Dave Bass - NYC Sessions.pdf

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whaling city sound
www.whalingcitysound.com
Produced by Dave Bass
about
DAVE BASS
This Cincinnati kid attended Berklee,
studied with Madame Chaloff gleaning
an exquisite touch on piano and an
appreciation for the spirituality of
music, opened for Captain Beefheart,
studied composition with George
Russell and toured the world with
Brenda Lee before hitting 26. After
an injury took him out of the music
world for decades, Dave is back. As
Phil Woods says about NYC Sessions,
“Man! This is a helluva recording. I love
it and am very proud to be on it. It’s
swinging all the way and the overall
balance of material is exquisite. Let’s
take this sucker on the road!”
Executive Producer: Neal Weiss
Recorded December 4 & 5, 2012
at MSR Studios, New York, NY
Recording engineer & mixing: Todd Whitelock
Re-mixing: Michael O’Reilly
Re-mixing consultant: Suzi Reynolds
Mastering: Alan Silverman
CD package design: David Arruda Jr
Photography: Standa Merhout
Phil Woods plays a Yamaha 82Z alto sax,
uses Van Doren ZZ reeds & K & M sax stands
Ignacio Berroa plays Yamaha Drums, Sabian Cymbals,
Evans Drum Heads, Vic Firth Sticks & L.P. Instruments
Conrad Herwig exclusively plays
Michael Rath Trombones, England
Harvie S uses the Acoustic Image amplifier
For contact and booking info,
please visit: www.davebassmusic.com
1
The Sixties
2
Lost Mambo
6:02
4.55
5.05
The
road leading Dave Bass to his New York City sessions was long and
7:17
3
Endless Waltz
4
La Comparsa
/
Mi Montuno
5
Lost Valentine
7
Baltic Bolero
9
Dark Eyes
6:12
6
My Foolish Heart
8
Since I Found You
10
Silence
3:46
7:12
5:32
winding to say the least. It has taken him across the US and over the Pacific
Ocean, through a variety of styles, a change of careers and two decades where
he appeared to put music behind him. Along the way, Bass mastered the
language of modern jazz improvisation, the rhythmic secrets of Afro-Latin
idioms, and both the melodic and poetic auras of the Great American Songbook.
No late bloomer, Bass should be considered a hardy perennial whose talents,
once dormant, have finally emerged.
The jazz chops, heard on his hard-swinging “The Sixties” and delicate reading
of “My Foolish Heart,” came first, and can be traced to the music he heard
while growing up in Cincinnati. “A friend played John Coltrane’s Live at the
Village Vanguard Again for me and it knocked me out,” Bass recalls. “I just went
from there, with the goal of playing avant-garde jazz.” He enrolled at Boston’s
Berklee College but dropped out after a few weeks, finding the curriculum of
less interest than the contemporary music that had yet to reach the academy –
the mix of freedom and intellect in Paul Bley’s music and the spontaneity of
Keith Jarrett’s Facing You. Bass used his time in Boston to study with visionary
tutors such as George Russell, who had begun teaching his Lydian Chromatic
Concept at the New England Conservatory, and Madame Margaret Chaloff, the
legendary piano teacher whose emphasis on sound can be heard in Bass’
beautiful keyboard touch.
While these lessons were sinking in, and while his love of adventurous music
never waned, Bass began to find his avant-garde focus insular and limiting.
Mastery of the musical basics he had previously shunned now became a goal.
“I didn’t want to be on this island, isolated from the rest of the world, and I
wanted to prove that I could survive as a working musician,” he explains, “so I
began answering ads for any kind of band that had an opening – blues bands,
rock bands, groups accompanying Sinatra-style singers. I got pretty good and
began to tour, and while my jazz playing definitely took a back seat, I’d still play
5:33
4:56
11
Just A Fool
4:38
Total running time: 60:02
All Music & Lyrics and arrangements
by Dave Bass; Dave Bass Music, BMI,
except where noted
Track 4,
La Comparsa
(by Ernesto Lecuona)
Edward B. Marks Music Co.
