James Jamerson

I've found myself going through a Jackson 5 phase lately, but there are times when I'm not sure if I'm just in love with their bass player. The two that I know have played with them are Wilton Felder, and James Jamerson. I found myself last night listening to the album ABC, and trying to figure out who played on each song just by hearing it and comparing it to what I know of each of them.

A big part of the Motown sound was the studio band there, commonly referred to as "The Funk Brothers". James Jamerson worked for Motown Records as a member of this band, and in his career performed on nearly 30 #1 pop hits. His style favors improvisation and creates almost a duet with the soloist. If you listen to Darling Dear, you can hear how his playing dances around the solo without overpowering it. Wilton Felder is the one who played on I Want You Back and ABC. His playing style is much more pop-centric, because he would create a hook much like the one in I Want You Back. I found it very interesting that from a musician's standpoint Jamerson is a godlike entity, while Wilton Felder is creating more popular music. It is this vague concept of success that you'll see tossed around from time to time. (Disregarding the fact that the in house Motown musicians received little recognition for their work) Wilton Felder was successful in the sense that he played the songs that everyone knows, but James Jamerson went down in history as a legend among musicians. A good way to describe the magnitude of his influence is looking him up on Wikipedia, and scrolling down to Style and Influence. You will find a list of bass players that named Jamerson as one of their primary influences, and if you asked someone to rattle off the most influential bass players they can think of off the top of their head, chances are they will name few that aren't already on that list. How Jamerson got there has been somewhat of a mystery to me, and is one more reason for me to delve deeper into the really early influences of popular music. Mainly early Jazz and Blues music; that has always been kind of a blurry area for me, but I keep coming across the influence shown in popular music enough that I think it's time to take a closer look. A lot of my approach has been following the trail of influence backwards. I'm just not sure where I should start.

Tonight's Ramblings

I'm very interested in the way some artists will create this very full song with all sorts of depth and different layers, and then others will create this thin layer of many parts woven together. Someone like Trent Reznor can create this whole world in a song; I remember reading about how on The Downward Spiral he didn't want it to be about the instruments as much as the song as a whole. He made an effort not to lean too heavily on synthesizers or guitars, instead wanting to focus more on creating the "texture and space". The Smashing Pumpkins would also create heavily layered songs; for example, the song Soma supposedly has around 40 guitar tracks.

 My limited experience with playing around recording music on garage band has given me a greater respect for artists that can really tone down their music and really simplify it. This is probably because I'm realizing how hard that really is to do. Whenever I've recorded something, I'd keep adding layers and more tracks and it would sound cool, but it felt like I needed to do that to make it work. I have quite a bit of respect for minimalist artists.

This next video is something that really amazes me. It is a studio jam session with all these amazingly talented musicians and yet none of them on their own are really playing much. For the most part they are all playing really tiny little parts that weave together perfectly. I also find it interesting to see Victor Wooten playing like that because he is such a talented bass player, most of the time you'll see him playing these wildly complex fast slap lines. His playing in this video is in a word; refreshing.

I've found that minimalism can mean many things when it comes to music. In the Studio Jams video, it refers to the construction of each individual part and how they merge into something more complex, but it is also taken in a more traditional sense.

Morphine was a very unique band in several aspects, one of which was that it was a three man rock band comprising of a saxophone player, a bass player, and a drummer. They played a sort of jazz-blues-rock, but probably the most unique thing was that the frontman, Mark Sandman played a bass with two strings using a slide.

The limitation of the two string bass to some might seem like a gimmick, or an extremely limiting technique, but reading about Mark reminded me of something Geddy Lee said about his unique bass playing technique. Geddy Lee has a very interesting technique; he plays with one index finger but achieves the attack of a pick. I heard somewhere that when he was younger he injured his finger and the nail grew back unusually thick, allowing him to get away with this style of playing. All that aside though, I recall an interview where Geddy Lee discussed the development of his technique, and he said that he started by limiting his right hand to only using one finger. This then caused him to experiment more in ways he wouldn't normally have played, because of that limitation. This concept of "forced creativity" is really interesting to me, and I'll definitely be looking for more examples of this in music.

The Pixies

From the moment I first listened to the Pixies, I've considered them to be one of my favorite bands. I think I started listening to them because I would keep coming across their name while reading about artist's influences; David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, OK Go, Thom Yorke, U2, the list goes on. The best way I can describe them is beautifully bizarre. I remember the first time I listened to Doolittle, I was struck by this one song "Mr. Grieves". It has this incredible energy that I had never encountered before; it starts off all quiet and little and it's like some switch is flipped that just releases this built up wave of power.

When people talk about the Pixies, all you hear is about their dynamics that carried on into modern alternative music, but it is much more than that. Something that I've always been interested in is how some bands will weave all their parts into this giant sonic blanket that fills all the little spaces and surrounds you with a wall of music; The Velvet Underground did that a lot on things like "White Light/White Heat". On the other end, you'll see bands completely tone it down and play these tiny little minimal parts that compliment each other in a minimalist sort of way like a lot of funk music does. These two approaches are part of what makes the Pixies different. The bass player Kim Deal played very simple bass parts and yet managed to always groove with the drumming. Over that, they'd play these little quirky guitar parts that would suddenly explode into a reverberating tidal wave of sound. 

