Spain

here’s a little gem that i stumbled across while wandering around youtube.

the first place I went to try and find me some work while in Mexico was a latin jazz jam session at a beach bar called Cuates Y Cuetes. This place is owned by a wonderful woman and avid music fan named Esther(or Tete) and her husband jazz saxophonist Martin Montenegro...anyway, they became good friends of mine as i continued to haunt their session while scrambling for gigs and brought all of our visitors there for drinks and general beachside hangmanship.

they do this thing where they host a few big concerts a year where they rent a big stage and go all out on the sound system and they feature mostly latin jazz and fusion, so they invited julio and i to play…and they also invited Memo Suarez to play with us as well. This would have been fine if we had stuck to more familiar repetoire, but we really wanted to play Spain. So, if you can get past poor Memo trying to hang on while we drag him through this tune here it is:

I had a lot of fun this day. I LOVE CUATES Y CUETES. it was my Mexican cheers.

How I got me some learnin’

Although my formal musical training did not start until I was 18, for the four years prior, many patient people took the time to show me a few tricks. Brad Nadeau taught me how to hold my newly acquired bass guitar and he also showed me the basic technique and a few tunes. Sheri Pelletier nutured my ear by throwing me up in front of all my friends and making me play songs by ear. Chris Rooney was the rebel kid who lived in the next town. I used to go to his house and play zeppelin tunes with the motley crew of stoner kids that he hung out with. They were like protective older brothers to me and taught me alot about classic rock. Don Flewelling took me under his wing and showed me everything that he knew about the bass. He was a guitar player at heart who got delegated to play bass often at church related things. I think he was psyched to have someone who was psyched to play bass around because that meant he could play guitar. Mark Shaw was a DJ but had been on tour and lived down south and played in bands that had almost made it big. I thought that he was so cool. He taught me alot about music, and i admired his life. He had a beautiful wife and a daughter that everyone who met her doted on. Also a very peaceful, content cat on his own. I owe a prop to the Aroostook Regional Gifted and Talented Program. They offered music classes at the local University. I took a couple of those and met some like minded people who turned me onto to, among other things, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers. My music teacher Pam Kinsey let me play my bass guitar in the concert band. To me, it was something musical to do and a break from sitting in class. That experience taught me how to read but the hugest thing it taught me was that anything could work anywhere as long as you did it right. I never knew it was weird for a bass guitar to play trombone and tuba parts. I’m glad about that.

After High School I went to Greenville College and majored in Contemporary Christian Music. I studied bass with David Engelke from St. Louis, MO. That school was pretty much a joke and I quickly realized that i was majoring in bad pop. Most of the teachers were either staunchly conservative and old fashioned or dorky christian rockers. I did have one cool teacher that we called Prof. K.O. She was a jazz vocalist and a doctoral candidate from UNT. She and her husband(sicksicksick percussionist!) exposed me to the real deal: JACO PASTORIUS. That was the tip of the iceberg for me and monumental in my development. I had no idea about the possibilities up until that point.

I dropped out after a year and followed a girl to Nashville, TN. While in the midsouth, i acquired me some learnin’ from a guy named Roy Vogt. I only had a couple of lessons with him, but i still practice some of the stuff he showed me. He taught me not to look at the fingerboard when i play and also taught me that many fretless bass players pattern their phrasing and vibrato after singers. He told me that Jaco mimicked Sinatra and he also played me some example that i can’t remember but that dude played fretless bass like Stevie Wonder sings.

In 1999, i made my way back to Maine and enrolled at the University of Southern Maine. I learnt a whole lot from many different folks there. From all of them i learned about history, theory, practice, dedication and excellence. Bill Street taught me about expression and aesthetics in music. He taught me how to listen and he taught me interesting ways to think about music that were new to me and are with me today. Chris Oberholtzer taught me about balance and about politics in music. He also taught me about lineage and common practice. Chris will forever be a role model and a great friend, in my mind. Les Harris taught me how good it can feel to just ‘swing’ for hours on end. Gary Pack blew my mind and when he heard my young improvisational voice, he told me to chase it.

Bronek Suchanek was my bass teacher while at USM. Bronek taught me proper technique from head to toe and instilled in me a desire for excellence as if it is my duty. Lessons were scary, inspiring and humbling. He broke me down and built me back up. I usually needed a nap afterwards. After agonizing over this paragraph i think i see a Bronek blog in the near future.

