Today, it's Taras Prodaniuk. Tomorrow it might be whoever I listen to, and think "that's some tasty stuff". Or not.
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Who's everyone's favorite bassists?
- Thread starter TristanFunky
- Start date
Oh, derp, how could I have forgotten to include Bill Laswell?
Definitely an iconoclast, and sometimes more abrasive than cooperative, but man, when he decides to lay down a groove it is deep and solid and feels like it came from the center of the planet and has its own gravity. If he'd only ever played on Material's Memory Serves and his debut Baselines he'd be one of my favorites, but his work on Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" and Peter Gabriel's "Excellent Birds" absolutely sealed the deal for me.
How about Last Exit? Granted, it's pretty outside manic stuff. Then there's Massacre.
That is my favorite projects that Bill Laswell has been a part of.
Mind to avoid confusion the free/avantgarde jazz band "Last Exit", not the fusion jazz band of the same name, and the experimental rock band "Massacre", not the metal band of the same name.
I actually believe I discovered Bill Laswell, through a live video performance of Last Exit, as far as I remember searching Peter Brötzmann material, after having heard "Machine Gun" with his Octet, and I wasn't disappointed.
To this day one of my favorite YouTube live performance videos.
I believe the same live concert that became the material for their self titled debut album.
Last Exit is like an all stars free/avantgarde jazz band, all the members are absolute legends, it is absolutely ferocious, and they are all some of my favorite players of their respective instruments.
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It's too bad that guitarist Sonny Sharrock didn't get deservedly wider recognition in that field, but Laswell gave an effort to make it so with all those collaborative projects of his, Praxis and so on. I could barely keep up, plus all those related Golden Palominos releases. That was such a golden age of musical collectives. Also similar was Power Tools, with Melvin Gibbs on bass, Bill Frisell on guitar(far from his understated style, he managed to freak out often), and Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums.
Sonny Sharrock is pretty highly acclaimed and recognized in free/avantgarde jazz circles, as a ground breaking and unique voice, but no, I suppose his playing style was too uncompromising radical and abrasive to really reach wider public acclaim.
Also Bill Frisell was more experimental (suppose you could still claim it is, at least he has a very unique style) and relatively wilder (relatively to his not very wild personality, to say the least, and general almost ethereal playing style and voice on the guitar) earlier in his career, he was part of John Zorn's "Naked City" project as well, but he remains one of, if not the number one, favorite guitarists of mine, what he does on a guitar is just absolutely astonishing beautiful, and I love pretty much everything he has made or featured in/on.
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too many bassists to list. some off the top of head faves: stanley, entwhistle, casady, jack bruce, pallidino, ray brown, chubby jackson, pastorius, jamerson, ron blair, mcc, both tom kriss and dale peters, mel schacher, john seigler, tom hamilton, graham maby, rob grange, joe osborn, prestia, doyle holly, louie johnson, larry graham, esperanza.
True, but overall he's better known for his spacey, chorused sound; him going off the deep end is very overlooked. I caught the band with Petra Haden a couple of times, amazing shows.
Power Tools' debut album Strange Meeting remains one of my all time favorite desert island discs, some of the most emotionally visceral music I have ever heard in my life...but despite that, Melvin Gibbs has never managed to eek his way into my personal list of favorite bassists. He's obviously responsible in a significant way towards making that album so powerful (he even wrote a good chunk of the material), yet something about the bass playing always struck me as being a bit less than what it could have been.
I've enjoyed hearing Gibbs' work in other bands (e.g., Black Rock Coalition, Rollins Band, Decoding Society, whatever that retro-fusion group with Vernon Reid and Wil Calhoun was called) and never doubted his skills on the instrument...but his bass playing just doesn't speak to me for some reason.
I saw Mr. Frisell's band in concert ten days ago. No bass of any kind but simply astonishing music. A pretty mind-blowing experience.
Tiran Porter
Jamerson
Pete Sears
John McVie
Duck Dunn
Carl Radle
Sting
Laura Lee Ochoa
Nick Jameson was the producer in Foghat's Fool For The City and played bass on the album. He co-wrote my favorite song from the album. And it might be my #1 favorite bass lines in a song.
Jamerson
Pete Sears
John McVie
Duck Dunn
Carl Radle
Sting
Laura Lee Ochoa
Nick Jameson was the producer in Foghat's Fool For The City and played bass on the album. He co-wrote my favorite song from the album. And it might be my #1 favorite bass lines in a song.
