swingin so hard it hurts

Absurd. In a good way. Who is the bass player?

 

Thanks. He good.

 

I just recently discovered Revis this year and I'm loving his sound/groove.

I also managed to grab a lesson from him when he came through Omaha, and he was one of the most relaxed down to earth guys ever. he taught me so much in one hour and blew my mind with "simple" right hand and left hand technique stuff. I can't wait to see him again.

 

......ugggh. I suck.

wow.

 

Solo chops on bass are nice to have but if you can't lay it down you don't work.

If that guy never solos it wouldn't matter a bit. He plays tight and clean and relentlessly in the pocket.

 

Wow+1. Who's the drummer? He's astonishing.

 

Jeff "Tain" Watts

Do everything in your power to check that guy out.

And I can't get a great look, but I'm pretty sure it's Joey Calderazzo on piano. Great band.

 

Revis is great. I think it was a brilliant move to put a player like him in that band. Like Toad said, flashy solos are cool, but you couldnt of had Trane's band without somebody like Jimmy Garrison. We need more bass playing bass players I think. Tenor saxophone bass playing is cool too, though.

 

thanks for that. tons of fun.

 

That's a great clip. Revis is a horse! To me this means the first priority for bass has always been, and always will be "stayin at home" or holding down the bottom. You can have all the solo chops in the world but if you can't play in time and groove, what good are you to a group? Thanks for posting fingers!

 

Ooooh. That was fun. Frickin' Eric Revis. That's how you do it.

I saw Branford's band once out here with Kirkland.... that guy was amazing. Another one of my favorites, Rob Hurst, was the bassist. Tain was just levitating, as always.

It was kind of funny; it was an outdoor show at Turtle Bay, on O'ahu's north shore. First up was Pancho Sanchez' great salsa band, who performed to a large, happy, dancey local audience. Next was Freddie Hubbard, who was still pretty strong.... and as his set progressed (with its slightly more demanding music, from the listeners' standpoint), the crowd started thinning out, and the remaining audience started moving closer to the stage. So then Branford's band came out, and started playing pretty much at the level we see in this clip. WHOOOSHH.... probably 60% of the audience headed for the beach, the bar, the parking lot, whatever. So the rest of us are now converging on the stage from different areas in the crowd, and we're all cracking up. It was like a roster of all the jazz players from all the different Hawaiian islands, like we were meeting at some predetermined nexus of the universe. We all had to wonder; "Who's gigging tonight?" It was cool, because I don't get to hang with friends in the biz from the other islands that much unless we're working together. My wife was just laughing, rolling her eyes.

 

Holy #&%*!

I played some of those notes on my bass once, but it was totally by accident.

Suddenly I feel the need to practice for about a thousand years.

 

lil' sumthin'....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0SBayuWdOo

 

Hell yea. I'm diggin this dude.

 

What struck me is the contrast in how the band played with Branford and then with Redman. It is Branford's band and they play together constantly so when Branford was soloing, the band was like an organism. They breathed together. They phrased together. It wasn't Branford and a cool rhythm section; it was a unit. When Redman came up, there was an abrupt shift to soloist playing over a rhythm section. It was still good but it was something different and less unique.

Revis is a killer player. He's probably the best bassist for that band. There isn't room for a bass soloist anyway since whoever plays bass, plays unamplified next to one of the loudest drummers in jazz. And the band is really about intense group interaction anyway. It isn't about individual soloists even when someone is soloing.

When their last album was released, they were interviewed as a group in Down Beat and they, as a group, made fun of bassists who soloed calling them guitar wannabes. (Yeah, Ray Brown, Eddie Gomez, Scott Lafaro, Oscar Pettiford, Marc Johnson, NHOP, Gary Peacock, Stanley Clarke, Charles Mingus, Art Davis--what a bunch of hacky guitar wannabes...) I don't know how serious they were though. Sarcasm doesn't come across in print very well.

I do find that ones that put down bass soloists the loudest tend to be those that don't solo very well or at all, which makes their position somewhat weak. It's as if they have feelings of inadequacy and have to put down what they can't do to feel good about themselves. They use words like "flashy" with a negative connotation which implies bass soloists are shallow and, paralogically, as a consequence don't know how to or can't groove. I've never understood that logic when, in fact, exactly the opposite is true: most good bass soloists HAVE to be able to groove hard just to solo well. The best solos groove hard. You think it is easy to play streams of well chosen 16th notes in time? As bassists, we have to solo in almost metronomic time and play in tune while doing it. Unlike saxophonists and singers, who can float over the time, due to the nature of our instrument, we have to solo in the groove or doesn't sound very good. Most good bass soloists can groove their butts off. A very short list of examples: Ray Brown, Eddie Gomez, Scott Lafaro, Oscar Pettiford, Marc Johnson, NHOP, Gary Peacock, Stanley Clarke, Charles Mingus, Art Davis, Dave Carpenter, Scott Colley, Drew Gress, Avishai Cohen, John Patitucci, Ben Wolfe, Dave Holland, Brian Bromberg, Paul Chambers.

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