Kim made a point of not over elaborating and keeping it simple, which initially was beyond me considering part of the reason I picked up the bass was Flea, but I've come to realize how essential her technique is to their sound. All Over the World demonstrates all of this very well:

The most striking thing however is the vocals. The first thing you notice is Black Francis' unique lyrics and vocal style. I read that he drew a lot of inspiration from surrealist films which could do something to explain the nature of the music. He sings about surrealist topics in ways that you don't often see. In "Mr. Grieves" he seems almost insane, and in "Something Against You" from their debut album, Surfer Rosa, his vocals are filtered through a guitar amp making them unintelligible.

Their second album "Doolittle" was an interesting combination. Their producer was pushing for a more accessible pop sound and the band was sticking to their unique underground sound. This created a contrast between the unique surrealist sound, and the "clean" production. This album is considered by many (myself included) to be their best work. One thorn in the side of this album, however, is "Here Comes Your Man". Black Francis wrote this song when he was fourteen or fifteen and it was recorded on their initial demo tape, but the they all decided not to release it on their debut album or EP because it was too much of a pop song. Gil Norton, the producer of "Doolittle", in his quest for that pop sound managed to have the song on the album. The song is well written and all, but it sticks out too much among the songs they usually wrote.

Over time, Kim's presence in the band diminished until the hiatus in 1992. They reunited in 2004, but Kim officially quit in 2013, one year before their next album. The Pixies still tour, but towards their last few albums their music became essentially Black Francis' (now known as Frank Black) solo work.

The Beginning

When I was very little, I loved music. I would pick up my mom's guitar and strum it without making any sort of chord and pretend I was one of The Beach Boys. However the music I listened to was pretty much limited to what I got from my family. I owned a Monkees greatest hits album that I used to love, and "The Sign" by Ace of Base. My mom was into Stevie Wonder and The Beatles, and my older sister listened to more popular music. She introduced me to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but it would be some time before I really got into them.
When I was 11 or so, I realized that I didn't know a lot of music and I wanted to change that. The first thing I did was go to the library and looked through the CD's. I didn't know what I was looking for, so I thumbed through them until I found one that sounded familiar; Aerosmith.

I can't imagine any other reasons that an
11 year old me might have picked this one out

I had heard the name before but I didn't know anything about them. I immediately checked out the CD and brought it home to put on my Ipod. The album was Just Push Play, one of the more recent Aerosmith albums, and as soon as I started listening to it, I couldn't stop. I would go to the library and get more CD's, mostly Aerosmith, but also bands my sister would tell me about like My Chemical Romance. This new interest led me to my dad's collection, which would become my new primary source of music. When I first borrowed from his CD collection, I recognized many of the songs from hearing them on car rides. A lot of U2 and Rolling Stones songs were familiar to me. Some of the first albums he lent me to put on my Ipod were: Smash Hits - Jimi Hendrix, Hot Rocks - Rolling Stones, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb - U2, the first four Led Zeppelin albums, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the list goes on. One moment that made an impression on me was when my dad showed me the music video for "Bust a Move" by Young MC. He told me to pay attention to the bass player, because that's how it's supposed to be done. This bass player was Flea. (He comes in right around the 2 minute mark)

A lot of things about this were new to me, but most importantly, it was the beginning of me discovering music through playing the bass.

My First Bass Guitar

Music has always been a big part of my life. I come from a fairly musical family; my mom sings and plays piano and violin, my sisters play cello and viola, my brother plays piano, and I play bass guitar. I started off in the school orchestra in third grade where I played viola. I was not enjoying it. The next year I switched to upright bass, and that was a lot more fun, however it just wasn't working. I didn't have the drive to spend time learning all of the boring music we played. It was a fun instrument, but in middle school the songs we played weren't the most exciting for a bass player; not to mention the bass rental was expensive. In 8th grade, I left the orchestra. On my birthday, my parents handed me a printout of a craigslist post. Someone was selling a bass guitar, and they were going to buy it for me. This was the beginning of it all.
I always thought those Gibson arch-top guitars were the absolute coolest thing in the world, so when this guy showed me two basses to choose from, I played them (with my minimal knowledge of the instrument I probably played "Smoke on the Water") but I had already made up my mind.

My First Bass Guitar

It's an Ibanez Artcore AFB200 hollow-body bass. I put flat wound strings on it and it has this fantastic acoustic sound. There are a few other Ibanez hollow-body basses, but from what I've seen, mine has a deeper body, and a floating bridge. I'm pretty sure all of the Artcore basses are short scale meaning from the saddle to the nut is 30" where on your average bass guitar it will be 34" and a guitar is generally 25". One of the best things about this bass is that you can play it acoustic. If you were to play it alongside other musicians unplugged, it would get lost in the mix; however, when you have an acoustic instrument, you will find yourself playing it more because there's no hassle of setting everything up; you can literally just pick it up and play. It doesn't seem like a lot, but you will get a lot more practice in if you picked it up and played it for five minutes a day, than if you were to say "I don't have time".