Origin Story

I moved into a new place this week so I haven’t practiced as much as usual, but it was just unavoidable. (Pat Metheny once said something along the lines of “If I don’t practice for a day, I can tell— if I don’t practice for a week, everyone else can tell.) I have a little audio to share (Autumn Leaves at the very end of this post!), but I thought I’d tell the story of how I came to start this project I Never Make My Move Too Soon, and how I chose to get all these instruments I’ve acquired in the last year or so, and how I made the decision to try to use them again in a professional setting.

It started two years ago. I have a wonderful old Seagull¹ guitar I bought new in 1990 (they are still made!) when I started to get serious about playing at a high level. As a bass player, you pretty much have to have another instrument, guitar or piano, to work out songs in the course of figuring out bass parts. I never grew up with a piano but I have in fact been playing guitar longer than bass— but no one ever paid me to play guitar. Anyway I used the Seagull hard for 35 years and the last time I got it repaired the luthier told me I should consider getting a new guitar rather than fixing the Seagull one more time.

So I started thinking about getting a guitar to last the rest of my life. I’ve always wanted one of the classic Martin guitars. It’s such an iconic sound and an iconic playing experience, and I finally had the budget and the opportunity to get a new HD-28 almost exactly 2 years ago. And I played it a LOT. I had been playing the Seagull quite a bit but I fell in love with the Martin.

Having such a nice guitar started to spill over into other experiences. I have a funky old ukulele I got 11 years ago for $50 at a Guitar Center in Austin TX. (A long story for another time…) It was perfectly fine for what I used it for but one day I was fighting it like usual and I got so unhappy with not being able to make it do what I wanted that I went out and spent a couple hundred bucks on a nice Kala. The Kala was not quite right— I played it for a year or so and eventually ended up with an Ohana concert ukulele that I just love. It lets me play nimble stuff like the pull-off bits in Richard Thompson’s I Feel So Good. (I still need some practice but you can hear where it’s going on the audio below. The Ohana has a cedar top just like the Seagull so it sounds really familiar.)

I didn’t grow up with a piano in my house but my early jazz experience involved a whole lot of Fender Rhodes (with a MuTron phase shifter of course— it WAS the 70s) and I just love that sound. Less than a year ago I found someone selling a 1975 Rhodes refurbished in 2013 for a really good price— and I bought it. It is unfortunately heavy (I know because I just moved it across town!) but it sounds right and it FEELS right. Even though I’m not that good, I love to play the thing. It’s good for my aging brain to struggle with an entirely new class of instrument.

So I had the Martin, and the nice ukulele, and the Rhodes and I was playing a LOT, including the Warwick fretless that I had never really abandoned. I was having a blast with all these instruments, but I still wasn’t interested in really investing the time to get really good at any of them. I had a whole complicated rationale I won’t bore you with, but it did make sense. (And actually still does make sense— this Never Make My Move Too Soon project is arguably ridiculous, but I’ve been ridiculous before and had it pay off.)

What changed my mind was catching the Portalfest in Santa Fe back in August. Portalfest happens on the front porches of a few houses in this one old barrio in Santa Fe. This was the third year of it and it had about 50(!) acts on 8(!) stages (porches!) on a Saturday in August. I never dreamed that there was a scene like this in Santa Fe. Santa Fe in general tends to skew old/white/straight, and Portalfest attracted people of every age and description, but the overall vibe leaned young and queer, and while the level of talent varied widely, the sincerity was real and the music ranged from singer-songwriter stuff to trad/bluegrass to jazz vocals. It reminded me SO MUCH of Atlanta in the 80s and early 90s, where my roots are. I want to be a part of that. I want to do other musical stuff too, but I want to find out if there is a little place in that scene for me.

So for the final pieces before I Never Make My Move Too Soon, I wanted an acoustic upright bass for the rest of my life, and after many many many years, to get the Precision rehabilitated so it will last for the whole of my musical life. I wanted my quiver of basses from my pro days back! And with the Martin and the Rhodes and the Ohana, all intended to last the rest of my life, I have even more musical firepower to draw on. As I said, I’m going to practice through the winter and get back on stage when the weather gets warm again. I might see y’all at Portalfest.

And because INMMTS is all about bass, here is Autumn Leaves. I’ve been playing this with my friends on a number of different instruments. Claudia is getting pretty good at it on piano, and I’m working up a nice guitar take on the Martin.

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1  Seagull is a great value because as a Canadian company in a small town, they have always been subsidized by the Canadian government. Their instruments are priced well below comparable instruments from other countries