haha:...id rather hear upright. ...electric bass, with its effortless position shifts, leads to players doing things that dont quite sound idiomatically correct.
Yeesh. I'm late to this thread, and reading the overall tone of it has saddened me.
The idea that the musical community that brought us innovative, genre-busting artists like Miles, Coltrane, et al, could have stagnated to the point that there are approved instruments that are considered to be "true to the idiom", or that there is a body of work that represents "classical jazz" and needs to be preserved, literally makes me want to hurl.
If someone ever suggested to me (on a jazz gig, at least) that I couldn't play with them because I had walked into the room carrying "the wrong instrument", I would know, immediately and instinctively, that I had never really wanted to play with them in the first place. I would also be convinced that no matter how skillful a player they might be, that they didn't really understand the first thing about jazz.
My attitude about this, comes straight from my earliest experiences as a musician. I first started gigging as a teenager in the early '70's. My first boss was my dad, who was a hot local jazz player at the time, doubling mainly on vibes and guitar.
We mostly worked with local players in their 50's and 60's, and their main source of paying gigs, was doing weddings. Their modus operandi was to play whatever the audience wanted until the crowd got a little drunk, and then to stick pretty much to bebop for the rest of the night.
Playing with those guys taught me volumes, but if I were to condense it down to just a few lines, it would look something like this:
- to swing as hard as I possibly could
- to develop a sophisticated, understanding of
what it means to be supportive
- to do my homework, and be ready for anything
- to be generous in sharing time and harmonic
space with other players
- to dig down deep and find something new, every
time I picked up my instrument
- to be adventurous in my improvisations, and by
extension, to not be afraid of failure
Note that not one of those lessons, had anything to do with the type of instrument played. Or even very much to do with the style of music played, for that matter.
My dad had pretty eclectic tastes, and would play with anybody that he thought had something interesting to say. We worked with electric accordion, vibes, pretty much all of the brass and woodwind family, electric organ and electric pianos, archtop and solidbody guitars, Chapman Stick, drums, congas, timbales, and I don't know what-all else. The only thing that mattered, was that everyone loved, understood, and could articulate the language of bebop, and that they improvised in an honest and original way.
I played in those circles for 15 years, and never once did anyone have anything negative to say about my being an electric bassist. They got on my case if I played too loud, or didn't swing, but they couldn't give a crap about what gear I used. If I could make it work in their context, that was all that mattered.
Those guys would have had a lot to say, however, about anyone they thought wasn't up to the challenge of being a jazz musician. They saw themselves as being on the vanguard of a music that had no boundaries and no limits. The only sin was to be boring, or to play something the same way twice.
To suggest that an instrument was too "new", or that it couldn't be bent to the will of the player and made to swing, was actually to make the shameful admission that either a.) you didn't have the chops to make it work, or b.) you didn't really understand what it means to be a jazz musician. Wasn't the whole idea to be on an adventure?
No offense to narud, but if anyone had ever suggested to one of those guys that they'd played something "idiomatically incorrect", the whole group would have immediately ganged up on him, and given him an atomic wedgie that he wouldn't soon forget. And then, they would have gently, lovingly tried to educate the offender to the freedom, the richness and the wide open skies that represent the world of jazz...
Really, really good, and Eddie does a good 'fretless P Bass' imitation
) sounded like he was coming from a place that was mindful of what jazz sounds like. electric bass, with its effortless position shifts, leads to players doing things that dont quite sound idiomatically correct.
i guess ive got a wedgie comin'!