Track 6,
My Foolish Heart
(by Victor Young & Ned Washington)
Patti Washington Music / Chappel & Co.
Shapiro Bernstein obo Catherine Hinen Music,
ASCAP
Track 9,
Dark Eyes
(traditional)
things like Chick Corea’s `Spain’ when the rhythm section would be given an
opening number.” One of those opening features led to a yearlong gig touring
internationally behind singer Brenda Lee.
By 1975 Bass was tired of the road and left Lee to settle in San Francisco. ”The
scene was really vibrant,” he says, “with bebop, more contemporary jazz styles
and the emerging salsa scene.” It was at this point that he gained the feeling
for the various Latin rhythms that inform “Lost Mambo,” “La Comparsa /
Mi Montuno,” “Baltic Bolero” and his arrangement of “Dark Eyes.” “I got some
Latin gigs,” he explains, “and when I wasn’t playing well enough on the
bandstand the cats would just sing the right feeling into my ear.”
San Francisco also gave Bass the chance to immerse himself in standards
and try his hand at writing in that idiom. He accompanied the young Bobby
McFerrin and developed a particularly close relationship with Jackie Ryan.
“Jackie was in a band I formed called Ad Infinitum, which was named after
the Carla Bley tune. When Jackie moved to Maui, she invited me over to
accompany her and I ended up staying for four years. We became big local jazz
stars over there, and I must have learned the changes to hundreds of tunes.”
Bass finally returned with his family to Southern California, with every intention
of continuing his career as a pianist and composer. Then one night, in the
parking lot at a gig, he slipped on a pool of oil and fractured his wrist in an
attempt to break the fall. “I actually played the gig with just my left hand,” he
recalls, “and went to see a doctor a couple of days later. The diagnosis was that
there was no guarantee that I’d be able to play again once my wrist healed.”
With a family to support, Bass decided to become a lawyer, which meant
completing the Bachelor’s Degree he had never earned before entering Law
School. Ultimately, the career change led Bass to Sacramento and a position as
a California Deputy Attorney General, and his musical focus dimmed. “I liked
what I was doing,” he says, “and there weren’t any old friends around calling up
and saying `Hey, let’s go hang out and hear some music.’ So I didn’t really look
back on my life as a working musician. I still had a piano, but I resisted most
requests to play socially. My musical activities were basically limited to
accompanying my lawyer friends when they sang show tunes at parties, and
teaching basic musical concepts to my kids’ elementary school classes.”
All of this changed in 2005, after Bass shared his life story with a videographer
he had employed for a legal deposition. The videographer invited him to a
party where several bands played, and for once Bass did not decline the
invitation to “play a couple of tunes” on the electric piano, which led one of the
bass players to invite Bass to a jam session. “Jamming just felt so good,” he
marvels, “and apparently I had a lot to say. I didn’t realize how much I had
missed music; but once those stars had aligned, it just came pouring out.”
While there was rust, Bass called upon one of his early teacher’s wisdom.
“Madame Chaloff‘s idea of playing from a deep place became my goal. I may
have forgotten the changes to a lot of tunes, and my chops were down, but I
realized that the content of what I could say in a solo does not depend on
chops.”
By the time Bass recorded his debut disc Gone in 2008 and 2009, both his
playing and writing showed no signs of rust. With the support of California
stalwarts Babatunde Lea (an old friend who was part of Ad Infinitum), Gary
Brown and Ernie Watts, and with Mary Stallings interpreting two of his songs,
the album brought Bass to the attention of a national audience and gained
prominent exposure on jazz radio. The next step is NYC Sessions, with its cast
of East Coast giants, seven instrumentals and four vocals.
“The more that I got back into the music, the more I realized that the cats I
wanted to play with were in New York,” Bass notes. “I liked the idea of
musicians who could play all of the music I wanted to play, whether Latin or
jazz,” a description that nails the multi-faceted skills of Conrad Herwig,

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