This episode’s featured instrument is the bass guitar. The dark, sometimes dulcet tones remind me of whales and their slowly unfolding songs or conversations.
A memory: back in high school, my buddy and bassist Brian Kirk and I saw Neil Starkey perform at the Inman Park Festival in Atlanta. Neil is a bass legend whose double bass had such an impressive look that we dubbed it the whale. It seriously looked like it had barnacles on it. I think about that bass, whales, and my longtime friendship with Brian often when I play the instrument.
The first piece is an evolving loop – a fragmented melody played on the fretless bass is the source loop. Various tempi, small repeated samples of the loop, and pitch morph throughout the piece, sinking ever deeper into the depths.
The second piece is a duo with Blake Helton on drums and percussion from a performance with Crossover Movement Arts in 2009. The fretted bass guitar is prepared with an alligator clip and paper woven between the strings. It reminds me of traditional Gnawa music and the gimbri, a three-stringed lute.
The third piece is a soliloquy on fretless bass, this time both mic’d and run through some ambient-generating effects. I love playing in this mode either first thing in the morning or at the close of an evening.
It’s funny hearing the 2009 piece makes me realize that I had ideas on how to approach the bass guitar back in 2009, but it took many more years until I codified my own sort of style via the Sataras Quartet. It’s a sort of a what-if? scenario: what if Geezer Butler played the double bass in a free jazz group?
Colin Bragg 