Word: basse
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Blow-Up'. Beck looks at Waller taking up the challenge and they invent a melody to be called from now on 'Train'. The sound of the tracks on wheels, the howl of the whistle, the engine, and the train and its heavy coaches...all on guitar, drums and bass. The drums go quiet, the train chugs to a start. Beck blares once, twice, thrice, Waller plays on his tom-toms and then the roar of the engine, gears clashing, wheels performing, the miles flying, The Boston Tea Party light squad flashes a picture of a locomotive on the main wall...
...musical prestige as well as pitch, it is hard to get any lower on the scale than the double bass. Rumbling and ungainly, it is the bullfrog of the orchestral lily pond-laughed at by laymen, slighted by composers, and even cursed by its own players, who call it a "monster" or a "baroque doghouse." Once, after Conductor Serge Koussevitzky gave his Boston Symphony players a dazzling demonstration of bass playing, one of them said he was so good that "he sounded like a lousy cellist." At the time, Koussevitzky was one of three men in the 250-year history...
...there is a fourth. In the hands of Los Angeles-born Gary Karr, 26, the bass sings instead of croaks, and it sings with all the richness of the cello, the warmth of the viola and the agility of the violin. Yet Karr is not content simply to be the master of a narrow field. He wants to broaden the field-by revamping the technique of bass playing and bringing the instrument into its own as a solo voice. "My intention is to start revolutions," he says. "Most bass music doesn't demand very much, and most bass players...
Slow Bow. Karr is building a movement. Next year he will be teaching at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music, Boston's New England Conservatory and the University of Wisconsin. He publishes a magazine (The Bass Sound Post) and organizes annual conferences for the 1,000-member International Institute for the String Bass, which he founded and heads. He champions improvements in bass design: his own custom-made instrument has, among other features, a special thick-bellied shape for resonance and carrying power and an unusually close spacing between the strings and fingerboard for easier fingering...
Many of Karr's techniques are self-taught. Raised in a musical family in which the father, grandfather, two uncles and three cousins all played the bass, he took up the instrument at nine "without even knowing there were other instruments." He made such rapid progress that he soon ranged beyond the conventional approach to the bass. He studied with a cellist, a pianist and even with Singer Jennie Tourel ("the greatest influence on my phrasing and musical ideas"). After a 1962 appearance in one of Leonard Bernstein's televised Young People's Concerts, he started...