Bass Instincts
I’ve been kind of obsessing on bass guitar for a while now … I’ve always been a big McCartney fan, particularly of his bass playing, and some of my friends have recommended other more challenging music for me recently. I guess I was the last of the cool kids to discover Eberhard Weber, the extraordinary German jazz bassist, and I’ve been listening to him constantly for quite a while now.
So, while I have no pretensions of becoming anywhere near as good as Eberhard Weber, I recently rented a bass guitar and have started to learn to play. A good friend is a pretty proficient bassist and he’s offered to give me occasional lessons in return for editing his term papers. His English is good, but not perfect (he’s from Italy originally) and he could use some help with polishing.
We’ve begun with very basic stuff … some rhythm patterns where I don’t even use the guitar, I’m just clapping a beat to a metronome, and the basics of plucking and damping a bass string. I’m having fun with it, and I hope that things move along fairly quickly, since I’m eager to begin playing some actual tunes.
Once I get to begin playing in earnest, I want to learn the bass line to one of the guest appearances that Weber made, Mother Stands for Comfort, from Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love album. It’s an older album, it came out in the mid Eighties I think, and it’s just beautiful. Weber’s appearance is a standout, but it’s all around a pretty great record.
OK, back to bass-ics now (oh, what a wit).