Bass on Top a column by Finding Gus Nemeth [Note: originally this article was to be a deep investigation into who Gus Nemeth was and what happened to him with the assumption that he was long deceased but, with just a little bit of searching, contact with French vocalist Thierry Péala, who worked with him in the ‘90s, revealed that Nemeth was alive and well and available to talk by phone. Heavy storms in northwest France, where he has been based for years, made for an intermittent but informative conversation about his life.] In the history of jazz, there have been hundreds of bassists documented on record. Some, the Ron Carters, Richard Davises and the like have discographies on their own that outnumber many of the rest combined. On the other end are the ones who made it on to an LP or two and were never heard from again. This edition of the column focuses on a player in the middle of that spectrum. Gus Nemeth is a name that listeners of different jazz genres may have come across in their musical travels. But his discography, a little over two dozen recordings, is intermittent and inspires more questions than answers. This author had first come across him on a pair of albums recorded within four days of each other in Paris and put out on that country’s Futura label. On July 26th, 1971, he was part of a rhythm section (with drummer Jean My Truong of Perception fame) supporting pianist Jaki Byard for Live at the Jazz’Inn. Then, on July 30th, he was in the Studio Europasonor with drummer Stu Martin (during his period in The Trio) under the leadership of German-French pianist Siegfried Kessler for Solaire. Futura’s typical minimalism with information gave no clue as to this player alongside far more known entities. Nemeth is a Hungarian name so the easy assumption was that he was among the coterie of free-ish European jazzers scattered across the continent, many of whom appeared on other Futura dates. These albums show a refreshingly restrained and melodic player able to traverse both the complex terrain of European avant-garde and American post-bop. Nemeth recalled Futura founder Gérard Terronès organizing these sessions. Several months later, still in Paris, he appears on a much-harder-to-find release, Jamaican trumpeter Sonny Grey’s Skippin’ on Numera, a session with two notable American expatriates in pianist Mal Waldron and drummer Kenny Clarke, the band completed by French tenor saxophonist Alain Hatot, who would go on to have hundreds of credits in the rock and pop worlds, most notably with Elton John. An alternate timeline would have an aficionado of African jazz seeing the name Nemeth on two albums from the mid ‘70s, one, Soweto To Harlem, with American expatriate saxophonist Hal Singer from Johannesburg, South Africa on June 30th, 1976 in a group with drummer Oliver Johnson and French pianist Alain Jean-Marie, the other presumably from the same period in the same location with the same band on one track of Blue Stompin’, with the rest of the date given over to Kippie Moeketsi, both put out by the seminal South African label As-Shams/The Sun Records run by Rashid Vally (who passed away last December at ~85). So, if your tastes remained centered within the bubbling cauldrons of European free-bop of the ‘70s or early-ish South African jazz, you may have thought this was it for our elusive Mr. Nemeth. Turns out this is hardly the case and the story starts far earlier and goes much further. While Augustus Nemeth is indeed of Hungarian extraction, he was actually born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1936. His father, who died when Nemeth was eight, played violin and had an orchestra that performed Hungarian music. The younger Nemeth started playing the bass at twelve and would travel to nearby Philadelphia to study bass with Carl Torello (son of then-principal bass of the Philadelphia Orchestra) at the Curtis Institute of Music. He also studied in that city with native jazz guitarist Dennis Sandole. Of his studies during that period, Nemeth said, “To play your instrument, there is no better way to play in tune than with a bow, classical music.” His first document on record comes from 1957, the Charlie Ventura King LP Adventure With Charlie, where he is listed as Augie. Prior to that he worked with Blossom Dearie and later spent time while in his twenties with pianist Bernard Peiffer, who had moved to Philadelphia in 1954 after a successful career in his native France. Nemeth worked with him for 12 years, appears on three of his albums and, according to a period report in DownBeat, Peiffer and Nemeth came on the Captain Kangaroo show in 1967 to explain jazz to its host and his audience. During his