Bass on Top a column by ECM – The Solo Bass Catalogue While there is some debate over whether the transformation of the bass from a support role to an unaccompanied lead voice was the result of “simultaneous” or “heroic” invention – both Barre Phillips’ Journal Violone (Opus One) and Peter Ind’s Improvisation - Contrabass (his own Wave) were recorded in London in November 1968 – indisputable is how the format has proliferated to the point where bassists from all frequencies of the artistic spectrum have experimented with it. To wit, as of this writing, there have been over a thousand solo bass documents (for a dynamic list, visit https://solodoublebass.jimdofree.com). Also indisputable is how Manfred Eicher’s ECM, famed for supporting the bassist-as-bandleader since almost its inception, has done more than any label – at least among the “majors”, not to discount the work of smaller imprints and bassists self-releasing their work – to champion the solo bass format. Admittedly, ECM’s solo bass catalogue is a drop into a glassy northern lake that could be one of its cover photographs but it includes some of the instrument’s giants in incomparable audiophilic settings, a League of Nations’ worth of players hailing from Britain, America, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Sweden, and Norway. This issue’s column explores that catalogue, including three releases that are not strictly solo bass recordings but come close enough and are important statements meriting inclusion. Not considered is the far more unusual – both for ECM and the format in general – solo electric bass guitar album Provenance by Björn Meyer as it is just too different an instrument to be comparable (this author would know, having played the electric since childhood yet failing miserably to translate his experience to the upright). It should be stated for those who don’t know that Eicher began his musical career as a bassist, documented with Bob Degen, Joe Viera, and Marion Brown. No disrespect to those efforts but we are far luckier that Eicher moved to the other side of the studio glass so many decades ago. His experience was crucial in ECM’s attention to aural reproduction. A bassist, more than any player on stage, is attuned to the group sound and how he or she, as the quietest instrument, can easily be washed out. As he told this author in an interview on the occasion of ECM’s 50th anniversary, “You should be a musician to be a producer. I put the double bass in the corner to become a producer because I got the feeling that I can do more for the music this way. I played jazz with American musicians while training classical bass. That was not so bad actually but I thought, I will never be able to play like those that I was watching from a distance, so I switched sides and started recording them. It was a distinct point because the sound I was hearing on orchestra recordings was never the sound I heard when playing with the orchestra. So I tried to get a bit closer to reality by using my talent of listening to music and trained it through a school of listening that I enforced on myself.” A surprising thing right from the outset is that after having released David Holland/Barre Phillips’ Music from Two Basses as the label’s 11th session in 1971, it would take seven years for a pure solo bass album to come out. Less surprising is that would come from Holland, who, at the time, was the most prominent (and second most documented after Eberhard Weber) bassist on the roster. Emerald Tears was recorded in August 1977, after the aforementioned duo with Phillips and Holland’s participation in a multi-bass ensemble organized by Peter Warren (see last issue’s column for more on that date). The album mixed Holland’s compositions (never recorded again) with music from two earlier collaborators: Anthony Braxton and Miles Davis. Two other points of interest are that it would be only Holland’s second full leadership date after Conference of the Birds and that he would revisit the format only once more in 1993 (the non-ECM release Ones All). Later in 1977, also in Oslo’s Talent Studio, Gary Peacock would make his own ECM solo date, released in 1979 as December Poems. This is one of the three not-strictly solo recordings as labelmate saxophonist Jan Garbarek appears on two tracks. Peacock was an interesting member of the ECM family for a couple of reasons: his first appearances were recordings that predated the label’s founding and it was his 1977 label debut Tales Of Another that was the debut of what would become Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio, itself ECM bedrock. Apart from Mal Waldron and Paul Bley, Peacock was the most veteran of the label’s early roster and perhaps its most versatile; name someone else who worked with both Bud Shank and Albert Ayler. Unlike Holland’s release, December Poems is entirely from the pen of Peacock (one tune, “December Greenwings” reappearing in trio format for the 2016 ECM album Tangents) and he would never make another album like it again. A period review by Art Lange in DownBeat upon the release of December Poems compares and contrasts it with Emerald Tears: “Both bassists share a penchant for rhapsodic continuity and elaborate thematic investigations, though where Holland is prone to pull out all the stops and exhibit his frighteningly formidable technique, Peacock tends to retreat into his compositional framework, exploring its curves and emotional feel. As a result, Peacock the composer makes effective use of such devices as refrains, ostinatos, and occasional overdubbing in order to dramatically juxtapose thematic events, colors, and textures.” It took Phillips nearly 15 years to follow up Journal Violone with another solo set (the 1979 ECM album Journal Violone II was actually with a trio). Why it took until his fifth ECM date to make a solo record given his prominence in the format’s history is unknown (making one wish the label had included liner notes of some sort during that period). Unlike the first solo album, which was really a fully improvised sonic experiment turned into a commercial release after the fact, 1983’s Call Me When You Get There is discrete compositions, was carefully planned and actually made at the suggestion of Eicher. In a 2000 Coda interview, Phillips stated that “I worked on [that album] actively for six months. I almost knew every note I was going to play before I went into the studio.” Miroslav Vitous, despite being active since the mid ‘60s, came to the ECM party more than fashionably late, with an 1978 eponymous cooperative date with Terje Rypdal and Jack DeJohnette. He then had three leader dates and a smattering of sideman credits on ECM before waxing Emergence in 1985, his sole entry into the solo bass canon, a collection of originals alongside a reading of the Sammy Fain-Bob Hilliard standard “Alice in Wonderland.” Writing about the album in 2012 for his ecmreviews.com blog, Tyran Grillo gushed, “Although Miroslav Ladislav Vitouš has had varying levels of success in the post-Weather Report years as bandleader, we can hardly help but marvel at this gem of a solo recording. With nary an overdub in sight and more than enough heart to spare, the Czech bassist plots an orchestral sweep through his precisely (at)tuned skills. Like the caron that disappeared from the end of his name before going international, it is a valley of possibility and he our shepherd through its gallery of songs and tales.” The next two entries both come from Eberhard Weber, who had first appeared on an ECM record as part of the longstanding Wolfgang Dauner Trio in 1970 before making his leader debut in 1973 with The Colours Of Chloe, going on to be one of the most documented bassists on the label. 1988’s Orchestra would seem inaptly titled for a solo bass album except it is another deviating entry, with a couple of the tunes including a horn ensemble and another with Weber also on keyboards. Pendulum from 1993, on the other hand, is purely solo. Both are exclusively Weber compositions. He, with three solo ECM records and Phillips, with two, are the only ones with multiple entries into the catalogue. Weber’s liner notes from Pendulum are worth quoting: “Why do I play everything alone? The answer is simple. The bass just happens to be my life-long preoccupation. Also my old adversary. And I have long been dissatisfied with using this instrument in the traditional way. I find it a lot more exciting to make all those strange, witty, unmistakable, unique sounds that only an obstinate lover can coax from this stubborn instrument.” For whatever reason, there would be large gaps on either side of Anders Jormin’s Xieyi, six years after Pendulum and over 15 until Larry Grenadier’s The Gleaners. Jormin had been on ECM records since the early ‘90s under the leadership of Charles Lloyd, Tomasz Stanko, Bobo Stenson and others but Xieyi established him – in this unusual format – as a leader for the label, which he continues to this day. Like Orchestra, this is not Jormin totally distilled, 4 of the 12 pieces (some originals, others covers ranging from compatriot bassist Georg Riedel to Ornette Coleman and Jean Sibelius) including a brass quartet. A BBC review placed it in a lineage with Emerald Tears and Call Me When You Get There while distinguishing it from later entries full of “the extended technique that some bassists rely on to get them through a whole album, Jormin instead relies on a perfectly honed melodic sense and an impassioned, lyrical approach to solo bass language that relies as much on folk and classical influence as it does on jazz. His technique, though impressive, is never allowed to grandstand and is completely at the service of the music (though there are occasions when the listener is led to wonder exactly how many hands he possesses).” There would be nearly 700 albums released by ECM between Xieyi and 2016’s The Gleaners. Why? Only Eicher would know. Like Jormin, Grenadier had been a regular participant in ECM dates, starting in the new millennium, with Lloyd, Enrico Rava, Wolfgang Muthspiel, the cooperative FLY and others, before debuting under his own name with his solo date, still his only leader release, a collection of his compositions alongside one by partner Rebecca Martin, plus John Coltrane, George Gershwin, and