Double Bass The New Standard

[Damon Rondeau]

"In hearing unknown new music, surprise and excitement are most important. Music is not a static art: it is constantly born anew."-Toru Takemitsu

This quote coming (I presume) from a member of a culture that revels in the almost ritualistic pursuit of fine ancient fine art: Noh theater, haiku, painting, etc.

"New" is good, but it ain't everything. If that's the only criterion someone is using as an aesthetic yardstick, then I say it's poverty-stricken and closer to a fetish than it is a sensible artistic world view.

Besides, it's a horribly inefficient use of time: you gotta shuck a lotta bad oysters before you find the "new" pearl that turns you on.

 

[Jason Sypher]

No, you're right I tend to be cynical even though it's never beneficial. Maybe if I'd pursued composition I'd be thinking differently but very broadly defined I'm fundamentally a blues musician and "new" for its own sake doesn't seem as important as trying to express who I am as an individual through improvised melody. I have a hard time attaching value to newness...I'm really not sure what it means. If I were to immerse myself in the study of pygmy nose flute music my bass playing might sound new to you while a pygmy nose flute master might hear it as the same old sh!t from some tall white boy who's missing the point. Does that make any sense?

A blues musician? Well you are in one of the most narrow-minded traditions in terms of creating new music. I know, I lived in New Orleans and submerged myself in a world where all that mattered was the blues and everything else was complete crap. There are a lot of worlds like that, including the "new music" world. I purposefully did that to learn something that I thought was very important but I eventually had to leave it because the people that I surrounded myself with had a very narrow viewpoint and I suffocated. I've done this many times in many traditional music worlds. It's amazing how small people can get for the sake of feeling safe. After I left NOLA I discovered a lot of music that I had missed. New for it's own sake is valid and not for everyone but I think many pursuing "new" music are trying to express themselves through sound just as you are in the blues. I'm not as rigid as Damon but I really understand his perspective. I don't want to fight the good fight the same way he does. I've got a blues gig tonight and I'm totally looking forward to it. It will be forgotten and I know that. In the meantime I will constantly pursue new sounds and forms of expression in my practice room and the stand to see what I can come up with. I know I can make some music that is my own creation and is new, both inside and outside. I think, even as a blues musician, you should pick up the bass everyday and try to play a new sound. As my teacher used to say "you bought the whole bass, now play the whole bass"

 

[mtto]

Lester Young still sounds new to me.

Warne Marsh sounds like he bypassed new and went straight for the future.

If you are committed to improvising, true improvising, then you are always striving for new, even when you're playing rhythm changes, the blues, Radiohead or "free".

 

[notabene]

Old hat and new (innovation) are relative terms, and there are no black and white, but only shades of grey in using the concepts.

Beethoven wrote until 1827. Schoenberg wrote Pierrot Lunaire in 1912. So, in time, Schoenberg was closer to Beethoven than he is to us. Yet in the minds (ears) of many, he defined the beginning of "modern".

I was living in New York in the early, post LSD, 1960s when Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Sonny Murrey, Archie Shepp,, and, for that matter, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, et al, were trying to fight their way out of perceived cliche's to the new.
That was almost 50 years ago. And they created in their struggles what became a language and idiom based on conscious iconoclasm. And it became, in a certain sense, a cliche' also. It was, and is, a brave struggle to try and create newness. But it will always become, at some point, old hat. The attitude of exploration seems more important than the actual idiom.

So, if Sonny Rollins could play St. Thomas, and have it be (great) jazz, not by idiom, but by attitude, why cannot current "tunes" be the bases, structural skeletons, of playing with the same sense of exploration and adventure as a 1960's Wayne Shorter tune (40 years old), or a 1940's Richard Rogers tune?

All that being said, I love playing "New York State of Mind", "Still Crazy After All These Years" "Just the Way you Are" eg because they are great tunes. I enjoy playing "Blackbird" because it is the one Beatles song that doesn't sound maudlin to me. I enjoy playing the Grateful Dead's "Ripple" and "Shakedown Street" because in an earlier incarnation as a sax player I recorded with the Dead, and therefore feel connected. Similarly "It's A Family Affair" and some other Sly and the Family Stone tunes. Time served, so they are "authentic" to me. Of course they are reharmonized enough to be interesting TO ME. But, because, in my neck of the woods, they are recognizable, audiences seem to enjoy them. I certainly do, or I wouldn't play them. No pandering here.

I wish that I could do "free improv" with the same players that I can make money with, playing music that unspecialized audiences seem to relate to, but it seems a special idiom. And I believe it to be an idiom, like bop, post bop et al.

Steven

 

[beggar98]

Lester Young still sounds new to me.

Warne Marsh sounds like he bypassed new and went straight for the future.

If you are committed to improvising, true improvising, then you are always striving for new, even when you're playing rhythm changes, the blues, Radiohead or "free".

Amen. The tune is what you make it. Ornette and Haden did a pretty mean job with a sitcom theme song, "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" on Soapsuds Soapsuds. I think Christian Scott's take on Thom Yorke's (of Radiohaead) "The Eraser" is one of the better jazz-covers-rock songs I've heard recently, possibly because Scott is one of the best young players I've heard. The potential is there, and in the right hands it can be pretty interesting.

