anything based on its ability to make you more money, not out of any kind of support for the enterprise involved, or any sort of sporting allegiance to the jockey or horse…

I was listening to a radio phone in on stock trading on BBC London yesterday, and at no point did anyone raise any kind of moral or ethical questions about the idea of investing in financial success without any concern for what the company actually does. When Chris Martin declared that ‘share holders are the great evil’ last week in the debate about how The new Coldplay album’s delay had dented the EMI share price, it was the first time I’d heard any kind of critique of the system on the news for years. Anyone questioning the rationale of the free market ideologues (FMIs) is painted as a mad commie (rather a commie than a FMI any day), and their critique dismissed as anti-progress or out of step with the times. Does anyone really think that a situation where any PLC is required by law to maximise the investment of it’s shareholders is a good thing?? This means that if a company wants to switch to using all recycled stationary in their offices, which would cost a bit more, they’d have to ballot their share-holders to be able to make the switch, and could be blocked, rather than being able to make ethical decisions in the work place. If they offer out to tender the production of a particular product and a ‘legal’ factory in the far east offers to make the stuff for less with worse workers rights and no unionisation, they are legally bound to go with the lower offer, again unless they ballot the shareholders.

So what can we do? I know various people who have with varying degrees of effectiveness bought stock in order to have a voice at AGMs. Turned up, highlighted particular human rights or environmental abuses and been able to change company policy (Tony Campolo, professor of Sociology at a Uni in Philadelphia, has written about this, but I’m not sure which book it was in…) That’s one way.

Or we can just support co-operatives, small businesses, family run shops, cottage industries, solo bassists… how did that last one creep in there????

If you haven’t done so yet, PLEASE read No Logo by Naomi Klein – a fantastic look at how all this stuff relates to branding in big companies. Beautifully written and very compelling.

How did I end up here, after starting a post to take the piss out of Gareth and his ‘winning’ on Ebay??

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Thoughts on Live 8

It was announced today that there’ll be a huge gig in Hyde Park on July 2nd called Live 8, to highlight the cause of the Make Poverty History campain, and put pressure on the G8 leaders meeting the week after in Gleneagles to make changes to our screwed up economic system that currently favours the rich over the poor, widening the gap between them.

The gig won’t be a fund raiser in the way that Live Aid was, it’s all about awareness and garnering public support for the changes. On the same day, there’ll be gigs in Paris, Rome, Berlin and the US. It’s all happening on the same day as the Protests in Edinburgh in the run-up to the G8 summit.

Which begs the question, why isn’t it happening in Edinburgh? People are already suggesting that up to a quarter of a million people are going to descend on Edinburgh for the weekend. Why host an event in London that could a) dent the attendance in Edinburgh and b) split the media attention? I’m all for gigs big and small that raise awareness of such issues, but the timing could have been better. Even having it on the Sunday would have been better, giving die-hards the change to hot-foot it from Scotland back to London.

Meanwhile, I was asked to play a gig in Edinburgh months ago, which has yet to be confirmed (looks unlikely to happen), and have now been asked to play one in London on July 2nd (sadly not in Hyde Park – I’m sure some solo bass noodling would provide the perfect antedote to overblown rock dinosaurs giving it earnest for hours on end).

As it is, I’ll probably still go to Edinburgh, minus bass gear. I’ve already planned to go to the protests, and on a much more selfish note, can stay on a day or two and see if I can sort out some promo for my Edinburgh show! Having said that, the London show does look fun – it’s organised by Filomena Campus, an improv singer I’ve done things with before, and the last gig we did together featured some fab players – Orphy, Dudley Philips, Roland Sutherland etc.

Hopefully the split in the focus of events on July 2nd won’t confuse people as to the aims, and somehow some kind of miracle will happen in the G8. Given the kinds of people the US have been putting forward for jobs in the UN and World Bank of late, I don’t hold out much hope for them to show any compassion to the poor – clearly making the mega rich even richer is a much higher priority than ending the trade inequity that leaves entire continents languishing in crippling poverty despite them being rich in natural resources.

I’ll stop now, I’m slipping into despair again…

Read the Guardian’s report on the announcement

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The end of civilization as we know it?

