Unsteady Bass

Published: Fri, 09/03/21

I rounded up the David Murray Octet's recording of "Dewey's Circle" on Spotify and had a listen. Around the third time through I started hearing what Giddins had been saying about Murray that piqued my interest in the first place: that while Wynton Marsalis and other 1980s Young Lions were responding to the the free jazz of the 1960s and 1970s by pretending it had never happened, musicians like Murray were working on, if not taming it, at least harnessing it with a deeper approach to composition that acknowledged free playing as an asset to be deployed within a larger whole rather than simply exercised for its own sake. (A decade earlier, Martin Williams was making similar arguments about Horace Silver's reconciliation of the explosive exploration of bebop improvisation with the relaxed, riff-based grooves epitomized by the Basie band of the 1930s.)  There is unquestionably a good deal of polyphonic, expressionistic wailing over the course of the eight minutes of "Dewey's Circle," but a groove hound like me can hear it mostly as a matter of musicians intentionally coloring outside the lines of an otherwise relentlessly insistent, gleefully Ellington-esque vamp. If this proves to be my window into an era of jazz I've long written off as too forbidding and abstract to even mess with, great, and in the meantime, "Dewey's Circle" is, this week, rocking my world on its own merits, not least because it seems to be the work of someone with a sense of humor, an affinity for a good backbeat and a love of earlier forms of jazz.

I really can't think of anything less subversive than fingerstyle guitar, and yet I've spent a lot of time, first unconsciously and then consciously, trying to break out of the few grooves and rhythms one most easily defaults to when playing either alternating-thumb picking or blues with a steady bass. Initially, this effort was born of performance necessity: as I was most comfortable with the alternating-thumb approach, I tended to write and arrange songs in that style, and wound up with a lot of rolling, folky grooves. I'm pretty sure this was motivated by what it takes to sing and play simultaneously – I found the regularity of the alternating thumb approach grounding, a solid, reliable and regular platform upon which to assemble my vocal efforts. Starting out as a diffident singer at best, I needed to park my hands somewhere safe, then focus on not screwing up the singing.

Eventually though, I got interested in widening my palette, possibly around the same time I became slightly less terrified of singing, and started looking for ways to do different rhythmic things while maintaining that alternating-thumb foundation. (I imagine this is when, unbeknownst to me, my hands started reaching for the various articulations and extra-musical shenanigans I rarely realize I'm doing until it's time to explain them to someone else – the rakes, damped notes and other efforts to imply rhythmic motion that aren't actually present in the picked notes themselves.) And finally, I started looking at what the steady bass might have to offer as an accompaniment tool. I've always loved steady bass, as well as its uptown cousin, the walking bass, for being the thumpiest of foundations for blues improvisation, but have tended to view it as more useful for instrumental music than for vocal accompaniment.

Steady bass, however, has the potential to really open things up rhythmically in a way that can be particularly useful for songwriting and vocal accompaniment. Or rather, unsteady bass. Lately I've been most interested in what happens when the bass is no longer propelling a regular quarter note pulse, but is itself syncopated – sometimes on the beat, sometimes off the beat, sometimes not playing at all. The question, of course, is: can you get solid enough with it to improvise over it? To sing over it? It's not exactly harnessing free jazz via the scaffolding of composition, but it is a way to potentially play lots of cool grooves via solo guitar that you might never have access to otherwise.

In this week's lesson, we'll take a syncopated bass line in E and walk through three different ways to start playing over it. You can find the lesson here:

Blues Licks Over A Syncopated Bass

And you can download the tab here:

Get The Tab

More soon,

David