DOUBLE BASS:

JAM Talks to Bob Bowman and Gerald Spaits

JAM: Did any bass players actually start out playing bass?

Gerald: I didn't, technically. I started out on guitar, I was in third grade, I think. Eight years old. I played guitar for a while, until they needed a bass player.

Bob: I started on piano when I was eight. Then I played clarinet. I always liked the bass. A friend of my parents gave me a Pete Fountain record, there was a bass solo on it. I was probably eleven or twelve by then. I said “that's what I want to play”. Morty Corb was the bass player. I met him in LA once, shortly before he died. That was like twenty years ago. I told him, “Hey, you know, you're the main reason I play the bass!”

Gerald: I was in junior high school, they needed a bass player in the jazz band, and I knew some of the guys in the jazz band. I was playing guitar, just getting back into it, I had gotten an electric guitar, wanting to play in a rock band. They had a bass at the school, a Gibson EBO electric bass. I didn't play upright until much later. They said to take the bass home, with some music. I could already read treble clef, but I had never read bass clef before. I spent a long weekend learning all the parts, went back in and the guy said “yeah, you can be in the band.” And it just fit, it was better than guitar. And they need bass players, you can get more gigs. I figured that out early.

JAM: Tell me about the basses that you play. Gerald, you have a couple of basses.

Gerald: I have one good bass, and one all-weather bass, a “beater bass” is what James Albright calls it. That one is still a pretty good bass, a Kay bass. The good one is one I bought years ago from a guy in the symphony, it's probably a German bass, but there's no markings on the inside or anything.

JAM: How personal is your bass to you?

Gerald: (To Bob) You've had your bass forever, as have I. I'm kind of looking for a new bass. I don't know, I just want to look around, there are some things about mine that I don't like. But I've played this bass for so long, it's like a part of me.

Bob: I got mine in 1972, when I was freshman at North Texas State . I was kind of thinking I could get something else later, it was almost like a student model. Only it sounds better than it's supposed to. I shopped around about ten or fifteen years ago for basses, they were like twenty five grand. They are all different, one might have a great low end, or a great sustain or something but it's uneven. But mine seems to fit all those areas, I figured I actually like mine better, why would I want to spend whatever for a new one?

Gerald: I looked at one a couple of years ago, (to Bob) remember? You played it. The guy loaned it to me for a week, it was a new bass. What did he want for that? Like eighteen thousand. I said “eh, no.”

JAM: Do you travel with your bass?

Bob: Not anymore.

Gerald: Real hard.

Bob: It's a hard thing to do for one thing. Now they open up the hard case and inspect it. It's tricky getting it in there, there are these straps, you have to know how to get it in and out.

JAM: You'd like to be with them when they do it.

Bob: But you can't, they won't let you. Except maybe at little airports. I know some guys that have done it and they didn't put it back in right. The main thing that happens, it breaks the fingerboard. It's just a big piece of ebony.

Gerald: It's kind of delicate. But I did fly with the bass in a soft case with McShann. It was my Kay bass.

JAM: The all-weather.

Gerald: Yeah, we had this gig in Florida . We had to stop in North Carolina . Ray DeMarchi drove me to the airport. We had a seat for the bass. Ray's wife said that she had talked to someone from the airline, they assured her that it would fit. Anyway, I had a backup plan, I brought my regular bass in, I had Ray with me, and I had another bass, an electric upright, in the car. They let me on like everything was going to be okay. I'm still thinking that there's no way it's going to fit. So I get on the plane, I pre board, first one on the plane, and I'm trying to fit this in the seat and can see that it's not going to fit. They made me go to the back of the plane, I'm stuck in the back of the plane, and people start coming on. I can't get off the plane until everyone has boarded. So I get off the plane and Ray's gone. So I didn't have any choice, they let me pack it on the plane in the baggage going down there.

Bob: That wouldn't happen today.

Gerald: Well, I got down there and back with the bass intact. But I'll never do it again.

