Steve Swallow – Bass

A personal hero of mine, Steve Swallow is one of those musicians who does everything wrong and ends up being so utterly original and profoundly musical. He plays a five string with a high C (wrong), he plays Jazz on an electric bass (wrong) and plays Jazz with a pick (wrong). Despite these errors of judgement (I am being ironic), he remains, for me, one of the most musical of bass players in the whole canon. This tune is a perfect example of this. Performing with his wife, Carla Bley’s Septet, on her 1987 album, ‘Septet’, he plays the part with the absolute minimum of extraneous detail but it is his little solo that is simply perfect. Listen to the opening phrases (bar 69-71). They form the basis of the whole solo and it builds thematically from there. He repeats that opening phrase in bar 81/82, showing that he knew exactly what he was doing and where, when and why he was doing it. Forget the Hadrien Feraud, Victor Wooten, Jeff Berlin, Charles Berthoud acrobatics. Forget Dirty Loops and Snarky Puppy. This is where the real music is.