After graduating, I attended a master class at UNH with Ray Brown. This took place a couple of months before Ray died. I had the pleasure of playing Ray’s bass when i raised my hand to ask a question. After i asked my question, he asked me what instrument i played. I gulped, “Bass.” He then beckoned me to the front with his propulsive right index finger. He then proceeded to make an example of me. I did alright and was on cloud nine for the rest of the day.

I had one private lesson with Ben Street in 2004. He taught me about sound and rhythm by making me play half notes for an entire hour. I was at a point where i was feeling like kind of a bigshot at this point in my life, so the timing of this humbling lesson with a monstrous player was perfect.

The last formal studying that i did was the Boston Bass Bash in 2005. I got to spend some time in class and one on one with Rufus Reid. He was an amazing teacher. My experience with jazz teachers is that they lean towards too much information or not enough. Too much information involves handing out a sheet of licks and instructing the student to play the prescribed licks in a prescribed way. Not enough information is when one teaches improvisation in relation to shapes, colors or any number of esoteric, hard-to-apply concepts that sound new-agey on their own. Rufus was a perfect balance between the tangible and the esoteric. I use his book with my students and in my own practice routine.

In the big picture, i learn from everyone i play with and hear play. This blog is to acknowledge the people who took the time to show me the way. thank you.

First Bass

I was 14 and in 9th grade. I know it was in September because I was taking my first paycheck from my seasonal potato picking job and using it to buy my first bass. In the small Northern Maine town of Easton, where i grew up, the entire school system took a 3 or4 week break from classes so that the kids could work various jobs on the potato farms that kept our local economy afloat. It was optional to work, of course, but I had been working harvest for a few years. I don’t think that i was very good at the job, but my goal this year was to pick enough barrels so i could by a bass guitar and an amp.

I had been singing for a few years around the house and at church, and had a brief stint as a trumpet player at school, so I was pretty fired up about music as early as I had the chance to try it out, but hadn’t really found my niche. One day that summer, I noticed that there weren’t that many bass players around so I decided that I would become a bass player. The fam didn’t have too much money, so I was going to have to work again this harvest in order to get the stuff I would need.

I decided that I would try to buy my gear used, through the Swap, Buy, and Sell guide. I figured I would need a bass that wasn’t too banged up and looked moderately cool, and an amp that was as loud as I could realistically afford. I remember an ad for a pink bass with distortion pickups that ran for months. I didn’t get that one, but I have to admit, I was definitely curious. I can’t remember what the ad that I responded to said but it was a really heavy jazz bass copy with a natural finish and silver soapbar pickups. It was a Global. I have only seen that brand once since then; in a music store in Nashvegas, TN.

I called the number in the ad, with a little coaching from my dad, and arranged a time to check out the instrument. I handed my dad the phone and he got directions. We drove over there on one of those autumn nights where it’s super cold for the first time in a while and seems to have gotten dark much too early. They lived in Caribou, which in my memory, is 35 minutes or so away from Easton. I was a little nervous when dad and I pulled in the driveway. I didn’t even know any songs. How was I going to know if this was a good bass? Now that I think about it, this may have been one of my first ‘adult’ decisions. Dad didn’t knew less than I did about the subject, so it was up to me. What a proud moment, hold on, I need to cry a little….

Anyway, they were nice people and actually gave me some pointers as I was playing. I think it was a husband and wife who played in a band together. She was the bass player, and she showed me how to pluck with my right hand and told me that alot of bass lines were shaped like ‘L’s. I guess that would be my first lesson! Weird. So anyway, I played some L shapes and it seemed to be a good bass to get started on. It worked when you plugged it in and it looked moderately cool. I gave her 50 bucks and we went home.

While at their house, the lady’s husband told dad how he might be able to make me an amp out of an old stereo. My dad used to save everything, so we had some stereo pieces kicking around in the shed or something. He somehow made me an amp that night and I was in business that very Friday night. It was loud enough to play along with my tape deck, which was what I spent most of my time doing, at first. I knew that I was going to need a little something more if I was going to be in a band, so my next harvest check was going to go to an amp. I’m pretty sure I was in charge of buying school clothes that year, so I was doing some serious math with all the figuring and re-figuring of my budget. It’s amazing how, in hindsight, this seems like such a fertile time in my development. Excuse me, i need to take another moment…

So, I worked another couple of weeks and bought this giant no-brand guitar tube amp for 75 bucks. The people I bought it from told me that it was a bass amp. Other people told me it wasn’t. Today, I would google it and found out. Then, that wasn’t an option. I didn’t care that much. It worked for me. I was on my way to become a bass player. In my head, I was all in. Born into a disfunctional family of limited means, in an area of limited opportunities, it was something I could put my hopes and dreams into. I was going to be a bass player.