former employers Muthspiel and Paul Motian. It was, in fact, Eicher who suggested the idea. As Grenadier said in a 2019 article on ECM in SFJAZZ’ online magazine On The Corner, it was “just the right timing. It sounded like a challenge I could use, going into the woodshed and trying to figure out how to do it and then pulling it off. And if I ever was going to do a solo bass record, it would be for Manfred. I could trust that he would capture the sound of the bass in a way I would appreciate. Also, who else would even put out a solo bass album? It is not exactly something that record companies are jumping to do these days. That’s another thing about Manfred: even if it is become a commercial enterprise over the years at ECM, that’s not really what it is about for him.” The timing of returning to the format could not have been better as about a year later Eicher would approach Phillips to make another ECM solo date, almost 34 years after Call Me When You Get There (though Phillips had made others in the interim for Les Disques Victo, émouvance and fellow bassist JC Jones’ Kadima Collective imprint) and nearly half a century after that initial foray Journal Violone. In a Cadence Magazine interview from 2018, shortly after End To End was released, he said that it was “likely going to be the last solo record I will make” – which it indeed was, Phillips dying in 2024 at 90 – and that “what I like so much about this record is that, on my behalf, there’s no artifice, it is just me the way I would be playing and working at home. The bits of artifice which I had brought with me to the studio, I threw out almost instantly and didn’t even record them.” The last decade has seen three more solo bass albums for ECM. The first came in 2018 with Marc Johnson’s Overpass. Best known for his stint as Bill Evans’ last bassist, Johnson had led and co-led dates for ECM since the mid ‘80s but holds the record for second-oldest bassist to debut as a pure soloist, being nearly 65 when Overpass was recorded (Henry Grimes was 67 when he did it) so one naturally wonders why he and his instrument took the plunge for this collection of originals, Eddie Harris’ “Freedom Jazz Dance” and pair of tunes obliquely fêting his old boss Evans: the “Love Theme From Spartacus,” which the pianist recorded (mostly solo) several times in the ‘60s, and Miles Davis’ “Nardis,” unofficially Evans’ theme song and his feature for his bassists, waxed with Johnson numerous times. As he explained to the notreble.com website in 2021, “I’ve been experimenting with different ways of playing alone with the bass to make music and came up with a couple of different meditative-type, pattern-oriented concepts. That started the idea of doing a whole record like that some time. I’ve been experimenting with that and throwing them on different album projects for different people, like with John Abercrombie. There are some moments in a track here or there, where I dive into something like that, but I had never tried to do a whole piece from start to finish with just that being the impetus of thing.” Closing out the ECM solo bass catalogue are two unique entries in that both are the only live recordings of the bunch. Weber had his career tragically cut short when he suffered a stroke in 2007, robbing him of likely many more years of active recording and performance. So Once upon a Time (Live in Avignon) is a bittersweet reminder of what could have been, a 48-minute recital from the Festival International De Contrebasse in 1994, taking place in the titular French city and put together by none other than Phillips and having in its set music from the Orchestra and Pendulum records, two and three pieces, respectively. The last solo bass ECM – as of this writing – is of much more recent vintage and comes from a bassist of equal prominence to the label as Weber, Arild Andersen, first heard on ECM the same year as the former and just as active as a leader over the years. Landloper is a 2020 concert from Oslo’s Victoria National Jazzscene and is a supremely modern take on the form as Andersen plays over real-time electronic loops for a solo duet of sorts. Reviewing the album for Stereophile, this author brilliantly observes “Landloper falls squarely in the middle of a spectrum that has Ron Carter’s explorations of standards on one end and Peter Kowald’s arco violence on the other. Arildsen plays tunes by himself [the title track from his 1980 ECM album Lifelines, “Dreamhorse” and “Mira” from book of his more recent ECM-documented trio with Tommy Smith and Paolo Vinaccia], Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden, and from the Great American and Norwegian folk songbooks. Familiar tunes feel like echoes across a vast fjord. The effects add the glistening of early morning dew under sonorous pizzicato.” Manfred Eicher is a spry 82 and ECM is still releasing vibrant new recordings from both new artists and roster staples. There is bound to be another solo bass record on the horizon, with the best bet/this author’s suggestion being its most recent low-end stalwart Thomas Morgan.
© 2025 Andrey Henkin
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