You’re walking a standard and you hit two bars of the same chord. You play a lick in the first bar, and then you’re thinking, wait, what do I do for this next bar? Do I play the same lick again? When I talk to other bass players in New York, they often say that’s the hardest thing about playing standards. Israel Crosby’s bass lines have a clever answer for it, so let’s look at what he does.
I consider Israel Crosby the great grandmaster of bass lines. His line on Ahmad Jamal’s “Poinciana” actually influenced James Jamerson’s line on Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” which is probably one of the most popular electric bass lines of all time. Ray Brown, Ron Carter, Percy Heath, all the great bass players loved and respected him. He was born in 1919, much earlier than a lot of the great bass players we listen to, and he was really the first one to play bass like this.
His line on “But Not for Me,” from Ahmad Jamal’s At the Pershing, is, to me, the greatest upright bass line of all time. My students have heard me talk about it incessantly. If I had to pick one album as the seminal bass line album, that’s the one.
Change the order of notes
There’s an interview with Ron Carter where he says all he’s trying to do is find a better order of notes than he did yesterday. I love that, because it’s exactly what Israel Crosby does in the first bar of “But Not for Me.” He takes a common phrase in the bass line language and changes the order of the notes. Where most of us would start the chorus with a very common lick, he goes one, six. It’s so simple, yet so effective.
You can do this in your own bass lines today. Think about a lick you play all the time. On an F blues, I walk down in the first bar all the time. Now change the order of those notes, or start the way Crosby does, one, six, and see where it takes you.
He does it in his other lines too. On “You or No One,” which is kind of an obscure tune, he reorders a phrase to three, five, nine, one. On another line he starts a C major seven bar on the major seventh because of its relationship to the root, so instead of one, three, five, seven, he plays seven, one, three, five. It’s bebop-ish in a way, with the approach tones. It gives the bass line another dimension. Is it something you have to master? I haven’t mastered it. But it’s a very important thing to be aware of if you’re a jazz bass player at any level.
Put the cadence on beat four
In the second bar of “But Not for Me,” Crosby ends on the root of the next bar. He creates a cadence, which is so important to good bass lines, but he does it before the next bar happens. That way the next bar is fresh. I love to do this in my own lines. On an F blues, I’ll play that F before it arrives.
By the fifth bar he does the cadence on beat four again, only this time he plays the root of the chord he’s on, not the root of the next one. He plays the root of that chord as a cadence, so he can move on.
You don’t always have to create cadence on beat one. Sometimes the most effective cadence is on beat four.
Cole Davis
Crosby got this from New Orleans music. He grew up in Chicago, but he was a master of that style, and when you hear him play with Benny Goodman you can really hear his understanding of the two-beat. Listen to a lot of tuba parts and you’ll hear the cadence on beat four, not beat one. Ahmad Jamal’s band was so inside that music, especially Vernel Fournier, who was from New Orleans. And the beat four cadence isn’t only rhythmically powerful. It’s harmonically powerful too, because it sets up the next bar. That comes straight from classical music. It’s a very classical, almost Bachian approach to bass lines. I came up singing classical music in New York, so when I hear this kind of cadence, it’s familiar to me. If you didn’t grow up with classical music, not to worry. You can practice it.
Two bars of one chord, and the sixes and nines
Back to that problem from the top. On “You or No One,” Crosby gets two bars of one chord, and he plays something ambiguous. It’s in the chord. It’s just not 100% clear what chord it is. He isn’t playing anything obvious. He’s setting up another cadence, so the second bar has a ton of weight. Play the obvious version back to back with his and the obvious one is kind of boring. But to come up with his, you have to really understand how to use phrases to create a cadence. If it doesn’t lead to a cadence, there’s no point.
He also uses the six and the nine a lot, in many of his bass lines. There’s a bar in “But Not for Me” where he uses both, and it’s brilliant. (No jokes, please. We’re mature musicians here.)
Sometimes his lines turn into melodies. There’s a spot where he separates the intervals in such a way that it actually creates a melody. If it were the theme to a Prokofiev symphony, I’d say, wow, that’s an amazing melody, and it’s just this dude’s bass line. He chose to play mostly intervallically, which is part of what I get into in the Ray Brown walking bass line formula. A bass line that’s functional, clear, logical, and that elegant and melodic. There’s nothing like it.
Write out a blues with Crosby’s cadences
This comes to me in real time now because I’ve been doing it for a while, and I can think about it on gigs to the extent that it informs my improvised lines. A good way to get there pretty quickly is to write it out. Take the pressure off yourself to come up with this stuff in real time. Take an F blues or a B-flat blues and write a bass line with these steps in mind.
- Reorder a lick. Start with a phrase you always play and change the order of the notes.
- Cadence on beat four. Put a root on beat four to wrap up the phrase and set up the next bar.
- Create some tension. Make a bar a little ambiguous, so the listener doesn’t know where you’re going.
- Land it on beat one. Follow the ambiguity with a strong beat one cadence, so it feels like, okay, we’re home.
I know this is getting pretty advanced. If the basic notes of a walking line still feel shaky, start with Walking Basslines From the Beginning and come back to this. But if you can write out bass lines with this in mind and bring it into your own playing, you’ll start to love your playing, and it doesn’t take that much to get there.
I break down “But Not for Me,” “You or No One” and one more line in The Genius of Israel Crosby, and his Cheek to Cheek walking line is another one worth studying. Write out that blues tonight, put a cadence on beat four, and hear how fresh the next bar sounds.
