By Matt McDermott

Many people are most familiar with the playing style of a bassist like Paul Chambers on the classic 1950s Miles Davis albums. In this style of modern jazz, how can the listener best understand the role of the bassist as first a rhythm player and as a soloist?

Where the rhythm section is concerned, I think the bassist's role today is the same as it's always been: to provide an appropriate form of propulsion. In contemporary improvised music, "appropriate" propulsion should be flexible, supportive and/or challenging to the other players in the group - and, of course, these criteria would also have applied to the classic Davis rhythm section you cite: Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. There are important differences, though, in the rhythmic/harmonic framework of the music, and the roles of the musicians in the group in general. On the latter point, much of the improvised music being made today finds the lines between "soloist" and "accompanist" blurred to the point of irrelevance and many players make the decision to do away with these roles from the outset.

In terms of rhythmic/harmonic framework, the music a rhythm section player can be expected to encounter in 2007 may or may not involve a fixed pulse, a walking line in the bass, or a repeating pattern of chords to establish a context. Contrast these two factors with the conditions for a 1950s state-of-the-art rhythm section like Chambers and Jones, who were, at that time, working with a fixed pulse exclusively, and in a format which adhered rigorously to the melody/soloists/melody structure.

So the job of a bassist in a rhythm section today is to be aware of the precedents set by players like Chambers/Jones, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell - note that I'm including the drummers too! - and many others who have moved the concept of jazz rhythm playing forward in important ways. Once those precedents have been absorbed and internalized, the bassist can hopefully draw from those examples when choosing a particular style of propulsion.

Describing what happens in a rhythm section is pretty complicated - I realize now that I haven't mentioned listening to each other and listening to the phrases and cadences being generated by the "lead" instruments - but it should sound, when it's happening right, like an inevitable flow of energy moving in a specific direction. That's true in any style of jazz playing, and it's what I'm thinking of, if I'm thinking of anything, when I'm playing in a rhythm section.

Hopefully I can say something simpler about the role of the bassist today as a soloist: the bass, at this point, has joined horns, other strings and percussion instruments as a fully capable solo instrument. In most playing contexts these days, the bass is free from any special conditions imposed on its solo space due to its bass-ness. Where Paul Chambers, for all his prowess as a soloist, was still functioning in a time when the bass's solo role was generally circumscribed by the needs of the arrangement, the conventions of sound balance necessitated by earlier, pre-amplified times (i.e., virtually no one else plays when the bass is soloing), and so forth, this stuff is pretty much all out the window now and the bass solo gets treated like any other solo which is free to develop its own space and trajectory. Of course, there are still unique challenges inherent to the instrument -challenges for the whole group; I hasten to add - which have to be dealt with. It's a quiet, low sound and is easily swamped by other instruments when played acoustically and easily becomes overwhelmingly heavy and out-of-balance when amplified. That's where listening comes back in ...

What contributions of the bass to jazz do you think are least understood by audiences?

Well, I guess I covered a little of this question with all the above comments about propulsion. But another important aspect, one which can be missed in the fray of an improvised performance, is the bass's role in creating tension and triggering release in the music. Even though much of the music we play is not based around a particular harmonic center, that is, it's not in a "key," or based on a set of chords, it's still a fact that when you play two or more notes together, you create an interval and I believe that the human ear will hear that interval as a harmonic relationship. As to whether this is built into us, or the result of conditioning, there aren't enough ones and zeros in my computer to cover that topic, but I am content to accept it as a natural law.

Also built into our harmonic perception of music is the tendency to hear the lowest tone of an interval as the fundamental or the harmonic basis for whatever tones may be stacked above it. So to oversimplify, if I play a note on the bass, and the saxophonist plays a note in the upper register, the interval will seem to be "grounded" in the note the bass is playing. Then it's up to me to move the ground, make it unstable or solid, make it move or stand still, etc. I am leaving out the fact that I am simultaneously playing some kind of rhythmic structure with or against the drummer, which goes back to the issue of propulsion. But both propulsion and harmonic stability/instability are among the ways a group builds tension in its music, and I would argue that in contemporary improvising the responsibility for regulating harmonic stability, or creating instability, rests largely on the bass.

The bass traditionally plays a unique "bridging" role between the drums and the rest of the group. How would you explain that role in general and in terms of your own playing?

