Bass is the Place

The first time I really heard the loaded, full-bore rumble of the double bass, I was stopped dead in my tracks.

It was the swinging 90s, and I was in a basement in Paris’ 10th, all dark drapes, candlelight and rickety bar stools.

The bass itself, slouching beside the bar with a kind of raffish, fat-bellied idleness, looked classy, all dressed up in its sheen of spruce and maple. But the sound…my God. It was a sort of primal hum, a broadcast dispatched from the cosmic void.

I was smitten.

Like a courtly lover, for decades I admired the double bass from afar; in music shops, at gigs, in LP liner notes and in photos of Charles Mingus wrangling his bass whilst chuffing on a fat cigar.

In the end though, I gave in. First renting a double bass and then, inevitably, buying my own big, earthbound, sonic butterfly. I had to feel into its origins, where its sound began, how it felt to the touch.

It started badly. I kept bashing my head into the tuning pegs and cutting my brow. It took me half an hour to get it into, and then out of, its ridiculously large body bag.

It humiliated me. But I tamed it.

“Don’t Trouble The Moon” is track 5 of my debut album “Your Best Thinking Got Me Here”

It’s built around a simple, repeating double bass motif and features a sample of Randy Crawford singing J.J. Cale’s haunting classic, “Cajun Moon.”