Collaborators

For the sake of a photo up front, I got a big ass mirror for the new place because I really have to think about my posture while I’m playing. I have a tendency to hunch up and make faces, neither of which is conducive to thoughtful playing.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that I should find a sympathetic piano player to work with because I really need to work on locking in my intonation and it’s been a struggle without a reference to play against. Youtube is OK but a lot of the recordings are subtly sharp or flat and I worry that playing along is giving me bad habits.

At the same time, I’ve also been thinking how much I enjoy playing songs with just bass and vocal, because you can mess with the intonation and achieve some really true intervals if both parties have a shared understanding of where the tone lies.

So I took some steps and it looks like I’m going to make some things happen.

I answered an ad on craigslist for a singer, and Claudia knows an interested piano player. Both of them are amateurs with classical music training who are just starting to get into jazz a little deeper. The singer is mostly doing ballads and torch songs and the piano player is doing Duke Ellington and Oscar Peterson, as one might expect. I’m hopeful we can put together something that benefits all of us.

And finally, there is a venue in town that showcases the kind of shows I want to play eventually and I noticed there was one bass player in the band for a lot of these. I found him online and I asked him if he gives lessons. I don’t really want to take a lesson very often, but I think I could use some pointers on technique from someone playing out right now. (Not to mention the connections for work, eventually.) Ideally I would spend an hour or so and get stuff to chew on for the next month or so. I heard back from him last week, he sounded tired but he told me to hit him up again this week and we’ll see. This is my kind of teacher honestly, someone who doesn’t really need or even want to teach lessons. I could work with this guy.

This is really new to me because I’ve been a COVID recluse for years now and meeting new people in real life feels really strange.

I have no idea how many of these will survive actually trying to play them but here’s my preferred song list to start:

• Angel Eyes

• My Funny Valentine

• Black Coffee

• Cry me a River

• In Walked Bud

• Round Midnight

• Autumn Leaves

• All Of Me

• Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

• In A Sentimental Mood (fretless electric)

I did a rough take on Angel Eyes as sort of an “audition”, here.

Honestly, all my takes for this newsletter are rough takes, I’m not spending a lot of time making these little notebook recordings anywhere near perfect.

I’m also going to get out the acoustic guitar for a basic take on Summertime with the singer. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m not a great guitar player but I can show up OK now and then.

Really my other great area of interest right now is and has been ukulele. That probably seems strange, but I find the contrast of the tiny little ukulele with the great big bass to be helpful to playing both.

At work (disclaimer: I work for beehiiv, who hosts this newsletter) our social media manager has an internal award for the employee who contributes to the social media effort the most each week called “Social Media Girlie Of The Week” (The definition of “girlie” is pretty broad, because I qualify!) I wrote a little jingle for SMGOTW and I recorded it first on bass, then on the Rhodes, then on ukulele. It’s fun, I like the jingle.

To play the bass with good intonation means placing my left hand fingers very precisely on the fingerboard. I think that the little bitty frets on the ukulele help promote that. And really the thing that sets good ukulele players apart from not-so-good ones is right hand work, particularly playing fast. And playing ukulele fast takes a lot of right hand control and good discipline for right hand position, which is something I really need to add to my practice regime for the bass. So I think it’s a righteous feedback loop of working big-to-small-to-big and fast-to-strong-to-fast.

Of course it could be that I just like the way the ukulele sounds. Nothing wrong with that.

Random gear note: when the Musicman company announced their budget line Sterling take on the Joe Dart signature bass, I immediately signed up to get one. I love this thing, it is two slabs of maple screwed together with one pickup and ONE KNOB. I got it for Claudia because I bet that as a signature model with such simple electronics the build quality would be great— and I was right. If Claudia doesn’t like this bass I’ll play it happily, this is an awfully nice ax for $400.