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Bob Cranshaw was Sonny Rollins’s bass player for about fifty years.
And here’s what Cranshaw said about it, talking with the pianist Ethan Iverson:
“I think Sonny and I, over the 50 years, may have talked an hour and a half worth.”
He laughed and said it was probably more. But they never got into much discussion. Everything else was said through the music.
The car accident that put Bob Cranshaw on electric bass
Cranshaw played electric bass, and he didn’t switch for the sound. He was in a car accident while he was doing the David Frost show, and it messed up his back. After that, any time he played the string bass, the muscles in his back would tighten up and he’d have to stop.
So he made a choice: “I still had to work and I still wanted to play, so I said, ‘Okay, I’ll play the electric.’”
He knew how that would go over. In his words, “the jazz guys don’t dig the electric.” He didn’t want to fight them. He made the electric feel like the upright instead: “I gotta make it sound and I gotta make it feel like I’m playing the string bass.”
He didn’t run from the tradition. He carried it onto the new instrument.
Sesame Street, The Sidewinder and the union
A few other things about him you’d never guess.
He played on Sesame Street for 30-some years, by his own count. When Iverson pointed out the sweatshirt he was wearing, Cranshaw said, “Oh, I have a million of them.”
He’s the bass player on Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder,” one of the famous records of the Blue Note era. He remembered that it wasn’t even a tune they’d rehearsed. They needed one more tune to finish the date, and when Morgan finally put the music down, it was “Sidewinder.”
And early in his career, the musicians’ union in Chicago put him out. He’d been hired for a job at the union hall in Waukegan with a couple of players who weren’t members, and the union wanted to fine him for it. Being out of the union cost him a job with Ahmad Jamal, in the chair Israel Crosby was leaving.
Decades later he was a central figure in the New York musicians’ union, Local 802. He volunteered there, became its jazz consultant, helped guide the Justice for Jazz Artists campaign to bring pension and other benefits to musicians working in the clubs, and was elected to its Executive Board in 2012.
Fifty years with Sonny. And a seat on a union board, decades after the union in Chicago put him out.
What Cranshaw’s electric lines teach you
One of his lines behind Sonny has the whole electric walking language in one funky line: open strings, passing tones, tritones, fifths, repeated notes. I break down a Cranshaw line behind Sonny, from 1973, in jazz walking bass on electric.
Repeated notes are something we don’t do on upright. I’m always telling my upright students not to repeat notes, because they don’t sound good on upright. Somehow, on electric, they sound great.
So if you play electric, take Cranshaw’s deal. Play the instrument you’ve got, and make it feel like the string bass.
Go deeper
Walking on Electric Bass: Part 2
The full walking vocabulary working players use: the six right notes, the licks Ron Carter passed down, and the principle that makes a line move.
