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Meet Steve Swallow
To let all of that go and to trust that your hands know what they're doing on their own is not as easy as it might appear to be, but it's absolutely necessary in order to direct your ears out toward the other guys on the bandstand.
Touring this summer
As is often the case I've been touring Europe during the dreaded festivals. I did the July circuit with a band of [drummer]
Bobby Previte
drumsb.1957
Ray Anderson
tromboneb.1952
Marty Ehrlich
woodwindsb.1955
Wayne Horvitz
keyboardsb.1955
John Scofield
guitarb.1951
Bill Stewart
drumsb.1966
Gary Burton
vibraphoneb.1943
Acoustic bass vs. electric bass
I enjoy especially a variety of musics. I always have. My listening habits are extremely broad ranging, and I like for my playing also to have as broad a range as possible. That's difficult to do because you're constantly being typecast. Especially playing electric bass I tend to be falsely accused of belonging in certain area. I spent the first years of my life as an acoustic bassist. I didn't play the electric bass until I was twenty-nine. When I made the transition from acoustic to electric bass I had no intention of changing the idiom in which I was playing. I didn't take up the electric bass to become a rock 'n' roll or blues musician although I found myself interested in those musics in a way I hadn't been before. When you heard me with Gary Burton's band in the late '60s I was playing both instruments. That was a lovely band. [Guitarist] Jerry Hahn was helpful to me as a teacher. He's a prodigious guitar technician. I played them both for about a year and a half, but the day was too short to maintain them both. They each required a day every day. I was wracked by guilt every time I played the electric with the acoustic standing there forlorn in the corner. I've completely given up the acoustic bass. In 1971 I just gave it to a good friend, a bassist named Jack Gregg, in order to get it out of my sight and to emphatically resolve the conflict of what to play. My acoustic bass now lives in Beirut, which is where Jack Gregg is. I think it's having a very nice life. It's playing in a symphony orchestra so it's being bowed a lot which is very good for it.Bill Evans vs. electric bass
I think my favorite performances of my music by another musician are the several that
Bill Evans
piano1929 - 1980
Paul Motian
drums1931 - 2011
Introduction of rock into Gary Burton's band
I think it was kind of a shared enthusiasm. A scene that I recall vividly: the two of us (Gary and I) were playing in
Stan Getz
saxophone, tenor1927 - 1991
Jimi Hendrix
guitar, electric1942 - 1970
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
Dialog between bass and drums
I should say right off the bat that it's mysterious. Part of the fascination is the mystery. For instance it's a mystery to me that some drummers whom I admire greatly are not as comfortable for me to play with as some other drummers who might be less admirable but who seem just a better fit. The old cliche about listening to each other is extremely important and more difficult to achieve than one might think. It's very difficult to remove your attention from what you're doing to what somebody else is doing. Playing a musical instrument is not all that easy (although it's not all that difficult either).There's a lot to it—letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing, remembering the chord of the moment, hundreds of other considerations that are flying by as the song is in progress. To let all of that go and to trust that your hands know what they're doing on their own is not as easy as it might appear to be, but it's absolutely necessary in order to direct your ears out toward the other guys on the bandstand. It's a kind of act of faith. I know that I'm most thoroughly in sync with a drummer when I'm inside his right hand rather than my own. It has to do with letting go. And what prompts you to let go is the spirit of fun and good times when a groove gets going. The sense of exhilaration allows you to abandon all of your concerns for your own playing. The sense of unease that you might be playing the wrong note or playing the right note at the wrong time just vaporizes. At the moment you ask yourself, "Am I swinging?" you can be sure you're not.
