lowquality.net

I was just reading an excerpt from Anthony Vitti’s website about his transcription of a George Benson solo and how he likes to study non-bassists for soloing ideas. It seems like a pretty common sense thing but I don’t think it’s done often enough. There’s a contingent of bassists, especially here in Virginia, sitting around waiting for Victor Wooten to flurry out the latest bass solo ideas, and they eat it up and think it’s the most innovative stuff ever. Now, I think Victor is great, but he will be the first to tell you that his double-handed tapping technique is not a “new” bass technique but an “old” piano technique. He will also tell you that his ideas come from his brothers who all play different instruments.

Anthony isn’t really looking at George Benson in a technical way, he’s looking at this solo in strictly musicial terms. When I studied with Anthony, he stressed phrasing above all else. You played a funk line like it was a funk line: with assertiveness and tone and attitude. If you were playing a melody of a standard, it was supposed to sound like a horn was playing it, not like a high-pitched bass line. We did some Oscar Peterson stuff that just kicked my butt, but it helped me a lot to realize how important phrasing is in defining your personal musical sound. Even on an electric bass, Oscar Peterson’s right hand parts sound like Oscar Peterson. Think about it. If you really got hardcore into someone like that and studied them you could get closer to assimilating their characteristics into your playing. We do this with other bass players all of the time! Why don’t we do it with non-bassists!?! Why is it every bassist I know learns Donna Lee because of Jaco and not because of Charlie Parker? Jaco did the work for you, man! There’s a million killer bebop heads that Jaco didn’t record, learn one of them!

The biggest motivator to this way of thinking is to get your head out of the low-end for awhile and listen to what all of those other guys in your band are doing. I was obsessed with (Galactic drummer) Stanton Moore and the New Orleans 2nd-line style for a few years while I was at Berklee and without realizing it, I had incorporated some of those rhythms into my slapping. I just heard something I liked and I used it, just as if I was building a speaking vocabulary.

Playing with Jay Rakes for almost two years now has skyrocketted my soloing prowess because I listen to him all of the time when we play together. He’s an amazing soloist. Sometimes, I can follow the chords of the song we’re playing better when he solos than when he comps. Jay’s very linear, melodic, style of soloing has rubbed off on me as well as his sextuplet and quintuplet licks, even though I’m not as fast with them as he is.

It’s like living with someone, you get into their heads and you can predict their actions and speech and responses to your questions. The cool thing about studying music is that you can go back and “live with” Charlie Parker or Cannonball Adderley or Hendrix or John Bonham and really get into their musical personalities and pick up their characteristics.