Ron Carter on why he stopped playing electric bass

Can of worms opened. Thank you Dr. Cheese for another thread!

 

So he gave up EBG because he thought that to achieve a decent amount of skill on it to be competitive, he had to sacrifice his time on upright to such a degree that it would hurt his playing.

Okay, seems pretty noncontroversial to me. Happens all the time with other instruments as well. I'm just happy it didn't turn into the argument of EBG being a lesser instrument. Actually, the opposite happened.

 

I'm a history buff as well. Should've majored in it. Have some of your youtube lectures on my playlist. Gonna check you out Doc!

The human stories, and the 'what really went down' aspect of THIS one is definitely intriguing. Feel like I'll be doing a lot of that as I age ... unpacking the stories/history of (IMO) the greatest period of music in History: The 20th Century. Glad I got to see even a small part of it.

 

Wow! Major props to Mr. Carter for his insight!

 

I went and listened to that track, and yeah, there's 'Verdine' all over it.

Kind of like ... hope this isn't a derail ... Bernard Purdie's 'I played on the Beatles' claim, when every track has 'Ringo' stains all over it.

 

I have seen Verdine White in that '70s time frame...IMO, he was the bassist on those records. He had much technique & much funkiness. There's more than a few Verdine-isms throughout the studio & live cuts.
From what I've heard of Ron Carter's EB-ing...no way he ghosted on Gratitude.

 

He should have kept on playing.
Ron murders the shizzle on Gil Scott Heron's "pieces of a man".

Incredible record.

I really miss Gil......

Rip

 

Steve Swallow said the same thing, but the other way around.

He tried to play both for a while, but when he decided he would be an electric player, he gave up the double bass, because he couldn't do both at a high level.

 

If anybody ghosted Verdine on Gratitude it would have been Louis Satterfield, he was Verdine's mentor a great bassist himself and also in the EW&F horn section.

 

I always liked that Ron realised to get great on electric it requires just as much time as any other instrument. As I frequently say, some of the worst electric bass players I've ever heard are double bass players playing the instrument, and vice versa. They are different animals that play a similar function but they both require a lot of time and respect as their own instrument.

 

He's not wrong. They're two different instruments that happen to have the same tuning and fill the same role in an ensemble. You can definitely get work as a multi-instrumentalist (I met Probyn Gregory, who plays about 12 different instruments with Bryan Wilson; he gets plenty of work), but you won't be in the top tier on any of those instruments unless you're Stevie Wonder or Prince or something. It's the main reason I decided to put down the woodwinds and refocus on the bass when I came out of retirement a few years back. I have too much fun playing R&B on the BG to put it down, but I have no delusions about my skill set/adequacy there.

 

On (I believe) the Netflix Miles Davis "Birth of the Cool" documentary, they said that Miles asked Ron Carter to stay on with him when he disbanded his second great Quintet in the late sixties to begin his electrified fusion era with his groundbreaking "In a Silent Way"/"Bitches Brew"/"Tribute to Jack Johnson" trilogy and he turned him down because he didn't want to play electric bass. Some of the material Ron Carter recorded for CTI sounds to me like electric bass although I wouldn't stake my life on it.