So I’m sat here, having a conversation with myself about why Kris Delmhorst isn’t a superstar – I’m listening to her album, ‘Songs For A Hurricane’, loving it, and trying to imagine why she isn’t the biggest thing in the singer/songwriter world. So, this is going on in my head, and I flick over to the BBC entertainment newsfeed in Thunderbird, and see that the new UK #1 single is the Crazy Frog ringtone. What the hell is going on with the world? A ringtone at the top of the singles chart??? The singles chart has been largely irrelavent for many a year, but this is pretty much the nadir of its descent into a Dante-esque new level of hell.

For starters, who the hell is buying it? OK, I know, it’s lil’ kids, downloading it, not thinking about the cost etc. etc. It’s still a nightmare. The charts have always been subject to the occasional hijack by things that have nothing to do with its normal constiuency – like every time Cliff has a hit, or when Robson and Jerome suddenly became one of the biggest selling acts of the decade with a couple of shitty karaoke versions of great songs just cos old ladies in their millions dashed out to buy their lame band-in-a-box-plus-drunk-pub-singer drivel.

But, ringtones?????????.

I now know why Kris isn’t a huge star, and I’m far less bothered by it than I was 10 minutes ago. I’ve not paid any attention to the singles chart for a decade, and I guess no-one else is really.

Chart-wise, the audioscrobbler charts are a much more interesting indication of what people are actually listening to, given that they log actual plays of actual songs on real people’s computers. So it’s a geek-chart, but a real chart nonetheless.

But the lesson is surely to give up listening to charts and mainstream radio for music suggestions, and go on recommendations and networks, and random links and of course, solo bassists.

Soundtrack – Kris Delmhorst, ‘Songs For A Hurricane’.

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Web links…

Links have obviously been the main traffic driving thing for the web ever since it began. You go to a page, the info there contains a link to somewhere else, and so it goes on.

I often get emails from musicians wanting to ‘swap links’ – they’ll put a link to my site on their if I’ll add one to theirs on my site.

Now, while I appreciate the thought process behind this, that’s never been what a links page has been about for me. A links page should tell you a lot about the person whose site it is. It’s one of the first places I head when I’m checking out a website – what are they into, who do they want me to check out, what’s important to them? Same with blogs – you can tell a lot about a blogger by the blogs they read.

So my links page is all about what I listen to, what I’m into, what I think is important, musicians and things I want to support, places to go to get more info about the stuff that’s already on the site. My blog links on this page are to blogs I read, not blogs I want people to think I read cos it would be cool, or links I’ve swapped with other bloggers.

There are very few people on my links page that link back to me – a few of the bassists do, some of the music equipment companies etc. They are they cos I dig what they do, not because I can get some more traffic out of them.

If you want to link to me, please do. If you’d like me to link to you, send a link over, I’ll check out the site, and if it’s something that becomes part of my webosphere, it’ll go up there, but not if you make linking to you a condition of linking to me.

So, head over to my links page, check out some of the musicians, or the political stuff, or just the fun stuff. It’s all things I like a lot.

Or just have a read of the links to other blogs on this page.

Soundtrack – Seth Horan, ‘Conduit’ (that’s another link to follow to check out a fabulous singing solo bassist); Spearhead, ‘Stay Human’; David Wilcox, ‘Into The Mystery’.

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Finally, Michael Manring's CD has arrived…

It’s was one of those questions that had taken on an almost Monty Python-esque level of absurdity; ‘when’s Michael Manring‘s album coming out?’ – for the last 18 months or so, I’ve been asked this a few times a week, sometimes a few times a day! I started off telling people whatever spurious deadline Michael had told me that week – ‘well, we just need to blah blah blah and it’ll be ready in about three weeks’ etc. etc. It got more and more laughable as Michael missed more deadlines than end-times loonies predicting the end of the world.

So I gave up answering, other than to say ‘your guess is as good as mine, why not email him?’. Hopefully his inbox wasn’t flooded with requests that he was no better placed to answer that I was…

Anyway, his launch gig was last week, and my copy of the CD, ‘Soliloquy’, arrived this morning. My 10 o’clock lesson was cancelled due to illness, which has given me time for a first listen.

OK, these are first impressions, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say when I’ve heard it 20 times (some time tomorrow afternoon, I suspect!), but this really is the album that Michael’s been needing to make for a long time, the one that all of us have been waiting for.

