11 Great Bass Solos!

Several years ago I wrote a post about bass solos, called 'When Drums Stop, Big Trouble', which referenced a well known joke about bass solos and got into some discussion of bass soloing. I more recently wrote about the electric bass culture of virtuosity that has appeared in more contemporary times. To complete the now stereotype/cliched trilogy, here's a post which just simply celebrates great bass solos. I chose them in no particular order, and there are of course many more, both by the people mentioned here and many other great players.

Because it's a piece about bass solos, I've started some of these tracks at the solos themselves. But I would of course encourage you to listen to the pieces in full.


Eddie Gomez - Autumn Leaves

One of my favourite recorded bass solos. Gomez' style of playing is somewhat out of favour these days (though not with me...) - a lot of high register playing, and a low action. But I love his lyricism and the individuality of his sound - you'd know him anywhere. On this track he displays a ferocity of attack that's not often associated with him, but was a feature of his earlier playing with Evans. This track is a tour de force. Drummer Marty Morell's accompaniment is model of how to accompany a bass solo - intense, swinging, but not too loud.




Renaud Garcia-Fons - Baja De Guía

Renaud Garcia-Fons has created a bass language and sound all his own. Playing a five-string double bass, combining Spanish and Middle-Eastern influences in a very personal way, and applying his ideas to a superhuman technique on the instrument (the intonation!), he really is a one-off. Here he gets into a full blown Buleria for solo bass. Just extraordinary - listen to how he keeps the Buleria clave with his feet.....If you don't know him check out his music - he has some other great videos on Youtube.






Paul Chambers - Softly as in a Morning Sunrise

The difficulty with PC solos is which one to pick... Every solo he played defined bebop bass soloing. The time feel, the lines, the articulation. In my mind he is to bebop bass soloing what Sonny Stitt is to bebop saxophone, representing a kind of perfection that distils all the qualities of the genre into every solo.  I could have picked any of the dozens of recorded PC solos and had as good a representation of great jazz bass soloing as is represented by this. One of the all time greats.






Dave Holland - Mr PC

One of my biggest influences and of course one of the greatest living jazz bassists. The list of his achievements in bass playing and music in general is really phenomenal. Among those achievements would be the development of the idea of solo bass performance - both live and on record.  I wrote previously about 'Emerald Tears' , the ground breaking solo album he made in 1977 - it demonstrated a whole new concept of the bass as a solo instrument in its own right, one that didn't have to mimic a saxophone in order to have credibility in soloing. This is a live performance of 'Mr. PC' a piece dedicated by Trane to Paul Chambers and here given a classic Dave Holland workout where the whole instrument is used, the time is flawless and technique is pushed to the limit. Another giant.







Anders Jormin

Anders Jormin is another giant - literally and figuratively. Yet though he's a big man who plays a big instrument, he does it with extraordinary delicacy and finesse. His technique on the instrument is effortless and his playing has such an elegance to it. You can see it here, taken from this wonderful concert in the forest with Bobo Stenson's trio, where from the opening false harmonics to the beautiful chordal passages and deep lyricism, he sets up the following waltz beautifully. And what a sound.....






Michael Pipoquinha  - Incompatibilidade De Gênios

If you've read my post about current trends in electric playing you'll know that while I admire the extraordinary technique that's been developed by the younger generation of bassists, I'm often left wishing they'd play some decent music in which that technique is put at the service of the music. The young Brazilian bassist Michael Pipoquinha is someone who does exactly that. A phenomenal technician he also is a great improviser whose playing always reflects joy in every note he plays. I love this video, taken at a soundcheck somewhere, with the great Romero Lubambo, playing a classic Joao Bosco song. Incredible bass playing in every sense.






Niels Henning Ørsted Pedersen - Oleo

NHOP redefined what was possible technically on the bass when soloing in the traditional swing idiom. When he developed his right hand, three-finger technique he raised the technical level of upright bass soloing to undreamt of heights. In this video, recorded with Sonny Rollins and Alan Dawson, in 1965, NHOP more than holds his own with these two giants despite being only 19 years of age! He hadn't developed the three-finger technique yet and in a way I prefer this period where his youth and exuberance was allied to an already incredible technique, but not to the point where the technique distracted from the music. Completely burning!





Jaco Pastorius - Havona

There's not much more to say about Jaco that hasn't already be said. In his tragically short career he created a completely new way to play the electric bass and created great music to go with it. 'Havona' is one of the classic tracks where the instrumental playing and the subsequent music are of the highest calibre. It's a track known by pretty much every electric bassist worldwide for the past thirty years. All Jaco's great qualities are here - the sound, the groove and the fluid technique. Allied to these qualities are the lyricism which he so often displayed, (and is often unremarked upon), and his sense of humour. I've always loved the sneaky Stravinsky quote at the beginning of the solo.





