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Kontroversial
Korner Kolumn |
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I have been stumped for a topic of “konversation” for this month’s column I must say. Either I am becoming more accepting of things (heaven forbid) or I’m just getting older!!! Anyway, I was recently going through my old issues of bass player and I began noticing a trend – we are taught, for the most part, to think and play like bass players. You ask “so what?” and I agree that in as much as we are called to be bass players so we are indeed expected to think and act like bass players. But what about the outer limits of the instrument? What about Bill Dickens’ 9-string mega-bass? What about synth-bass pickups and effects? What about effects for that matter? So I ask this question…when does playing the bass guitar cease to be just a function for holding down the groove and when does it become a tool for musical expression? Why are we restricted to playing root-fifth combinations when keyboard players and guitarists are invited to “wail” or “shred” and why is it that when a bass player does step out beyond the “known regions” of the instrument that he is scorned? I know I ask these questions often in this column, but I’m no closer to the answer now than I was six months ago. So I pose this to you. I heard a recent comment during one of the cricket world cup matches, where the topic of protective headgear was under scrutiny. The person asked why it had taken so long for cricketers to get their heads protected when they had been wearing boxes or cups for over one hundred years! It seemed to the person (who was female I might add) that the priorities of the cricketer were all wrong. This spurred me to think that maybe the priorities of bassists were, if not wrong, then maybe a little misguided. About thirty years ago, some chaps began to use what we now call the slap technique. Imagine the horror then of the mere thought that someone was not playing the bass as it “was supposed to be played”. Imagine the thought twenty or so years before that when upright bassists saw and heard an electric bass. Imagine the horror thirty years before that when fingers overtook the bow as a preferred method of playing??? There seems to be no end to the misuse of the bass. Think about it: slap and pop, playing with a plectrum, the e-bow, tapping, tuning down a step or three…all of these things, and I’m sure many more are now a part of our bass world, our little island in the vast sea of music, and yet when someone like the aforementioned Bill Dickens plays his 9-string (or his slightly less offensive 7-string) we all jump up and down like he is committing a mortal sin. Every instrument has “suffered” or “gained” – depending on your point of view – from technology and forward thinking over the years. A lovely story to illustrate: Frank Zappa’s keyboard player (in the 70’s) comes in to rehearsal before a show and finds a synth on top of his beloved Fender Rhodes, and is told that unless he can play it (and we all know to what level Zappa meant) by the end of the session, he might as well pack his bags and go home. Revolutionary tactics maybe, but it gives pause to our small-minded thinking concerning our own instrument. Two things. One, never forget that you are a bass player. In that, I mean that along with the drummer (hopefully) you get to hold the song together. You get to make the groove and make the song “cook” – something our guitar playing younger cousins can only dream of doing. You also get to dictate to a certain degree how the song will feel. Two, you can, if you so wish, explore the limits of an instrument that has barely been tapped into. People are discovering new ways of making music on the bass all the time. Don’t limit your thinking to that what’s gone before you, but think ahead. Be yourself. I’m not suggesting for a second here to abandon the traditions that make the bass what it is, but instead of being a slave to what someone else has already done, I’m suggesting a little embellishment, a little seasoning and spice. Take a chance and try some thinking of your own and who knows what you might find. Imagine how dull our task would be if it were not for people before us who chanced to slap and pop and tap and de-tune and use effects and dream a little. Imagine that colourless music that we’d all be subjected to. Julian |
