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Chances are, most jazz bassists you know went the same direction. They started on electric, then “graduated” to the upright, because that’s the serious instrument. That’s the one that earns respect.
Steve Swallow went the other way.
He was already a respected upright player. He’d worked with Art Farmer, Stan Getz and Gary Burton. The real deal.
And he didn’t even like the electric bass. “I had a kind of knee-jerk aversion to the electric bass initially,” he told Berklee. “In my mind, I associated it with music like ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’”
Steve Swallow picks up an electric bass at 30
Then, around 1970, it happened. In his words: “I picked up an electric bass for the first time in my life when I was about 30 and fell in love.”
And he never went back. Within a couple of years, the electric was all he played. “It never occurred to me for a moment to return to the acoustic bass,” he told Premier Guitar.
Think about how strange that is. “I had a perfectly good career as an acoustic bass player,” he said. He walked away from the instrument that gave him his reputation, to go play one the jazz world wasn’t sold on.
It wasn’t easy. His early years on electric were an uphill battle, convincing bandleaders the instrument would fit in their groups. He remembers asking himself, “How am I gonna convince any of my compatriots that this is a good thing, that they’ll be happy with me playing electric bass instead of acoustic bass?”
He did it anyway. And he said something I love about it:
“I think I came to electric bass without any sense of the instrument’s history. So I was in the fortunate position of having to make it up and develop an approach to the instrument because I had no desire whatsoever to change the idiom in which I was playing.”
A pick, a high C string and “Falling Grace”
He made it up, all right.
He plays jazz with a pick. For many years it was a copper one. “I loved it dearly,” he said. He plays a five-string with a high C on top, on custom basses built by the luthier Harvey Citron.
And he became one of the great composers in jazz on top of it, with tunes like “Falling Grace,” which went into the original Real Book in the 1970s and has been recorded by jazz musicians ever since.
Here’s the part that tells you who he is. When the Real Book guys asked for his tunes, he gave them away. He also made free lead sheets for many of his tunes available on his website. His reason: what he wanted “more than the royalties was for my songs to be in circulation, to be played by my peers and upcoming generations of improvisers.”
Swallow’s walking line on “You Speak My Language”
One of his lines is on John Scofield’s “You Speak My Language,” from I Can See Your House From Here, Scofield’s record with Pat Metheny.
On paper it looks like nothing. A simple walking line. Then you hear it, and it sounds like real blues electric bass, all from a register shift and a touch of chromaticism dropped exactly where it counts.
I walk through a Swallow blues line from that same record in jazz walking bass on electric. He starts with two bars of just the triad and walks right back up. Then he changes the register, and the chromatic notes show up where the line needs forward motion.
Swallow made up his own way on the electric. If you play electric, steal his moves on your next blues: keep it simple, change the register, and save the chromatic notes for where the line needs to move.
Go deeper
The 7-Day Walking Bass Breakthrough (Electric)
A seven-day method for electric bassists who want to walk through any jazz tune: ii-V-Is, stepwise progressions and static modal chords, with lines that move and swing.
