| DOIDLYAHH?
I think it says something about a musician who can come up with the perfect onomatopoeic phrase to describe a musical event. Nicely done!
That Ron Carter sound on the Jim Hall duo album ("Alone Together") is where I start to drift away from him. It sounds cool when he's in an accompanying role, but it lacks something when it's out front (it is, though, a live recording). Or that could just be the fact that he seems to be wiggling his fingers rather aimlessly on his solos, er, I didn't just say that. (Most guitarists I know are very familiar with that album, and they all ask me "what's up with that 'doidlyahh doidlyahh' crap?" I have no answer, except to say "listen to the melody on 'Receipt Please' and that should tell you everything you need to know about what is and isn't there in Mr. Carter's melodic sensibility."
I hear the same thing on the studio recordings from the sixties: his sound in the mix is pretty much the ideal bass tone for my taste, but then when he (rarely) takes a solo the tone seems to be very heavy on the fundamental, and unclear, in a way that I don't hear from anyone else. (See Herbie's "Maiden Voyage" LP for an example.) It doesn't sound like the typical gut string sound OR like the steel string sound guys were getting at the time. Maybe it's the way his bass recorded...but there is one Wayne Shorter album with Reggie Workman that displays the same thing (maybe Rudy Van Gelder was trying out a new mic for a short period in the mid-sixties). The live recordings from the same time that I know (the Miles Carnegie Hall thing and the Plugged Nickel stuff) have, for me, the PERFECT bass sound combined with ideal musical choices, so who knows.
The evolution of Mr. Carter's sound has, in any event, perplexed many bassists in a way that I can't quite find a parallel to. Of course, he comes from a generation of bassists that saw such changes in technology and performance practice that the choices they made can be difficult to understand. I studied with Cecil McBee, who had a fat sound in the 1960s but by the time I studied with him had such light strings on his bass and such low action that when somebody stole the soundpost out of his bass when he left it in a "locked" closet at school over the summer (why would someone do that?) the instrument didn't seem to sound different to him, and he tuned it up (without the top cracking!) and played it at our lessons! (Um, don't try that at home; even if the top doesn't crack, the bass sounds like a$$, and your students will slowly back out of the room, as I did, and find a different teacher.) And when someone tried to force him to attempt to play unamplified at a gig, he exploded in rage and left the hall.
I'm sidetracking myself. Enough then... | 
