News & Updates — bassist

Give the bassist some! I always loved NHØP's bass playing on so many great jazz records that I felt the need to point out his birthday today and show some respect. From Denmark, he started playing bass at 13 and went pro pretty quickly. At 17 he was offered the bass role in the Count Basie band but was too young to legally travel to the US for work. He supported many visiting jazz artists at the Jazzhus Montmarte in Copenhagen, including playing with Sonny Rollins, Roland Kirk, Dexter Gordon, Bud Powell, Stan Getz, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp and others....

Perhaps best known to casuals as the bassist of Cream, the Scottish virtuoso Jack Bruce in fact had a long and varied career that included rock, blues, jazz, classical, third stream, Latin, world music and fusion. He could play electric & upright bass, cello, piano, harmonica and was a singer/songwriter as well. Growing up listening to jazz, he studied classical cello and was kicked out of music school for playing jazz on the side. In the early '60s he toured Europe in a big band and joined the legendary Blues Incorporated in '62, which splintered off into the Graham Bond...

Charles Mingus, along with Israel "Cachao" Lopez and William Parker, are my favorite bassists of all time. Add that Mingus is one of the greatest composers to ever walk the planet and his notoriously prickly personality and you have a genuine one-of-a-kind icon of insane genius. Deeply bluesy, gospel-inspired, funky and experimental, his music brought "jazz" to a whole 'nother level. As with Duke Ellington, he wrote compositions for specific players in mind, while engaging every member of the band. His music was also deeply politicized. Coming from Watts, he grew up poor but still learned the cello. He started...

The great jazz bass virtuoso Paul Chambers, forever immortalized by his old pal John Coltrane as "Mr PC", brought the instrument to a new level in his very short time on the planet. He was an early popularizer of the bowing technique and contributed greatly to harmonic advancement for the instrument. Born in Pittsburgh and raised in Detroit, Chambers played brass instruments before switching to bass at 14. He quickly started playing classical music while still in high school, as well as jazz with Barry Harris before moving to NYC in the mid-'50s. He held a regular gig with Miles...

A favorite of many on the instrument, the much-missed Peter Kowald was a major league improvising bassist. He was a member of Globe Unity Orchestra, Cooperative Trio, his "world music" project Global Village, London Jazz Composers Orchestra, Schlippenbach Trio and many others. A native of Germany, he started playing in 1960 and he and Peter Brotzmann hooked up for some racket shortly thereafter. They started touring in '66 with Carla Bley & Mike Mantler. He had a longtime association with Globe Unity, recording several records with them. He sometimes composed for and conducted that wild big band. Aside from his...