Nathan Harrell East (born December 8, 1955, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a jazz, R&B and rock bass player and vocalist. East holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music from the University of California, San Diego (1978). He has recorded, performed and co-written songs with performers such as Eric Clapton, Joe Satriani, Phil Collins and Stevie Wonder.
Showing posts with label Bass Guitar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bass Guitar. Show all posts
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Virtuosos (Bass) Abraham Laboriel and Lee Ritenour
WIKIPEDIA
Abraham Laboriel, Sr. (born July 17, 1947) is a Mexican bassist of Garifuna descent who has played on over 4,000 recordings and soundtracks.[citation needed] Guitar Player Magazine described him as: "the most widely used session bassist of our time".[citation needed] Laboriel is the father of drummer Abe Laboriel Jr. and of producer, songwriter, and film composer Mateo Laboriel.
Laboriel was born in Mexico City. Originally a classically trained guitarist, he switched to bass guitar while studying at the Berklee School of Music. Henry Mancini encouraged Laboriel to move to Los Angeles, California and pursue a recording career.[1] Since then, he has worked with artists as diverse asDonald Fagen, Lee Ritenour, Christopher Cross, Larry Carlton, Dave Grusin, Andy Pratt, Stevie Wonder, Hanson, Barbra Streisand, Al Jarreau, Billy Cobham, Dolly Parton, Elton John, Ray Charles, Madonna, Paul Simon, Keith Green,Carlos Skinfill, Alvaro Lopez and Res-Q Band, Lisa Loeb, Quincy Jones, Leo Sayer, Russ Taff, Engelbert Humperdinck, Andy Summers, Umberto Tozzi, Ron Kenoly, Rabito, Johnny Hallyday, Crystal Lewis, Lalo Schifrin,Herbie Hancock, Chris Isaak, Paul Jackson Jr., and Michael Jackson. When Laboriel recorded his three solo albums (Dear Friends, Guidum, and Justo & Abraham), he recruited a cast of musicians that included Alex Acuña, Al Jarreau, Jim Keltner, Phillip Bailey, Ron Kenoly, and others.
Laboriel was a founding member of the bands Friendship and Koinonia. He plays live regularly with Greg Mathieson, drummer Bill Maxwell, and Justo Almario. Abraham is now in the band Open Hands with Justo Almario, Greg Mathieson, and Bill Maxwell.
In 2005, Abraham was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music by the Berklee College of Music.
Virtuosos (Bass) - Charles Mingus
WIKIPEDIA
Charles Mingus Jr. (April 22, 1922 – January 5, 1979) was an American jazz musician, composer, bandleader, and civil rights activist.
Mingus's compositions retained the hot and soulful feel of hard bop and drew heavily from black gospel music while sometimes drawing on elements of Third stream, free jazz, and classical music. Yet Mingus avoided categorization, forging his own brand of music that fused tradition with unique and unexplored realms of jazz.
Mingus focused on collective improvisation, similar to the old New Orleans Jazz parades, paying particular attention to how each band member interacted with the group as a whole. In creating his bands, Mingus looked not only at the skills of the available musicians, but also their personalities. Many musicians passed through his bands and later went on to impressive careers. He recruited talented and sometimes little-known artists whom he assembled into unconventional and revealing configurations. As a performer, he was a pioneer in double bass technique.
Nearly as well known as his ambitious music was Mingus' often fearsome temperament, which earned him the nickname "The Angry Man of Jazz." His refusal to compromise his musical integrity led to many on-stage eruptions, exhortations to musicians, and dismissals.[1]
Because of his brilliant writing for mid-size ensembles—and his catering to and emphasizing the strengths of the musicians in his groups—Mingus is often considered the heir apparent to Duke Ellington, for whom he expressed great admiration. Indeed, Dizzy Gillespie had once claimed Mingus reminded him "of a young Duke", citing their shared "organizational genius."[2]
Although Mingus' music was once believed to be too difficult to play without Mingus' leadership, many musicians play Mingus compositions today, from those who play with the repertory bands Mingus Big Band, Mingus Dynasty, and Mingus Orchestra, to the high school students who play the charts and compete in the Charles Mingus High School Competition.[3]
In 1988, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts[4] made possible the cataloging of Mingus compositions, which were then donated to the Music Division of the New York Public Library[5] for public use. In 1993, The Library of Congress acquired Mingus's collected papers—including scores, sound recordings, correspondence and photos—in what they described as "the most important acquisition of a manuscript collection relating to jazz in the Library's history"
Virtuosos (Bass) - Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, Victor Wooten
WIKIPEDIA
Stanley Clarke (born June 30, 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American jazz musician and composer known for his innovative and influential work on double bass and electric bass guitar as well as for his numerous film and television scores. He is best known for his work with the fusion band Return to Forever, and his role as a bandleader in several trios and ensembles.