Steve Swallow bands
The reason I have a band is I write a fair amount of music that I want to hear and watch develop over a period of time. I tend not to place the bass in the forefront—the bass tends to be the bass. What makes the band mine is the repertoire. I write all the music—unlike other bands where there's a democracy and players are encouraged to bring their tunes. I'll have none of that. I lead a band infrequently enough that I really need that—to monopolize the repertoire. I think I'm having my strongest effect on music as the guy who defines the repertoire. I tend to keep my mouth shut as far as asking or even suggesting specific tactics or approaches for the players. I'm interested in what the written music evokes in the players, and I don't want to distort that process by talking about it. I'm barely present as the guy who leads the band except that the music I've written is speaking on my behalf. I'm mostly concerned with having a good time. My experience is that's what elicits the best results. I'm picking musicians to play with who are my good friends and whose playing I know well. There's a strong bond of trust between us all. I haven't gone out with my own quintet since we made the live record at Ronnie Scott's [Always Pack Your Uniform on Top, XtraWATT 10]. My next planned venture under my own name is an abridged version of that quintet, a trio with
Chris Potter
saxophone, tenorb.1971
Adam Nussbaum
drumsb.1955
That's what I've been focusing my writing attention on since last December. I've thought about what to do—whether to continue with the quintet or not. The last three albums have been that classic trumpet-tenor frontline quintet, the only wrinkle in it being the inclusion of
Mick Goodrick
guitar1945 - 2022
Horace Silver
piano1928 - 2014
Cannonball Adderley
saxophone1928 - 1975
Composition
I'm playing the bass so much these days that I don't expect to get to write for the next two or three months.But then I've roped off a period of about three months where that's what I'm going to do. It's difficult to accommodate both playing and writing when days are so short. I know you interviewed Carla a couple of weeks ago, and she faces the same dilemma. She's a writer who plays, and I'm a player who writes. We're approaching it, each from a slightly different perspective, but the problem is the same—we're both slow. I find it irresistible to play—I really enjoy it. I've always said "Yes" more often than I've said "No" when the phone rings. Carla in fact has been trying to teach me to mouth the word "No" with only moderate success.
I just start with a blank page and a kind of grim, despairing feeling. My experience is similar to Carla's—every piece is like reinventing the wheel. I think that's a good thing. I'm not writing to a deadline or for a specific purpose—for instance to accompany a TV show. Often I'll sit there for days on end. I've learned that I have to punch in—go to the piano. My theory is somewhere there's a big book that says, "Swallow has to sit at the piano for twenty hours, and an idea will come." I'm a pencil and paper guy. At some point an idea passes quickly through my mind that seems worthy of writing down after hundreds that didn't seem worthy. Having committed just a very small phrase, two or three bars, to paper I start to breathe a little easier. From that point on it becomes a science project and a lot more fun than the initial stage. It's a matter of slowly recognizing and elaborating the possibilities implicit in this little phrase. Slowly the pages kind of fill up. Characteristically I'll get two or three more pages of scrawl. It's usually still in the nature of fragments until the floor is strewn with them. Then the process turns toward assembling the fragments in a coherent way and figuring over a period of a few weeks what it all means—what I'm learning from the process I'm engaged in. What I'm really looking for is coherence. That's what seems to take the time. When all the elements finally lock into their perfect position there's a snapping sound in my head, and I know I've got it. It helps to know for whom I'm writing. In the present case I'm not hearing tenor saxophone; I'm hearing Chris. I'm not hearing drums; I'm hearing Adam. I'm intimately familiar with the way they breathe, with their touch, and with their sensibilities. It's as if there's a Chris wind-up doll and an Adam wind-up doll up in my head, and I can set them in motion and imagine what they'd do with the materials I'm working on. That seems to make it easier for me to get results. The process of settling on writing for this trio took a few weeks of pondering. I wasn't writing music during that time even though I was concerned with writing. I knew I needed to know for whom I was writing before I got to the point of actually conjuring notes. As soon as I knew the process began to roll.