Ray Brown - Things Ain't What They Used to be

Like Jaco - there's not much new you can say about Ray Brown at this stage. And when he's playing something like 'Things Ain't What They Used To Be', there really is nothing to say - it's all here in the music - the sound, the swing, the groove, the power......... (I said it anyway!)





Linda May Han Oh - Power Ranger

One of a clutch of great bassists on the contemporary jazz scene, I saw her play live recently for the first time, playing with Pat Metheny, and was blown away by the completeness of her playing. She really is the complete package for a modern jazz bassist and is a particularly strong soloist. What I love about her solo here is the way she deals with rhythmic motifs. The bass in jazz is ultimately a rhythm instrument and to use this aspect of it in soloing should be more common than it is. I really admire the way she takes this element and runs with it to create a really powerful solo. I know, having been lucky enough to have had the experience myself, that Joey Baron is one of the greatest drum accompanists to a bass solo, and you can hear that here too.




Mingus - Tensions

This may seem an odd statement, but I do think that Mingus is underrated as a bassist. His achievements as a composer and his notoriety as a controversialist has I think distracted from his incredible bass playing. I think the album 'Blues and Roots' has an unparalleled collection of great bass solos on it - these are in my opinion not just some of Mingus' finest solos, but some of the finest jazz bass solos ever recorded. Particularly the solo on 'Tensions' which has so many extraordinary features, like the way he pulls the string off the neck in the intro, accompanies his own solo, and finished with that great series of glissandos. Mingus was a bass giant, and let's never forget it!

The Beauty of Ambiguity

I love ambiguity. I love it in art of all kinds and in most situations in life. Looking at something, or listening to something that can be preceived in more than one way is something that's very attractive to me. I would much rather have my perception challenged rather than constantly confirmed, would rather be made to think about what I'm seeing, or listening to, or sometimes even what I'm eating, (food can be as ambiguously multi-layered as music or theatre, or literature), than knowing about it in advance. Certainty has its attractions of course - one doesn't want any ambiguity when one is getting on a plane for example, certainty wins hands down in that case, every time.

In general humans are more comfortable in a known environment than in an unknown one. There is a feeling of safety in the known, and in finding your comfortable place in any social situation. This is an evolutionary facet of our humanity and is a construct of our pack animal instincts. This also manifests itself in music, where the known is in general much more popular than the unknown. For much more on this subject, you can read this fascinating book - 'The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Live Without It', by Phillip Ball.

Much music that's popular around the world has little or no ambiguity in it. What you see, or in this case what you hear, is what you get. Which is fine for those that want that, but music which is not obvious gets a very raw deal these days. To some degree it always has, but currently the marketplace has such a stranglehold on popular music that even the limited amount of ambiguity and nuance that previously existed in popular music, has been eradicated as the A&R men and record labels of old have been replaced by institutions that have zero interest in the quality of the product that they host - such as Apple and Spotify. Never has the lowest common denominator been lower than it is now. When something as bland, predictable and dull as Ed Sheeran's music is feted by multitudes, then you know we are definitely in the era of the ordinary, where the obvious is lavishly consumed, and music that has any individuality and danger to it is resolutely pushed to the margins.

But despite its current unpopularity, ambiguity in music should be defended, and resolutely defended! Nuanced thinking, and listening is important, perhaps never more important than it is in these days of lies, spin, mindless consumerism and addiction to technology.

There are so many examples in art of ambiguity, features that make you think, that leave it up to your own imagination and personal outlook and experience as to the meaning of something. Neither in nor out, black nor white, happy or sad - it's this in-between world that is the most fascinating to me. When something can be seen in many different ways. Think of Kubrick's '2001', or David Mitchell's 'Cloud Atlas'. Or any art in which allegory is used. In any true world of ideas, ambiguity has to play an important role.

I was raised listening to modern jazz, and classical music written around 1880 and onwards, and I was exposed to ambiguous music from an early age, and I didn't hear pop music until I was 13 or so. I've been primed since a young age to appreciate music that could be heard in many different ways. Music can be ambiguous in several ways, but the most common would be harmonically or rhythmically.

Western art music has had ambiguity as part of its makeup even in its earliest manifestations as church music, and some of the harmonies from medieval times can be startling to the ear accustomed to the later codification of harmony in the baroque and classical periods. In the late 19th century the use of dissonance and clouding of key centres came to the forefront of contemporary classical music via Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky and Bartok. I'm not sure about including someone in this list that might seem to fit the ambiguous bill - Schoenberg. For me Schoenberg's most celebrated works move outside tonality to such an extent that the ambiguity is lost. In the same way that relentlessly consonant music can become cloying after a while, constant dissonance can become aurally monochromatic. For my taste you need the contrasting worlds of both consonance and dissonance in order to allow ambiguity full play in the music.

Here's a fantastic example of the unsettling effect that ambiguous harmony, and in this case tonality, can have on the listener. This is Bela Bartok's 'Boating' from Volume 5 of his Mikrokosmos. The naive childlike three-note figure of the opening is immediately questioned when the right hand plays in a completely different tonality to that of the left. Suddenly we are in a different world, where nothing is certain and one can hear the music in many different ways.




