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Most Americans have never heard of Dario Deidda.
Bass players who know him are another story.
In Italy, he won best bassist at the Jazzit Awards eight times in a row. Not two, not three. Eight straight, 2010 through 2017.
Dario Deidda trained on classical double bass
He grew up in a family of musicians. He started on drums as a kid, before he fell for the bass.
He studied classical double bass at the conservatory in Salerno and earned his diploma there. He went on to teach at that same conservatory.
So he was classically trained on the upright. Then he took everything that instrument taught him and poured it into the electric, an instrument jazz still barely takes seriously, and made it a lead voice.
An Italian jazz festival, Fara Music, once wrote that he studied double bass and electric bass, but more than a double bassist, he’s “a devourer of the four-string bass… he knows it piece by piece, he loves it.” (Translated from the Italian.)
Kurt Rosenwinkel’s trio and Angels Around
Then there’s the gig.
Kurt Rosenwinkel, one of the most important guitar players in modern jazz, picked Deidda for his trio. Rosenwinkel is an American giant who came up playing with Joe Henderson himself. When a guitarist like that picks you to play bass in his trio, that tells you something.
In 2020 the trio put out an album called Angels Around, with Greg Hutchinson on drums. It has Joe Henderson’s “Punjab” on it, and the title track is a Deidda tune.
Greg Hutchinson is the most swinging drummer on the planet, if you ask me. And he’s not complaining about the electric bass, because it sounds great and it swings.
Deidda’s line on Joe Henderson’s “Serenity”
You can hear that love for the instrument in the way he turns tough harmony into a singing line.
I broke down his line on Joe Henderson’s “Serenity,” played with Rosenwinkel’s trio. Those are extremely difficult changes. His line over them uses the idioms of electric bass walking: a lot of octaves, a lot of fifths and a lot of repeated notes.
Repeated notes don’t sound great on upright. If Dario were playing upright, he wouldn’t play them. On electric they sound great, and the good news is they’re a lot easier to play than much of the upright bass language.
The fifths work the same way. Upright is all about connecting the notes. On electric, the notes are already connected, so those fifths sound great.
He plays those Henderson changes simply and beautifully, and he leans on the ideas that sound great on electric. That’s how he makes them sound easy. I get into repeated notes and fifths on electric in jazz walking bass on electric, and Steve Swallow’s story shows how long players have been making jazz on electric.
Jazz on electric isn’t a thing of the past. Dario Deidda is proof this language is alive right now, not stuck in 1962. Next time you walk a tune with tough changes on electric, try it his way: octaves, fifths and a few repeated notes, played simply.
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.