It’s all solo, no overdubs, bass guitar pieces. He uses a whole range of basses, and an even wider range of techniques and sounds, but it’s all live all him (we like the sound of that – actually that reminds me of Michael mention at a gig once that he was going to release a live version of Selene, to which I answered, ‘we like live’, and he came back ‘you like live!’ – this was not long after And Nothing But The Bass had come out)

Anyway, all the live faves are here – Selene, Helios, Greetings Earthlings, Excuse Me, Mr Manring, Makes Perfect Sense To Me etc. and a load of other previously unheard magic.

I’m sure Michael will be unhappy with it in some way – he’s got that kind of analytical approach to these things where there’s an ideal in his head that he’s constantly chasing, refining and I imagine never quite gets to. It’s what makes his gigs so exhilerating. The rest of us will hear this as his best album to date, by quite some margin, and be inspired and scared by what’s possible on solo bass.

It also comes with a beautifully produced 20-odd page book in PDF format (if you work in an office with a colour laser printer, you’re really in luck!) with tonnes of great background info.

I’ve got some practice to do – it’s inspiring ideas for me already.

It will, I’m sure be available in my webshop soon (though, as with most things Manring-esque, there’s no knowing when!), but for now, you can order it from Michael direct – best to email him via his website, if the details still aren’t there (they weren’t a few days ago – how does this guy make a living?????)

Soundtrack – Michael Manring, ‘Soliloquy’.

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The wisdom of Mo

England hasn’t produced that many solo bassists, or bassists who front their own instrumental bands under their own name. One of the few – one one of the finest in the world – is . Better known as a session player (Jeff Beck/Phil Collins/etc.), Mo has released a string of really really beautiful solo records, with his fretless bass as the primary melodic voice. He’s great. His last album, Time To Think is one of my all-time favourite bass-feature records.

Anyway, the reason for discussing Mo is that I found a cutting from an old copy of the sadly now defunct Making Music magazine. The cutting is a column that Mo wrote for them about session playing. Here’s an excerpt –

“There’s a certain mythology currently surrounding session work:

1 – It still exists as a career option
I’m afraid it doesn’t. The thrusting, vibrant scene of some years ago has, regrettably, gone. There’s still a fair amount of work around, but it’s almost entirely for artists and producers who happen to be friends – ie it’s very much ‘who you know’. Breaking in is harder than ever.

2 – You must be able to read music
It helps to read and is, on occasion, vital, but for many gigs you don’t necessarily need that particular skil. You must, though, be able to create a bassline from a chord chart and , in some cases, no chart at all – ie your musical ‘ear’ is everything.

3 – You mustn’t contribute ideas to a song but just play the written part
This is nonsense: it’s quite possible both the producer and the artist haven’t a clue what bass does or how it does it and are desperate for your expert input. Een a written line should be scrutinised in case you can improv on it.”

Wise words indeed. Certainly true in my case – all the session work I’ve had has been through friends and chance encounters, not some marvellous mythological network of agencies and management.

Soundtrack – , ‘Music Has The Right To Children’.

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fairwell, tooth.

A trip to the dentist this morning resulted in me coming home with one less tooth in my head than I had when I arrived – how come they take my teeth and then charge me £45 for the priviledge? surely they should pay me for my lovely knackered tooth!

Anyway, there’s now a gaping hole in the back of my mouth where said tooth used to be… it’s been broken for a long time, but now there’s just a space. Fortunately it’s far enough back for me not to end up looking like some kind of solo bass Shane MacGowan (thanks for that mental image, Evil Harv).

So I’ve been eating lots of ice-cream today, as instructed by my dentist. That’s the kind of prescription I like! ‘Take two scoops, 9 times a day’.

Teaching this afternoon was fun, trying to explain bass-ness while not dribbling blood and bits of gum and jaw-bone down myself. ewwwwww

so now I’m sat here, with an empty tub of Haaggen-Dazs in front of me and a dull ache in my jaw (from both the monster injection I was given and the tooth being dug out – that’s got to do some muscle damage…)

Still, I’ve got Jonatha Brooke’s gig at the Betsy Trotwood tomorrow night to look forward to! yay!

Soundtrack – , ‘Hearts And Bones’; , ‘Big Dreams And The Bottom Line’; Peter Gabriel, ‘So’; , ‘Plumb’.

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