Bass Player: Jeff Berlin

Bilbo admits to being massively influenced by Jeff Berlin during his formative years and spent many hours playing cassettes back and forth trying to figure out the details. Berlin’s lines with Bruford are often complex and executed as such as pace that this approach was limited and Bilbo recalls the frustration of never quite getting the full thing down on paper. Fast forward to the new Millenium and we have Transcribe software from seventhstring.com. Being able to slow things down to up 25% of their original speed without changing pitch has allowed Bilbo to revisit these old Bruford albums and finally transcribe the bass performances in detail. The website contains transcriptions to ALL of the tracks of the Bruford album ‘Gradually Going Tornado’ and most of the tunes of ‘One Of A Kind’ and the first Bruford LP ‘Feels Good To Me’. This track is one of the head-turners in the Bruford catalogue and, at the time, it was one of THE tunes to learn (along with Jaco’s ‘Donna Lee’ and Stanley Clarke’s ‘Silly Putty’). The transcription is the entire bass part for the original version of ‘Joe Frazier’ (Jeff Berlin wrote the tune and has re-recorded it twice since).