Marcus Miller (born William Henry Marcus Miller Jr., June 14, 1959, Brooklyn, New York) is an American jazz musician, composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist.
Miller is best known as a bassist, working with trumpeter Miles Davis, singer Luther Vandross, and saxophonist David Sanborn, as well as maintaining a prolific solo career. Miller is classically trained as a clarinetist and also plays keyboards, saxophone and guitar.
Victor Lemonte Wooten (born September 11, 1964) is an American bass player, composer, author, and producer, and has been the recipient of five Grammy Awards.[1]
Wooten has won the "Bass Player of the Year" award from Bass Player magazine three times in a row, and was the first person to win the award more than once.[1] In addition to a solo career and collaborations with various artists, Wooten has been the bassist for Béla Fleck and the Flecktones since the group's formation in 1988.
In 2008, Wooten joined Stanley Clarke and Marcus Miller to record an album. The trio of bassists, under the name SMV, released Thunder in August 2008 and began a supporting tour the same month.[2]
Wooten was also a judge for the 4th annual Independent Music Awards to support independent artists' careers.
Virtuosos (Bass) - Charlie Haden with Pat Metheny
| Charlie Haden |
Born in Shenandoah, Iowa, Charlie Haden began his life in music almost immediately, singing on his parents’ country & western radio show at the tender age of 22 months. He started playing bass in his early teens and in 1957, left America’s heartland for Los Angeles, where he met and played with such legends as Art Pepper, Hampton Hawes, and Dexter Gordon. In 1959, Haden he teamed with Ornette Coleman to form the saxophonist’s pioneering quartet (alongside trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins). In addition to his still-influential work with Coleman, Haden also collaborated with a number of adventurous jazz giants, including John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, and Keith Jarrett, In 1969, Haden joined forces with pianist/composer Carla Bley, founding the Liberation Music Orchestra. The group’s self-titled debut is a true milestone of modern music, blending experimental big band jazz with the folk songs of the Spanish Civil War to create a powerfully original work of musical/political activism.
Haden’s love of world music has also seen him teaming with a variety of diverse international players, including Brazilian guitarist Egberto Gismonti, Argentinean bandoneon master Dino Saluzzi, and Portuguese guitar giant Carlos Paredes. In addition, Haden has explored diverse streams of American popular music with both his acclaimed Quartet West, as well as on such recent collections as 2002’s inventive alliance with Michael Brecker, “AMERICAN DREAMS.” Charlie Haden who was invited to establish the jazz studies program at California Institute of the Arts in 1982, has earned countless honors from around the globe, including and the Los Angeles Jazz Society prize for “Jazz Educator of the Year”, two Grammy Awards (alongside a multitude of nominations), myriad Down Beat readers and critics poll winners, a Guggenheim fellowship, four NEA grants for composition, France’s Grand Prix Du Disque (Charles Cros) Award, Japan’s SWING Journal Gold, Silver and Bronze awards. Montreal Jazz Festival’s Miles Davis Award - http://www.charliehadenmusic.com/bioShort.htm
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Virtuosos (Bass) - Jaco Pastorius
The Life and Music of Jaco Pastorius by Pat Metheny
Note: This is Pat Metheny's liner notes to the 2000 reissue of Jaco's debut album, "Jaco Pastorius", a piece we feel captures what Jaco and his music is all about.
Jaco Pastorius may well have been the last jazz musician of the 20th century to have made a major impact on the musical world at large. everywhere you go,sometimes it seems like a dozen times a day, in the most unlikely places you hear jaco's sound; from the latest tv commercial to bass players of all stripes copping his licks on recordings of all styles, from news broadcasts to famous rock and roll bands, from hip hop samples to personal tribute records, you hear the echoes of that unmistakable sound everywhere. (it may even be more imitated at this point than the previously most pervasive jazz sound to escape into the broader culture beyond the local borders of jazz, the moody harmon mute stylings of miles davis). for all the caterwauling that has gone on about new musicians that have shown up in recent years being toted as the "next miles", or the "duke ellington of their generation", or whatever, jaco outranks all of them and all of that by being the one and the only of his kind, without predecessor; the only post 1970 jazz musician known on a first name basis with all music fans of all varieties everywhere in the world. from the depths of africa where he is revered in almost god-like status to the halls of most every music university on the planet. to this day, and maybe more than ever, he remains the one and the only JACO.
