Good points on bass selection, Strongbow! BUT.........
I don't understand your remarks about "90%" of bluegrass bass players.......
Those 90% are the people that are keeping the music alive by playing it everyday for freinds and family!
The other players you mentioned are seasoned professionals who do a damn good job at making records and setting standards for other players to strive for. Setting a good example for others to study. And the "90%" make it possible for that other "10%" to have a great job.
But I think that the music would live on without the "10%", simply because the MUSIC is much bigger and more important than the music BUSINESS. Wouldn't you agree? Or maybe I've got it all wrong.{QUOTE]
Naaahhhh....actually, I don't agree with you. You don't have it entirely all wrong, either. But the deal is that in that genre there are entirely too many amateur-level pickers out there who are only too willing to give away their music in exchange for peanuts, tips and beer, relegating the music to a second class status. Its the most un-organized and un-professional musical genre in existence, making it extremely difficult for the "seasoned professionals" to eak out a living-- thus also making it among the most cut-throat of musical environments for those "seasoned professionals." I guess it was Tom Wolf who wrote that "music is a shallow money trench, filled with pimps and thieves-- then there's the down side." Well, that applies particularly well to bluegrass music. My second beef is that a surprisingly large portion of the bluegrass world insist that bass players are there to be seen and just felt--but never heard. They'd have a cat if the bassist tried anything other that 1-5, 1-5, 1-5 etc etc ad nauseum. I believe this comes from an in-bred lack of exposure to any other legitimate forms of music, and closed minds. What a drag to run into a bunch of rubes like that. There are reasons the music only rarely reaches out to a wider audience, and that only a handfull of specialty radio stations play it. Its always been a casual folk-art, undisciplined and unprofessional, and it always will be. But when you are a freelancer you have to be able to fill any kind of call, so you put up with the attitudes and lack of professionalism sometimes to fill an empty date and keep those bologna sandwiches on the table. I'm glad you love the music-- I agree with where you're coming from: the right combination of accomplished players can quickly "move" an audience, and that is a tribute to the power of American acoustic music....but those creative moments are rare. Overall, the whole scene tends to be unprofessional and thus it is the musicians themselves who invite exploitation by music buyers...Most full time and even part-time professional bluegrass bands are losing money on every date as a result of these conditions...... In my market (DC & Baltimore metro area) its a fact that jazz and bluegrass are strange bedfellows. DC is arguably the Second City of Jazz; at the same time DC is/was the bluegrass capital of the US and has thousands of pickers living there. You'd have to work about 3 bluegrass dates to earn the same bread you'd make if you are called on one jazz date. So even in the "capital city of bluegrass" its a second-class genre.