Bob: I remember one time, going to Toronto with Karrin, we were opening for Ray Charles. It was a small plane, I had the bass in a big hard case to take underneath. They put all the other luggage on first for some reason. It was one of those where you walked out to the plane, no jetway. So the bass is sitting out there, it won't fit. They weren't going to put it on. Bill McLaughlin was with us. Bill, in this nice voice, said we were opening for Ray Charles. They heard Ray Charles and they got it on. Actually, it's just easier to not take it. Usually I've been pretty lucky with the basses I get.

Gerald: They can be really bad, though. You know that, you do it more than I have.

Bob: One time I was playing in Rome , I thought I'd have this great old Italian bass. I got what I called a log with strings on it. Then we played in this teeny little town two hours south of Rome , they had a great bass. I tell the management, try to get it from a player and not a music store, it'll be set up better and stuff.

JAM: What have been your favorite places to travel to?

Bob: This one little town in Italy , Viatri, Steve Rigazzi has relatives from there. It was just so picturesque, it was kind of a poor town, but it was a great place. And we had a couple of days off, which makes a difference. For audiences, in Japan , they really treat you well there, everything goes like clockwork. They just have so much respect. And Europe is great, I remember Norway , the Scandinavian countries, the audiences really appreciate it.

JAM: The bass seems to be one of the later instruments to evolve, maybe because a Scott LaFaro emerged relatively late in the development of what is mainstream jazz.

Bob: LaFaro was a huge influence.

Gerald: He was for me, too.

Bob: He covered a lot of ground, changed a lot of how people approached the bass.

Gerald: Go back before that, Jimmy Blanton with Ellington, he was the first guy to really play solos, play melodies on the bass.

Bob: Toscanini heard him, said he was the greatest musician he ever heard. But it has evolved, I think.

Gerald: Then you go to the electric bass, it's like a totally different instrument in a lot of ways, the sound is so much different.

Bob: The electric bass came along and seemed to replace the acoustic bass for a little while. It's so much easier to play, shorter strings and all that stuff. Then they improved amplification systems for the acoustic bass, and the acoustic bassists had to catch up with the electric players a little bit. When I was at North Texas , they had eleven bands, this was back in 1971, I was the only acoustic bass player. Everybody was playing Fender basses. Well, anything you could play on a Fender, I was trying to play on the acoustic. I was just talking to someone the other day, they said they were trying to play everything they could play on the electric on the acoustic. That kind of made it evolve, too.

Gerald: Definitely

JAM: Who are the big influences currently?

Gerald: Most of my favorites are ones who have been around or are already dead. Like Scott LaFaro and Ray Brown, and Niels Pedersen was a great bass player who just passed away. The guys around today, I like Christian McBride, he's really good, and Larry Grenadier, I'm really impressed with him.

Bob: I go back to the older guys, Eddie Gomez, Dave Holland, he's been one of my favorites forever. George Mraz is one of the most underrated.

Gerald: Did you see him with Joe Henderson, just the trio with Al Foster? I thought that was unbelievable.

Bob: Yeah, I saw them at the Blue Note in New York . I kind of replaced him in Thad Jones and Mel Lewis' band, so I was real familiar with him. There was a lot of pressure. He was real nice to me, he came in a lot and helped me. He's from Czechoslovakia , as is another guy I like, Miroslav Vitous.

JAM: What records would you recommend to someone who wanted to hear great bass playing.

Bob: The Bill Evans Village Vanguard sessions with Scott LaFaro. It's a great recording, a live recording.

Gerald: That's the first recording that came to my mind. You can hear the sound of every note he plays.

Bob: And that was done ten days before he died. You can also hear a woman on there, during a bass solo on “ Alice in Wonderland” she goes “I like jazz, but…,” then it trails off. She's on one of the classic jazz recordings of all time!

Gerald: There's a lot of background noise on that album. You can hear glasses clinking, you can hear people talking in the background.

