Bilbo

Thump..... ( Bilbo's head hitting the desk)

Granted, but can he cook a meringue?

[quote name='fumps' timestamp='1367420601' post='2065432'] Have you heard many new young players ? [/quote] All of the time. A lot of young players can rip s*** out of Jaco's stuff but, as someone said above, it's the soul, the swing that they miss. Feraud, Garrison, Gwizdala etc are all monster players but they lack Jaco's organic humanity, his heart. Jaco played some incredibly moving music, clever but never cerebral.

[quote name='Skol303' timestamp='1367424979' post='2065517'] Yeah sorry Bilbo, the party's finished. Same thing happened back in [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/190256-october-composition-competition-voting-time/"]October.[/url] Once Charic pulls up the drawbridge, that's it. Don't worry, plenty of scope for you to see my compositional ass suitably kicked this month I'm sure [/quote]

Errrr. Lowdown got another vote? Too late to count, I assume?

I do it because it matters to me. When it becomes about money or popularity, it does not meet the needs I have. It is for its own sake and the music is its own reward.

That may yet be the approach!

Interesting images but one thing I have noticed on here is how important backbeats are to most folk. If one tries to create a Jazz feel, it is harder because the level of playing s is higher and getting a jazz feel out of sequencers and midi is nigh on impossible . We shall see where this takes us

,Jaco played some great stuff and some dross. He played well on some crap tunes and poorly on some great tunes. For me, when he was hitting, he was hitting and his hit rate was the envy of a generation. He opened doors for me that I didn't even know were closed. What he does for anyone else is of no interest to me. He was 'my man', along with 3 others, and I sometimes still hear him today and go 'wow'. There aren't many that do that anymore.

Mmmmmmm......

So, where is my picture? I have work to do.....

Just realised that, despite playing 99% fretless for 27 years, I hardly ever slide.

Doing their job vs redefining the job. Mmmmmm, let me think?

[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9iaqFtyWfE"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9iaqFtyWfE[/url] This was the one I was talking about. I was a 17yr old rocker and the opening guitar got me right away but the rest of it was so fresh sounding to my naive ears. 1.19 on was lovely and then, bang, the groove at 2.34 and then again at 3.06.

A lot use stock parts.

Not heard much of him (I have just put him on Spotify) but he seems a reasonably credible artist, as they say. To be blunt, there is no doubt that he has some reflected kudos (and possibly funding) from his Dad but his father is a closet jazz pianist and passionate jazz fan and I suspect he would not have let young Kyle 'play around' with being a Jazz musician if he wasn't going to do it properly. And, to be brutally frank, I suspect a lot of the Jazz musicians who he would have had contact with would have give him short shrift if he couldn't cut it. What I am hearing as I type, I don't rate that highly (material-wise) but that is not his fault, it just doesn't do it for me. It is perfectly credible, as I said, and he can play.

I was doing a Spotify nostalgia trip and put on one of the first 'Jazz' Lps I ever bought which was Al DiMeola's Land of the Midnight Sun' (I think I saw some pictures of him in a guitar magazine and thought 'I'll give that a try'). Anyway, the bulk of the LP features Anthony Jacksom but there is one extended track called 'Suite: Golden Dawn' which as Jaco on it. Now remember, I was a rock and metal fan and had never really heard much funk etc and 'bass' was Roger Glover and Geezer Butler and, maybe, a young Steve Harris. When the DiMeola piece featured that classic melodic fretless in the early part, it was a case of 'mmmmmm; niiiiice' but when he went into what I now know was a classic Jaco sixteenth note funk groove, it was like I had been hit by a train Now we have all moved on and, like Hendrix in my day, it is difficult to see how influential the guy was but that 10 minutes on Spotify brought it all back. I wish I could still be blown away like that.

My first gig was to an empty room (some people pooped their heads in a couple of times but no real audience). The only bloke there was the barman who, halfway through the first tune told us, an established NWOBHM band I had just joined, to turn down. The guitarist/bandleader, an old hand, said 'f*** this' and the gig was abandoned (to be fair, it was a bad booking in an unsuitable venue). I was gutted and, at 17, was probably on the verge of tears by the time I got home having built the whole thing up to being something it wasn't. Fortunately, we played again (?) less than a week later to a home crowd and it all came good in the end. That band ended up on The Friday Rock Show on Radio One* a couple of times and on a Heavy Metal Heroes LP. So, it goes to show, you can't judge anything by one lousy gig. PS that was the highlight of my career. It was 32 years ago.

Matana Roberts - Coin Coin Stunning.

Depping is what it is. I did a gig on Saturday with a 7-piece funk band that featured two deps, the pianist and myself, both jazzers first and foremost. We were discussing it afterwards. The funk players, who were not readers and had long ago learned their parts by rote, were stressing all evening about what we newbies 'knew' and 'didn't know'. We just said 'assume we don't know anything but that it doesn't matter'. They couldn't process it at all and looked nervous as fcuk when we got on stage When we picked up out instruments, I didn't actually 'know' any of the tunes at all, although I had heard some of them somewhere in the past, and the chord charts were just the usual Am, G7 type things with no detail of grooves etc. By the end of the night, the band were called 'Gods of Music' by the people who had booked them We just ripped s*** out of the grooves, nailed the details by a mixture of musicality, vague/subconcious familiarity with songs we knew of, hard-listening, reading signals, bluffing and our innate familiarity with idiomatic cliches. Mostly, familiarity with the role of your instrument and knowing the damn thing inside out. In short, you just gotta be ready to play. 'Knowing' the tunes is great (although, in my experience, no two musicians 'know' something the same way ) but, without that, you just need to be match fit and ready to blow. Some of the best music I have ever played has been under these circumstances; it can bring out the best in you.

I think there is a question about how much time you are able or willing to invest in this. One of the attractions of reading gigs is the 'turn up and play' element, even with band calls/rehearsals. If I was doing a show and had to spend a fortnight rewriting/reducing the charts to make them readable or suitable for a small music stand, I might as well just learn the whole pad and do it without the charts The issues you are dicussing are occupational hazards. Sometimes, if you work with someone often, you can talk to the MD so that future charts are better prepared. You can learn to read the extra ledger lines or refer to the chord symbols that are often present and 'approximate' the groove (depends on the piece being performed). 30 years of experience of this tells me that the lines you actually play are seldom that far from the well trodden paths of popular music and are easy enough to find, in spite of careless/poor presentation by an MD (remember, they are often doing a massive amount of work on a show 'gratis' (they often rehearse the chorus for weeks before the band are called) and have no more time to spend rewriting your charts that you have). It's a team effort.

My Gedo is now about 3 years old and has gigged regularly and recorded successfully about 4 times. I have never regretted the purchase (£1500).

It has been up there 3 weeks longer than everyone elses.

What I love about this is that nearly 400 folk have listened to my track. Where else could that happen?

It is a common problem. Bass parts are written an octave higher than they sound and MDs are often forgetting this fact and writing well below the range of the instrument. It is an occupational hazard, I am afraid, one that you will need to cope with as your career as a reader moves forward.