Music set to poetry
My music is just music—there is little programmatic aspect. Having said that I'll contradict myself. The music I've written to poetry qualifies as programmatic in a sense. Most especially I wrote music to poetry by Robert Creely (Home, ECM Records). He's been my favorite poet for all my adult life. That was another instance where I was having trouble writing. The stuff wasn't flowing, and it occurred to me that his poetry which I was reading intensively might jump start the writing process for me. I typed out some of my favorites of his poems—this was in the days of typewriters. In fact I went through all of his poetry and culled a dozen or so poems, the most amenable to being set to music, and pasted them up on the piano. Sure enough in short order they did start to provoke melodic phrases which also implied harmonies. I was off and running. I've returned to writing music to poetry periodically. I've also written to poems by Ishmael Reed and Allen Ginsberg (The Lion for Real, Island Records). It was one of those typical Hal Willner projects where he threw a bunch of us including Ginsberg into a studio together and told each of us to come up with two or three settings to poems. It was a disreputable cast of characters:
Bill Frisell
guitar, electricb.1951
Marc Ribot
guitarb.1954
Sheila Jordan
vocals1928 - 2025
The Duets band is dead because the pianist feels she is not accomplished
Horse shit! The duet thing is probably on protracted hold. I sense life there still just because we enjoy playing together so much in private. It's only when we bring it out into the real world that it starts getting difficult because Carla is very uneasy about performing before an audience. The more people there are on the bandstand the better she feels. She's OK with the trio because Andy's up there deflecting attention. She's even more comfortable with the eight-piece band (the 4 X 4) because she barely has to take any solos at all. It goes even further with her big band—she's almost written herself out of it. With [the opera] Escalator over the Hill all she has to do is stand there and wave her arms—she has a wonderful time doing that. It's a question of numbers. When it gets down to just the two of us on a stage it's immensely difficult for her. Part of what makes our Duets so wonderful to me is the extreme price that's paid when we do it. I think the music comes out deeply heartfelt because it's born out of such difficulty. I'm glad we have three CD's worth of music. The thing I like most about Duets is it's a chance to hear Carla's music before the guys in her band get their hands on it. She's always hired players with a strong individual stamp on their playing. Gary Windo springs to mind orGary Valente
b.1953Grog Kill Recording Studio
I tend to do most of the producing that happens in the studio. In fact I'm sitting in it right now. There was a point at which I could actually do it—come down here, turn on the machines, and record albums. I did record a couple of the Duets albums all on my own. I've stopped doing that because there are not enough hours in the day. I felt I was swerving away from playing the bass. At this point we always use our good friend and favorite engineer, Tom Mark. I'm very much involved in the mechanics of recording. I think in a way that's an extension of what happened to me when I became an electric bassist. I realized my instrument was not only the thing I was touching with my fingers, but it was also the amplifier I was playing. My sound was effectively a chain of events that began with my brain, proceeded through my fingers, a piece of wood, a cable, a lot of circuitry, then caused a speaker cone to flap. It was a logical and easy next step for me to see the entire chain of the recording process leading up through the mastering of the record was also a part of making music. On those terms I took to it right away. I enjoy being involved in the production of records—in the end you end up with a thing in your hand. We used to do more recording of other bands than we do now. The last thing we did that wasn't our own was Carla's daughter
Karen Mantler
pianob.1850
Computers vs. music
We're neophytes, but we're trying. We expect to have the website (wattxtrawatt.com) up in a month or so. It's more Carla and Karen. I'm an emailer—I figured that one out. Neither Carla nor I have any immediate intentions of writing music in any other way than with paper and pencil. We're both shy of notation software or sequencing. We're comfortable with slow. I find that the difficulty and the deliberation involved in writing music with a pencil serves effectively as a great editor. If it's not worth the effort it takes to write something down it's not worth remembering. I'm concerned that using sequencers and other aids of that sort make the process too easy.Reunion with Jimmy Giuffre and Paul Bley (Conversations with a Goose, Soul Note)
Paul and I visited Jimmy yesterday. Jimmy has Parkinson's disease, and I don't think he's going to be comfortable going on the road. It's a wonderful trio—we had a great time yesterday, the three of us. To me the sound of the recent band is similar to the sound we had in the 1960's. There's a weird and wonderful sense that those thirty years we took off were really just like a day—as if 1962 was Monday and 1995 was Tuesday. I don't think that would be true of the other bands I've played with.Tags
Interview
Steve Swallow
Bobby Previte
Ray Anderson
Marty Ehrlich
Wayne Horvitz
John Scofield
Bill Stewart
Gary Burton
Bill Evans
Paul Motian
Stan Getz
Chris Potter
Adam Nussbaum
Mick Goodrick
Horace Silver
Cannonball Adderley
Bill Frisell
carla bley
Craig Jolley
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