Bass Solo
Short post this week… fun things in “reality” are preventing me from spending hours editing monstrous posts.
One of my roommates was telling me about a concert she went to last weekend. One thing she mentioned was that there was an awesome bass solo at one point, and that this was the first bass solo she had ever heard! In case any of you have never heard a bass solo before, I invite you to check out one of my favorites:
An interesting trio: Oscar Peterson (legend), Ray Brown (monster bass player), and Niels Pederson (possibly my favorite jazz bassist). If you believe YouTube comments, apparently the producer of the 1977 Montreux Jazz Festival arranged the trio without telling either of the bass players that he wouldn’t be the only bass on the stage. That’s Brown playing the first solo, and Pederson takes the second half.
Brown’s solo is totally respectable. Variations on the melody, nice uses of silence, bends, and syncopation, great key changes, cute interplay with Oscar. I don’t think he was mic’ed very well, though; it’s hard to tell what he’s doing at times. When Pederson takes over, though, things get taken to a new level. Pederson’s thoughtful minimalist accompaniment with sweet little pickups through the restatement of the melody (3:24) are perfect, and you can tell he’s getting fired up when he launches into his walking bassline (4:27). And that solo (5:01)? I don’t know enough about the string bass to comment on the technicality, but it just sounds phenomenal, both his tone and his playing. So complex and yet so simple. He makes it look so easy, too.
Heck, just listen to the audience’s respective reactions to each solo. They know what’s up.