and how odd it is to see this era of historical revisionism in jazz how this accomplishment is often relegated by people who should know better as being "not jazz" or as "fusion" (possibly the single most ignorant and damaging term ever invented to describe (discount) an important and vital branch of the jazz music tree). jaco at his best, as on this record, defines what the word jazz really means. jaco used his own experiences filtered through an almost unbelievable originality informed by a musicianship as audacious as it was expansive, to manifest into sound through improvisation a musical reality that illuminated his individuality. and besides all that, he simply played his ass off - in a way that was totally unprecedented on his instrument, or on ANY instrument for that matter.
because jaco's thing has been so fully assimilated into the culture and the musical vocabulary of our time, i notice that it is difficult for people who weren't around at the time of his emergence to fully weigh the impact of his contribution. as a young musician who met jaco in his prime when we were both just starting out, i can only say that my reaction upon hearing him for the first time (with ira sullivan in miami, florida in 1972) was simply one of shock - i had literally never heard anything remotely like it, nor had anyone else around at the time. and yes, as is so often noted in his case, the way he was playing was unprecedented in technical terms, but that wasn't what made it so stunningly appealing to me. there was a humanity to jaco's thing, built into those relentless grooves was that rare quality that only the most advanced jazz musicians seem to be able to conjure up - with jaco, you were hearing the sound of a time, of an entire generation at work, on the move.
our musical relationship was immediate. we recognized in each other a kind of impatience with the status quo of our respective instruments and jazz in general and found an instantaneous rapport from the first notes we played together. we also became really good friends. during the short time that i lived in miami (near jaco's hometown of ft. lauderdale), we played show gigs together and occasionally played at his house (he was living on top of a laundromat at the time) and spent a lot of time just talking about music, much of it about how intensely we both disliked the so-called jazz/rock of the time. ( how ironic that we are both now associated (inaccurately) with that movement). shortly after we met, i wound up moving to boston to join gary burton's quartet. during this period, jaco and i spent time working together in new york with pianist paul bley and began a trio that lasted for several years with drummer bob moses (that group later went on to record what became my first record "bright size life".)
in the middle of this period jaco recorded this album. when jaco got word that herbie hancock (a major hero of both of ours) had agreed to participate, i think his already inspired vision of what he could be as a musician and what he could do with this record in particular went to a whole other level. listening again to this record, and the way that he and herbie hook up on the original and the alternate takes of "used to be a cha-cha" we are hearing improvised music at it's highest level - but with a difference. jaco restructured the function of the bass in music in a way that has affected the outcome of countless musical projects to follow in his wake - an innovation that is still being absorbed by rhythm section players to this day - he showed the world that there was an entirely different way to think of the bass function, and what it meant. for this alone, jaco would earn a major place in the pantheon of jazz history. but, of course, there was so much more.
his solo on 'donna lee', beyond being astounding for just the fact that it was played with a hornlike phrasing that was previously unknown to the bass guitar is even more notable for being one of the freshest looks at how to play on a well traveled set of chord changes in recent jazz history - not to mention that it's just about the hippest start to a debut album in the history of recorded music. that solo, along with his best compositions like "continuum" reveal a melodic ingenuity (that rarest and hardest to quantify of musical qualities amongst improvisors) that comes along only a few times in each generation. and then there is just his basic relationship to sound and touch; refined to a degree that some would have thought impossible on an "electric" instrument.
jaco's legacy has had a rough go of it - a horribly inaccurate, botched biography, endless cassette bootlegs of late-life gigs that do nothing but devalue the importance of his message through greed and overkill, and a mythology that seems to thrive on the stories that surrounded the lesser aspects of his lifestyle over the triumphs of his early musical vision and wisdom.
but you know what? you put this record on, and none of that matters. it is all here, in the grooves; everything you need to know about the guy. jaco pastorius was one of the most important musicians of our time - the fact that this was his first record is simply astonishing, there is no other way to put it. that this is without question the most auspicious debut album of the past quarter century is inarguable. as with all great recordings, the force of it's value becomes more evident as time passes.- http://www.jacopastorius.com/biography.html
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