Kermit Driscoll – Bass
Driscoll was born in Kearney, Nebraska. He began playing piano at age five. Soon after, he added saxophone, and at age thirteen he picked up the bass guitar. He was soon was playing gigs around the midwest. When an offer to travel with a rock band came up, he dropped out of high school at age sixteen to go on tour.
He resumed high school at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, then attended the University of Miami, where one of his teachers was Jaco Pastorius. At Berklee College of Music in 1975 he became friends with guitarist Bill Frisell, and they often performed locally in Boston. Driscoll cites Pastorius and Frisell as two of the biggest influences on his life. Around 1976, he and his roommate, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, and Frisell found work in a band called the Boston Connection. According to Frisell, band members dressed in orange polyester suits and played disco.
In May 1978, Driscoll traveled to Belgium to play with Stephan Houben who was working with Frisell. With this group he made his first recording, Mauve Traffic, with Frisell, Houben, Greg Badolato, Vinton Johnson, and Michel Herr. The album included a composition by Driscoll entitled “Doggone it”. In January, 1980, he moved to New York City, and during the next year toured with Buddy Rich.
From 1986 to 1996, he was a member of Bill Frisell’s quartet. From 1990 to 1995, he was in the group New and Used with trumpeter Dave Douglas and saxophonist Andy Laster.
Driscoll features on many of Frisell’s recordings including ‘Lookout For Hope (1987), Before We Were Born (1989), Where In The World (1991), Have A Little Faith (1992), This Land (1994), Go West: Music For The Films Of Buster Keaton (1995), The High Sign/One Week (1995) and Live (1995). I have been a fan of KD’s since way back and his electric bass is one of the sounds I recognise instantly.
The chart we have here is Bill Frissel’s arrangement of John Philip Sousa’s ‘Washington Post March’ from the 1992 album ‘Have A Little Faith’ – one of my all time favourite albums. This is a great album as it introduces you to Frissel’s whole concept by allowing you to hear his approach to a range of genres including Sousa, Copland’s ‘Billy The Kid’ Suite, Madonna’s ‘Live To Tell’ and so on. I got to see the Frissel band with Driscoll performing the soundtrack for the Buster Keaton films (was it the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank in 1995?). It’s a kind of root note thing all on the beat but there are some fantastically creative licks in there if you want to explore them. The bass appears to be detuned massively and even goes below that low B but I have written the charts with that in mind and have double the really low notes and octave up so you can play the whole thing without a 9 string bass with a low F!