Bob: I guess that's why the quality of the music was so good, they had the recording levels set very high.

Gerald: You almost have to go by eras. The Blanton-Ellington duos, that's one that everyone playing bass should listen to. Something with Paul Chambers with Miles. Relaxin' is one of my favorite albums.

Bob: He had a couple of good ones on his own. Like Bass On Top, and the Paul Chambers Quintet, both on Blue Note.

JAM: Of the folks you have played with, are there ones especially memorable?

Bob: I always enjoyed playing with Bob Kindred. We played at Topeka , and the Jazz Workshop series.

Gerald: Gary Foster, he hasn't been around for a while, but it still seems like he's one of the Kansas City guys.

Bob: That's really hard to answer, there are so many really great players around here. We may not have the depth that you have in New York , but still a lot of great players are here.

Gerald: Sometimes you have guys come into town, and they're not as good as the cats around here, you wonder why this guy is such a big name. It happens with guitar players a lot, your level of guitar players here is so great with guys like Rod [Fleeman] and Danny [Embrey], and guys like Jake [Blanton] coming up. The bar is high here.

JAM: Is there anybody you wish you could have played with? Is there somebody who, if they came to town, that you would fight each other to see who got the job?

Bob: We'd both do it, me on the right, Gerald on the left. Bass players are very accommodating people.

Gerald: More important to me are the people who I'd have liked to see play. I was talking to Doug Tatum about this the other day. He brought in Steve Lacy with Danilo Perez, not too long before Steve passed away. I missed that, I heard it was a great concert. Doug said it was one of the best concerts he ever put on there at the Folly. He's bringing in Lee Konitz, I've never heard Lee Konitz.

Bob: My choice would be Bill Evans. I got close. Marc Johnson was the last bassist with Bill, we were at North Texas together. I can't quite remember how this worked, but I was in New York , and the Bill Evans trio was playing the Village Vanguard for a week. Marc said he would let me sit in on Sunday afternoon, Bill had actually heard me with the Mel Lewis band, unbeknownst to me, but the bass player Reggie Johnson came up to me during the break and said that Bill Evans was back at the bar asking who the bass player was. I'm glad I didn't know that when I was playing! So I was going to sit in with him at the Vanguard, but he died before the gig started [Evans passed away in September, 1980].

Gerald: Did you ever play with Stan Getz?

Bob: No, but I auditioned for him, went to New York twice, I didn't hear from him for a week. I was staying with a friend of mine. I decided to come back to Kansas City , and the day I left someone called, “Is Bob Bowman there?” “No, he just drove back to Kansas , left for Kansas today.” And they said “ Kansas ! I need him to rehearse today!” and hung up.

JAM: How about some of your newer projects. Bob, you have a new group called Bowdog.

Bob: Yes, it is Wayne Hawkins, Tim Cambron, and Jake Blanton. It happened, I was trying to book an Interstring gig at the Blue Room last January. With Todd [Strait] living in Portland , and Danny and Rod are so busy, it just didn't happen, so I got these guys, and it seemed like really good chemistry that we stuck with it. It keeps getting better real fast, because they are all great players.

JAM: You have some original music written for the band?

Bob: Yes, and it seems we are playing a lot of ballads, which I enjoy doing, and to find younger guys who play ballads so well is unusual. It's coming off real well. Musically it's fun.

JAM: Gerald, you have the Westport Art Ensemble, it seemed to be pretty much your band as much as a cooperative thing.

Gerald: I don't want to take too much credit. Right now it's in an odd state, we get it together with some different players. The original band was with Jake, Josh Sklar, Roger Wilder, and Todd Strait . Like Bob said, the chemistry just seemed perfect. I had been playing some gigs with Josh, that's how it came about. We did some gigs with some different players, and it was okay, but one time we played at the Blue Room and it was just that band. We decided to get together and rehearse once a week, just to see where it would go.

