hi it's Geoff Chalmers here from discoverdoublebass.com which is the home of online
learning for double bass players we have courses lessons interviews all designed to help you move
your playing forward and today we're joined by one of our faculty it's the fantastic jazz bass player
educator author of the jazz bass book all-around good guy it's John Goldsby welcome John yeah thank
you Geoff thanks for having me well we've been talking about jazz bass all week and i happen
to have a copy of your fantastic book and we were well i kind of wanted to ask you a little
bit about your motivation behind writing the book and maybe some of some of the highlights within
it some of the topics that you're excited about because i know this is one that a lot of people
um a lot of people have practiced when did you write the book uh that book came out in the year
2000 wow but the yeah the work and the research was done I'd say for the 10 years 15 years before
that as i was really studying the bass tradition and learning how to play jazz and yeah honing my
craft in new york and listening to hundreds and thousands of recordings that i you know i pick a
few of my favorites and address those in this uh book so the transcriptions are a really important
part i can remember the Eddie Gomez transcription uh is from an album of who's called dedication i
think right and i love that album because he's playing standards and it's also he's on top form
uh and it's a wonderful record but it's it's interesting how i found that record through
the book you know right right and so were you transcribing a lot of these really cool lines
uh over the years i transcribed a lot of lines uh from my bass heroes the the older players like
Paul Chambers Sam Jones Percy Heath uh the Eddie Gomez transcription he came as a guest with the
WDR big band so on the f and he he played my bass oh wow he he got in touch with me beforehand and
said you got a bass i could use him oh well you know sure Mr Gomez you can use my bass and so i
let him use my bass the first day and yeah he just he found notes on that bass I didn't know existed
he played all over the bass it was amazing how he sounded on my bass that's one thing i've noticed
about great players who have happened to play my bass they pick up my bass and they sound like
themselves they sound like Eddie Gomez so that day he gave me this dedication cd oh really said
you know thanks for letting me borrow your bass uh here's my new cd and so i went home that night and
i transcribed that solo i hadn't really planned on using that particular solo but yeah somehow along
the way then that that was about the time i was doing the jazz bass book and the solo ended up
in the book that makes absolutely it was i can't remember the tune was it non-nardis or something
uh was that green dolphins green dolphin street that's it yeah yeah I knew it was one of the ones
that he played he's recorded a lot over the years and uh yeah i think he plays an artist
in the album he also plays footprints and he's got a really uh beautiful version of that so you
were transcribing and you were publishing these in bass player magazine is this how it and then how
did the bass player magazine articles come to form this book maybe talk a little bit about that well
there was a an editor for bass player magazine Richard Johnston uh bass player had quite a few
editors over the years when i was writing for them Richard Johnston left to work for Backbeat books
which is a music book publishing company and i don't know about a year after he had left bass
player he got in touch and said hey you know wouldn't it be a great idea to do a history of
jazz bass players because you've already got such a foundation and you you seem to like what you do
i said yeah this is great so that just gave me uh more of an excuse to transcribe more more of
my favorite players and also try and codify and figure out well what is the jazz tradition where
did it start who were the early players who did they influence who were the swing era players and
who you know came out of the swing era and started the bebop revolution who were the modern players
and for me i love all these styles of music i love to play traditional jazz i love to
play modern jazz bebop so it yeah it was a great project for me personally but i also saw it as a
service for the bass community to say okay people in my opinion these are the important players and
you can check them out in this book and you know add to them yourselves and hopefully one
day you're going to be part of the bass tradition i sort of stopped it about 19 in the 1970s because
the bass tradition got so diverse with the uh you know virtuoso electric bass styles the
fusion styles uh more free jazz and all kinds of styles so I left it there so the next person who
wants to write jazz bass book number two uh please take on you know take over where I left off and uh
yeah cover all those styles i think it's a it's a fascinating thing and it's great
that the transcription that you were doing has proved to be such a key part of you learning
all of that language just on a side note with the transcription did you just transcribe it the piano
did you do it at the bass did you you know how do you generally approach it is it different now
back then it was really before slick computer programs where you could slow things down
so when i first started transcribing i had a cassette player and it was hard on the
ears because i'd be wearing headphones and i'd listen to four bars of a bass line which was
already hard to hear sometimes they were poorly recorded or you had to strain to hear you know
is that which note is that then i would rewind and hear four bars rewind here two bars rewind
think okay i just need to get the first note you know first note listen to it again first note then
check it on the bass is that really the first note yeah then you move on to the second note
so a lot of times i did that at the piano but what i would do is i would play the bass
line sing it repeat it on the piano to check if that's what i actually heard uh on the recording
and then write it down so i would sing it yeah play it write it fantastic and just to finish off
maybe you could talk about one of the standout people i mean there were so many the four word
is by Ron Carter who i mean people like there's so many incredible bass players Rufus Reid is in
there Charlie Hayden Jimmy Garrison Red Calendar Red Mitchell uh Charlie Mingus Percy Heath Paul
Chambers is there somebody that you'd like to just pick out and tell us a little bit about
well one player that i think people ignore these days is Oscar Pettiford uh i'm a huge fan of Duke
Ellington and the Duke Ellington bass players of yeah from way back in the early days the 20s and
30s with Wellman Braud and then of course Jimmy Blanton who a lot of people consider the father
of mother modern bass playing Junior Raglan then came Oscar Pettiford with Duke Ellington and then
soon after that uh he moved on and was really an integral part of the bebop era on 52nd street with
yeah Dizzy Gillespie Charlie Parker Thelonious Monk Bud Powell Max Roach and he was in my opinion
the bass player who who really embodied
bebop on the double bass and that was already in the late 40s early 50s then he moved on to uh
leading his own groups and played with Thelonius Monk he played with Miles Davis but uh he was also
he was a band leader and composer and he wrote a lot of these great standard bass tunes we like to
play yeah what are some of your favorites if you've got one that you could maybe uh
maybe a share with us uh well i mean like Bohemia After Dark written for the cafe Bohemia
that one's a nice one it doesn't get any cooler yeah
or uh swing until the girls come home
or Blues in the Closet which i have beginning bass players learn
you know great just great swinging lines or uh in our our course Tell Your Story the new
discover double bass course we talk all about Tricotism
so yeah he was very clever very musical and just a brilliant bass player band leader and composer
that's absolutely fantastic John well listen i really appreciate you joining us today we've
got a beautiful venue for the interview which uh has made it a really special afternoon and
it's been cool hanging out with you thank you to everybody who uh emailed in their questions
we had a ton of questions about jazz standards so John has recently filmed a course on walking bass
line construction and also about soloing where he's talking about many of these topics plus you
can check out his book the jazz bass book i would highly recommend that to any jazz bass student so
thanks again John thank you for joining us at home and we'll see you in the next video