 

[anonymous122511]

A blues musician? Well you are in one of the most narrow-minded traditions in terms of creating new music. I know, I lived in New Orleans and submerged myself in a world where all that mattered was the blues and everything else was complete crap. There are a lot of worlds like that, including the "new music" world. I purposefully did that to learn something that I thought was very important but I eventually had to leave it because the people that I surrounded myself with had a very narrow viewpoint and I suffocated. I've done this many times in many traditional music worlds. It's amazing how small people can get for the sake of feeling safe. After I left NOLA I discovered a lot of music that I had missed. New for it's own sake is valid and not for everyone but I think many pursuing "new" music are trying to express themselves through sound just as you are in the blues. I'm not as rigid as Damon but I really understand his perspective. I don't want to fight the good fight the same way he does. I've got a blues gig tonight and I'm totally looking forward to it. It will be forgotten and I know that. In the meantime I will constantly pursue new sounds and forms of expression in my practice room and the stand to see what I can come up with. I know I can make some music that is my own creation and is new, both inside and outside. I think, even as a blues musician, you should pick up the bass everyday and try to play a new sound. As my teacher used to say "you bought the whole bass, now play the whole bass"

When I said blues I said "broadly defined" which you've completely and utterly ignored. That is merely the improvising tradition I'm coming from through jazz, rock, R&B. I'm not stuck there as you seem to have supposed calling me a "small person". You sure are making a lot of assumptions.

You've also ignored my having said previously I believe seeking the new is the worthiest of pursuits. And you've ignored the example I gave of "new" being purely a matter of personal perspective.

Do you believe that "new" is clearly and universally definable? What exactly makes my in the moment improvised treatment of a Pearl Jam song potentially any less "new" than anything else? Don't mistake idiom for intent.

 

[Jason Sypher]

Jeez, I'm sorry. I guess I was projecting my own story onto yours. I'm not calling you a small person that's also a stretch if you read what I actually wrote.

 

[anonymous122511]

Jeez, I'm sorry. I guess I was projecting my own story onto yours. I'm not calling you a small person that's also a stretch if you read what I actually wrote.

I was about to change that "called" to "implied" but ya beat me to it.
Don't get me wrong, I intend to play something new every time I play. I guess what I'm wrestling with these days is trying to understand the difference between my perceived limitations and those that actually exist.

 

[J. Montgomery]

 

[damonsmith]

What exactly makes my in the moment improvised treatment of a Pearl Jam song potentially any less "new" than anything else? Don't mistake idiom for intent.

Pearl Jam is/was just aweful. I might have problems with a lot of pop music but it isn't hard to see why people love Nirvana and Radiohead - but Pearl Jam. Yuck.

I think intent might be key here. The intent behind playing a Pearl Jam tune isn't going to be to make something new or interesting.
As it has been said that new and even interesting isn't everything and I agree. I don't have a problem with playing historical music.
I don't have a problem with people playing music for sentimental, crassly comercial, or ironic reasons, either - I am just not interested in hearing it and I don't want to pretend it is something it isn't.

Nobody is going to change anyone else's mind here, but I think it shows there is going to be a wide range of "reception dynamics" to engaging in this activity.

OK, now I am going to go teach a bass lesson and go hear the Houston Symphony do Led Zepplin (seriously!).

 

[beggar98]

I am just not interested in hearing it and I don't want to pretend it is something it isn't.

OK, now I am going to...go hear the Houston Symphony do Led Zepplin (seriously!).

Hmmmm... I'm confused...

 

[damonsmith]

Hmmmm... I'm confused...

Me too! But the tickets are free and I have yet to hear the symphony here yet!

 

[anonymous122511]

Pearl Jam is/was just aweful. I might have problems with a lot of pop music but it isn't hard to see why people love Nirvana and Radiohead - but Pearl Jam. Yuck.

I wouldn't know as I've never really listened to Pearl Jam. I did regularly play a couple of their songs with a guitarist doing apres ski gigs though and I viewed them as vehicles to play chordal melodic pads that I seriously doubt had much to do with the original recordings. Anyway you completely missed my point. Change "Radiohead" (another band I haven't listened to) or"Alvin and the ****ing Chipmunks" for "Pearl Jam" and that point doesn't change.

I think intent might be key here. The intent behind playing a Pearl Jam tune isn't going to be to make something new or interesting.

Intent is everything.
Stop.
Really think about that for a second.
Intent. Is. Everything.
Even if you don't come to understand that you have no business passing judgment on my intent. Furthermore not having heard me you have no foundation from which to do that. So why are you doing it? I don't get it.

 

[Beginner Bass]

I think that for all of this, there is one imprtant question that must be answered before all this talk of superior compositions and whatnot. That question is, what do you mean "Better music." Can we really quantitate so sujective a measure?

 

[damonsmith]

I think that for all of this, there is one imprtant question that must be answered before all this talk of superior compositions and whatnot. That question is, what do you mean "Better music." Can we really quantitate so objective a measure.

Agreed. The whole thread needs to be taken with a big IMO.
I am more into rock music now than ever, I listened to Meat Puppets "Huevos" today, I use "Come as you are" all the time in bass guitar lessons to teach leading tones and use of double stops. If playing Kasmir can get a kid to forcus on his left hand more than Simandl I am happy spend part of the lesson on that (we do, of course, get back to Simandl!). When I got my acoustic bass guitar a few years ago I sat around playing minutemen and violent fems tunes,
I heard Mike Watt's new opera live last month and have been listening to his work a ton since.
I just specifically strongly dislike the New Standard trend.

For all the reasoning I have put forth the bottom line is that it just always feels/sounds gross to hear it done (IMO), and only gets worse as the trend goes on.

I think like mustaches, mullets, fishmann pick ups and other trends that get out of hand it may someday seem fresh again but not for a long while. It really seems to need a LONG rest.

Like any material, in the right hands it should be possible for it to be great but it just does not seem to happen.

 

[Don Higdon]

I think that for all of this, there is one imprtant question that must be answered before all this talk of superior compositions and whatnot. That question is, what do you mean "Better music." Can we really quantitate so objective a measure.

Subjective.