Prog with Upright Bass

Captain Capricorn wrote:   sleeper wrote: Pain of Salvations Be has a fair amount of upright bass as well as fretless and fretted six string bass guitar.   That's one band I've never explored ...any suggestion as to where to start?

If its upright bass you want, Be is the only studio album of theirs to use it and the live acoustic album 12:5 has at least one song using upright bass.

If you want to get into the rest of their disography, The Perfect Element is the best place to start.

Oh, and I was listening to Soft Machines Fourth last night, some excellent upright bass playing on their.

Kayo Dot stands out first in my mind.

Edited by Equality 7-2521 - August 08 2009 at 22:51

Danny Thompson of PENTANGLE fame has already been mentioned, but he does a lot more than just PENTANGLE. [ 'Reflections' is a great example of their jazzier more prog influenced work ].

More recently he's worked with Jakko Jakszyk on some tracks on Jakkos solo, ' The Bruised Romantic Glee Club' and earlier in the Indian influenced ' Dizrhythmia'. Even earlier, Danny's solos , particularly ' Whatever ' is very good in a jazz/folk/proggy kind of way and well worth a listen.

But in the more fusion mould, Christian McBride from the US is a monster of the double bass. He has a number of interesting releases. A good place to start with him, particularly if you like STING's jazzier incarnations ,is the great Sting DVD ' All This Time ' , where despite Stings use of his old Fender bass, Christian powers along with Manu Katche on drums in what is a sublime band.

Said band is largely acoustic [ hence the appropriate input from Christian ] and Sting rearranged some of his old classics in a really interesting Jazz oriented way . [ You've just got to love the souped up version of ' Roxanne' featuring Jason Robello on grand piano as well as an unforgettable version of ' An Englishman in New York ' which is given similar treatment.] Suck it and see.