time with Peiffer he also worked at the Deer Head Inn in Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania with its house pianist John Coates, whom he had met while working with Ventura (“Afternoon Rehearsal Deer Head Inn” by painter Sterling Strauser captures the trio with saxophonist Bob Newman in 1963). He then worked all around, including Atlantic City, where he backed up Billy Eckstine and others. “When you’re an itinerant musician,” Nemeth said, “you work in a lot of different places and that fills in the gaps.” There was one particular collaboration that was hitherto unknown to me because no official recordings exist. From August 1969 to March 1970, Nemeth was part of Keith Jarrett’s trio during the pianist’s sojourn in Europe. Nemeth met the younger player while they were both working around Pennsylvania (Jarrett is from Allentown, northwest of Philadelphia) and it is known that a young Jarrett used to see Coates perform at the Deer Head Inn. This period in Jarrett’s career is typically overlooked. Traditionally his timeline has him following his years with Charles Lloyd, ending in March 1969, by joining Miles Davis in May 1970. Jarrett had a trio as far back as May 1967, comprised of bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian, which put out a pair of obscure albums on Vortex, Life Between The Exit Signs and Somewhere Before, and played a handful of gigs through the summer of 1969. It is unclear whether it was other commitments for Haden and Motian or a lack of proper money, or both, which prevented Jarrett from bringing them along to Europe. So, he recruited Nemeth and the even more obscure drummer Bob Ventrello, with Motian replacing the latter in the middle of the period, followed by a brief spell with Aldo Romano. The group played some Jarrett music from the aforementioned albums and various period pop and rock covers around Europe and Scandinavia. It from this time that we get the sole extended video footage – in black and white – of Nemeth. He cuts a swashbuckling figure, with a massive mustache and silk handkerchief around his neck, communing with Jarrett and Motian in an Oslo club. As said, none of this music was ever released officially but bootlegs do exist. Who knows how the mercurial Jarrett felt about this period of his career? Emails for comment to his management went unsurprisingly unanswered. But the process of leading a band, his first extended period doing so, surely influenced him in the coming decade, when he would launch his three most lauded groups: The American Quartet, The European Quartet, and the ensemble that would come to be known as the Standards Trio. After his time with Jarrett, Nemeth stayed in Europe, as did many others. “I worked with Keith until Miles Davis came to Paris and hired him. So here I was in Paris. I did some classical work, an opera and became an itinerant bass player doing work in different places.” Asked why he stayed on, Nemeth laughed: “What can I say? I love Paris. It’s cliché but it’s true.” He also found love and married a French woman. His name crops up in various contexts thereafter: a band with Swiss drummer Daniel Humair from 1971 that also had alto saxophonist Phil Woods during his own time as an expatriate and local pianist Michel Graillier; another piano (plus organ and keyboards) trio date, this time with Frenchman Maurice Vander; participation in a soundtrack for the 1975 film Le sujet ou Le secrétaire aux mille et un tiroirs with noted Steve Lacy collaborator Steve Potts (including late guitarist Christian Escoudé in possibly his first recording); the aforementioned Singer recordings, the tour for which Nemeth recalled was put together by the United States Information Center as “American propaganda”; a couple of 1978 albums with American trombonist Mike Zwerin and Escoudé, both under the former’s name and as the cooperative Not Much Noise; the Isis Quartet with saxophonist Jean-Marc Larché, guitarist Patrice Thomas and drummer Jean-Louis Mechali (late of Cohelmec Ensemble); albums with Alain Jean-Marie, Benoît Schlosberg, Annette Lowman, Manuel Villarroel, Gilda Solve, the very recently departed Daoud David Williams and Contrast Saxophones Quintet; and pop sessions with Catherine Lara, Robin Eaton and Jérôme Berrichon. “You go where there’s work,” Nemeth quipped. “It’s simple really but it’s always interesting.” He continued concertizing well into the new millennium, retiring at 79. He also became a pedagogue at several schools, including the Conservatoire De Musique Erik Satie De Bagnolet in the Parisian suburbs. So, Nemeth was never lost, needing to be found. One just had to care to look a little harder.
© 2025 Andrey Henkin
|