JAM: Any more Westport Art Ensemble recordings coming?

Gerald: No, but we are rehearsing for a gig at the Blue Room in a couple of weeks. And Josh is going to be in Town around Christmas, and hopefully Todd, too. So we are trying to get the original guys back together and play the Blue Room the Thursday after Christmas.

JAM: The band plays infrequently, is it like roller skating, just put ‘em on and go?

Gerald: It was last time we played with the original guys, maybe two summers ago. It was amazing, a great gig. Everything fell into place. We did two gigs, the Blue Room and the Westport Coffee House. The Blue Room was just packed. Every once in a while something like that happens. The music was great, too, I wish someone would have recorded it.

Bob: That's what the last Bowdog gig at the Blue Room in August was like. You could hear a pin drop. It's so inspiring. You put out energy and get it back.

JAM: You have a four bass group that plays occasionally, the Kansas City Bass Quartet.

Gerald: I kind of got that together. In fact, I don't know how it came about.

Bob: You and I were going to do a duo thing out at Johnson County Community College , and I got pneumonia, we were rehearsing for that.

Gerald: Right, and I had done some arrangements for three basses. James Albright had some recording equipment, and we got together at his house, it was without Bob, it was me, James, and Craig Akin, and we recorded some of the things I had written , just trying it out. Then I started hearing some of these things with John Clayton, things for multiple basses, four bases or more. Then we had the thing we were going to do at JCCC, the duo with Bob, and he got pneumonia. On that day, I got Rod Fleeman to sub for Bob, which worked out great. And we had the thing with three basses, and I thought, if Bob wants to do it, we could have four basses, and maybe we could do the same gig the next time, which we did and it came off great. We've done three out there, and a couple of churches, we've done six or seven gigs so far… about once a year or so. It's a different dynamic, each bass player is totally different. It's unique, and to see it live is something. We have arrangements, it's arranged to a certain extent, the melodies, and each bassist takes their solos.

Bob: Gerald has some great arrangements, things are harmonized and stuff, like you'd do with any kind of a quartet, this one just happens to be basses.

JAM: Time for desert island picks.

Gerald: I'll pick ones with basses.

Bob: And I'll steer away from them.

Gerald: Mingus Ah Um. T he Bill Evans Village Vanguard recordings with Scott LaFaro. The Bill Evans Album with Eddie Gomez and Marty Morell. Charlie Haden and Hampton Hawes' As Long as There's Music. And the first Jaco Pastorius album on Columbia . That one was a big influence on me. It's the one that really got me playing jazz. Hearing that was a mind-blowing experience at the time. It's dated in a way now, maybe, but it's incredible, that solo on “Donna Lee”, what he does on that tune is unbelievable. Just him and a conga player. He really changed the sound of the electric bass.

Bob: Before that, the electric bass was more of a funk think, a rock thing. But the electric bass really took off after that, it went one way and the acoustic another way, the electric stopped trying to be a substitute for the acoustic. Well, my picks, I have to include the Bill Evans Village Vanguard recordings. A really big influence on me was Miles Davis' Miles Smiles, with Ron Carter, he sounded so good on that.

Gerald: I used to listen to that album all the time.

Bob: Me, too. I got it, my mom took me to my birthday to Penney's in Topeka , they used to have albums. I had heard some big band, and some Dixieland stuff. I saw that was the Jazz Small Group Album of the Year in Downbeat, so I thought I'd get it. I took it home, listened to it, thought it was kind of weird. But I liked it, I liked the bass player, a nice sound. I'd put it down for a month or two, then put it on again and think, yeah, I think I like this. Gradually I started listening to it all the time. I probably know that album even better than Kind of Blue. Which would be another one, that's number three. Now I guess I have to jump. They are usually on the same CD together, Ravel's and Debussy's String Quartets. I think they each just wrote one string quarter. And Glenn Gould's recording of Bach's “Goldberg Variations”.

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