5 Crazy Paul Chambers Facts Most Bass Players Don’t Know

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The bass player on Kind of Blue died at 33.

Paul Chambers spent 1955 to 1963 in the Miles Davis Quintet, and he’s on a stack of the records every jazz bass player learns from: Kind of Blue, Coltrane’s Blue Train, Giant Steps. Tuberculosis killed him in January 1969. He was 33.

Here are five things about him most people don’t know.

The bass down the stairs and the tuba before it

1. His father threw his bass down the stairs.

Paul’s dad wanted him to be a professional baseball player, not a musician. When Paul tried to practice at home, his father let him know what he thought of that by throwing the bass down the stairs.

It wasn’t even Paul’s bass. It belonged to the school.

It didn’t stop him. By 1955 he was playing with Miles Davis.

2. He played tuba before the bass.

He started out on baritone horn with his schoolmates, then moved to tuba after he moved to Detroit. By one account, having to haul those horns around cooled him on them. Around 1949 he switched to the bass.

3. His first jazz heroes weren’t bass players.

He was about 15 when he started listening to Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. An alto player and a piano player were his first jazz influences.

You can hear it all over his playing. What do you get when you speed up a Paul Chambers bass line? You get a Paul Chambers solo. When he walked, he wasn’t just thinking about outlining the changes. He was thinking about playing melodies and phrases all of the time, and he took most of that language from Bird. I go deeper on that in my post on Paul Chambers bass lines.

So What, the sketches and the first complete take

4. That So What melody is a bass part.

So What opens Kind of Blue, and the theme everybody hums is played on the bass, with the horns answering it. A tune where the bass carries the main theme is unusual, and Paul is the one carrying it.

It’s a bass line you absolutely need to know. If you listen closely, you can actually hear him using the classic Simandl fingering. I show that one and two others in my So What bass line lesson.

And there was hardly any rehearsal behind it. Bill Evans wrote in the liner notes that Miles “arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played.” The band had never played these tunes before. In Evans’s words, “I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a ‘take.’”

Mr. P.C. and what to take from him

5. Coltrane wrote “Mr. P.C.” for him.

The initials are Paul’s. Coltrane recorded it in May 1959 for Giant Steps, with Paul on bass.

Pretty crazy, right?

Paul didn’t wait for permission. When his dad threw the bass down the stairs, he kept playing anyway. And when he played bebop, he made it look easy, because he’d been listening to Bird and Bud since he was a teenager and he heard his bass lines as melodies.

It works the other way around too. Take a phrase from one of his solos and play it as a bass line. I’ve done it, and with a little adapting, it works. It’s more or less the same language either way.