So if we in the rhythm section - which today often means just the bassist and drummer - are dealing with propulsion and what I'll call harmonic regulation in order to keep the music moving and flexible, what I personally am trying to do with the drummer is add to the energy he's generating, and hopefully increase it, while cluttering up the sound of the band as little as possible. To me this means letting the drums and bass do what they do well and using those inherent properties to generate energy as efficiently as possible.

A great example of this kind of playing, and one I'm trying to learn from these days, is Cuban music, where the drums are often extremely busy, throwing off all this energy in all directions - which is something drums do very well - and the bass is usually playing incredibly minimal, well-placed patterns against the drums which rely more on the bass's ability to make a clear, centered tone which is both percussive and harmonic. The effect is to streamline and direct the energy of the group so that suddenly it sounds like unified velocity, going in a single direction. It would be difficult or impossible to achieve the same effect with the roles reversed; the instruments just don't function efficiently enough to play the other's part effectively. So you do what the bass and drums do best and use your ability to manipulate propulsion, harmony, etc., to keep it interesting and at the same time try to make it sound simple and inevitable. At least that's the idea!

How would you describe your own approach to constructing a solo?

When I have the opportunity to play a bass solo, I am almost always considering, in the seconds before I know I will start the solo, what materials I have at hand and which ones I will choose to incorporate into the solo. Then the solo consists of exploring those materials, trying to find ways to expand on them without losing some kind of narrative arc. That's about it - but the list of materials includes everything: from the notes in the composition to whatever the piano player just finished doing, to the fact that my bass might only be playing well in one register that night, to the dynamic level, or the density of the tune up to then, etc.

Other materials might include a particular piece of music I've been listening to and trying to understand how to apply to playing situations; the lyrics of the tune, if it has lyrics; a sequence of notes I discovered earlier in the tune and want to come back to; what effects pedal I'm using; if I'm on tour, one of my materials might be all the solos I've played on a particular tune until tonight and the desire to find something different, unrelated to any of them. Many of these materials would be unidentifiable to a listener; others would sound like obvious attempts to process what's been happening in the concert.

Usually, at some point in the solo, I find that I'm not conscious of the materials that I set out to use, and that I'm just responding to the demands created by what I'm playing, in real time. That's probably as close as I can come to a description of the process of improvising, and it still involves a lot of subconscious use of materials that I'm not aware of while playing. Eventually I realize that I have to end the bass solo. Do I give it a big, obvious finish, so that everybody in the band knows to come crashing back in on the downbeat, or do I gradually mingle with what the rest of the players are doing, or do I stop suddenly? Depends on the situation, but it usually involves some kind of planning, so I'd say it represents the end of the "pure improvisation" part of the solo, where things are mostly unconscious.

You do a lot of playing in what is called interchangeably free jazz, avant-garde jazz, or contemporary improvised jazz. Is there a generally defined role for the bass in this music?

If I had to provide a general definition for the role of the bass in the types of jazz I'm playing - almost none of which involve conventional jazz chord structure or rhythm as exemplified earlier by Paul Chambers' playing - I would go back to the same issues of propulsion and harmonic regulation I've been talking about. I would say that 95% of the time, if I am asked to participate in a group playing improvised music, the expectation is that I help serve those functions. It's what the instrument does well. Alternatives certainly exist: the first example that comes to mind is the group Iskra 1903, with Derek Bailey on guitar, Paul Rutherford on trombone and Barry Guy on bass. On the recordings I've heard, Guy plays little or no conventionally functional bass - he's not trying to propel the music, or at least not any more than the other players are, and much of the time he's using sounds or registers on the instrument which exempt it from its usual role as the lowest sound in the harmonic spectrum.

But I would argue that Guy's approach, plus that of the others in the group and of many English and European musicians of that time, represented a conscious attempt to reject the conventional and to redefine the possibilities of instruments which had longstanding roles in the history of improvising. That they were able to achieve such fantastic music so much of the time is a testament to their determination and inventiveness, but I think the surprise of hearing these old familiar instruments being pushed so far out of their "normal" roles is also an important characteristic of that music. They were working incredibly hard to find sounds that could make the music have what music needs - velocity, tension and release, beauty, shock, etc., - but by trying to avoid the sounds that the instruments "did well," they fought to keep away from the roles that convention had established for each. So in a way, they were still dealing with those roles, still using them as material to work against.