The nursery rhyme opening quality of the opening is challenged almost immediately and the result is unsettling. Of course this kind of ambiguity has long been used by film composers for horror and suspense soundtracks - a childlike song given ominous overtones by the use of dissonance in conjunction with consonance. Film composer's are no fools and have always appreciated the effectiveness of using musical ambiguity to create emotional nuance.

In this next example Coltrane takes the simple song 'Chim Chim Cheree' from Mary Poppins and takes it into a world never envisaged by the Sherman brothers who composed it. The opening see-sawing chords played by McCoy, and the polyrhythmic carpet created by Elvin set the scene for a glimpse of a much darker aural landscape than is the norm for this piece. And in blending the familiar with the unfamiliar in this way Trane allows us to experience a mysterious atmosphere that is just not available in the very consonant original.




As Trane's music evolved in the 60s he moved further and further away from any form of traditional consonance and again, for me, the ambiguity and mystery gets lost as the dissonance increases. We move from a world of either/or, to one of certainty - though admittedly the certainty that Trane was  proclaiming in his final years was far from traditional.

Another aspect of ambiguity that is found in this piece is that of rhythmic ambiguity. Elvin is  suggesting an underlying pulse of two and three simultaneously, while placing a triplet based tattoo on top of that. This polyrhythmic ambiguity is one that originates in much West and North African music, and is a feature of nearly all African-American music. But it is not always as explicitly stated as it is in 'Chim Chim Cheree', and this rhythmic nexus provides the listener with an additional enigmatic musical landscape to explore.

The three and two polyrhythm can be extremely unsettling at times. Here for example Karim Ziad - a drummer originally from Algeria, now living in Paris - performs 'The Joker', a piece based on the dance rhythms of North Africa and which uses this 3/2 contradiction to great effect, both in the underlying groove to the melody, (which itself always has a slightly off-kilter relationship to the groove), and in the drum breaks that open the piece and punctuate the melody. As listener you are constantly torn between the two rhythm and the three, and the way the three rhythm is subdivided and accented adds to the tension between both rhythmic poles.





Miles Davis was of course the king of mystery and ambiguity. And I think this reached its apogee in his music in the second great quintet, with Wayne, Herbie, Ron and Tony. And in the recordings of that group, 'Live at the Plugged Nickel' probably represents the pinnacle of this way of playing. But I'd like to use an example from one the studio recordings that ably demonstrates how well they used both rhythmic and harmonic ambiguity. This is 'Footprints', now of course a classic tune, almost cliched in how often it's played, and often badly played at that. But here it's at its freshest, and is creatively light years away from the usual repetitive, boring versions we are condemned to hear so often at jam sessions. It is after all a simple 3/4 minor blues, (albeit with a haunting melody), but here the quintet not only, via Herbie's comping and Miles and Waynes' solo lines, show a huge range of harmonic colour and contour, but also move between a three pulse and a four pulse with great agility, and sometimes are playing both at the same time, in a spectacular demonstration of how imagination can creatively expand even the simplest material





This period of jazz, with Trane and Miles, and others from this time, is for me the era where the full flowering of the use of ambiguity in both harmony and rhythm was at its peak. The fierce contradictions so often found in this kind of music became less pronounced in later decades, 80s fusion music definitely had a deadening harmonic effect on it, and the Young Lions movement harked back to the Hard Bop era where the music was perhaps more obvious. Perhaps the harmonic and rhythmic tensions in the music of the 60s and 70s was more appropriate to the political and social ferment of those times, and is less representative of the control freakery of our times. I must admit that I do find that a lot of contemporary jazz, while it has explored rhythm in new ways,  is often very dull harmonically - lots of static melodic minor harmony or else indie-rock influenced two or three-chord plodding. In the 70s we seemed to be at a point where harmony was pushed to chromatic breaking point, and sometimes did get broken and explode into the atonal. That moment where the tension between tonality and atonality, and between seemingly competing rhythms, becomes almost unbearable, this is where the beauty of ambiguity shines through the most.

I'm very conscious of this in my own music and here is an example of that. This is a through-composed piece, with no improvisation, based on a Chorinho - a Brazilian song form which is very consonant and based on typical cyclic chord movement. Performed here by Izumi Kimura, the Chorinho melody is repeated over and over, while a commentary takes place in whichever hand is not playing the melody. This commentary is completely at odds with the bouncy diatonic melody. The counterpoint to the melody is both rhythmically and harmonically at variance with the main theme throughout, and ones ear is drawn in different directions all the time.




That pull between the two polarities of consonance and dissonance, between the various rhythms, is the quality of ambiguity that appeals to me so much in music. Either or, this or that - we need more mystery in our lives, in our art, and definitely in our music - I'm searching for it all the time.....