Thirty-five years ago this week — 24 September 1991 — three records landed in the same shop on the same day and each of them moved a wall. One of them, A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, is the reason this Friday’s set exists. It is a hip-hop album named after a joke about bass and the art of getting low, and it is built the way a jazz quartet is built: a walking, breathing upright bass at the centre of the frame, Rhodes and horns and two voices trading lines over it. Everything about it says the bottom of the music is not a floor to stand on. It’s a lead instrument.
So that is the corridor we’re walking down this week: twelve tracks from six decades and five continents where the bass carries the melody, the argument and the melody’s argument. A Cincinnati boy who took James Brown’s groove and made it sigh. A Stepney dub bassist who slowed punk down to a crawl and made it heavier than any guitar. Sly and Robbie at Compass Point, Jamaica’s oil-slickest rhythm section, holding a whole record together without ever hurrying. Mingus turning one repeating line into twelve minutes of sermon. A Cameroonian who sings while his thumb and fingers do what koras do. A Norwegian who opens a live set with a bass figure and then spends an hour proving it was a foundation.
Bass players are usually the least photographed people on the sleeve and the last name in the credits. This week they get the front of the stage. Turn it up from the bottom, and let the low end do the talking.
The twelve
1. A Tribe Called Quest — “Excursions” (The Low End Theory, 1991)
The door and the anchor. Queens, New York, three friends and a producer who understood that the quietest part of a jazz record is often the loudest part of a hip-hop one. The bass line walks; Phife and Q-Tip trade lines over it like a horn section. Thirty-five years old and still the cleanest thing in the room.
2. Bootsy’s Rubber Band — “I’d Rather Be with You” (Stretchin’ Out in Bootsy’s Rubber Band, 1976)
William Collins from Cincinnati spent his teens in James Brown’s band and then became the star-child of Parliament-Funkadelic — space bass, star glasses, the whole theatre. This is the other Bootsy: the slow one, where the bass slides and sighs like somebody talking in the next room. Every quiet-storm record and half of G-funk borrowed that tone afterwards.
3. Meshell Ndegeocello — “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night)” (Plantation Lullabies, 1993)
A bass player and singer from Washington DC whose debut album arrived fully formed and entirely unhurried. The lyric is a sly, sideways come-on; the groove is low, insinuating and completely confident. Nobody in 1993 soul had put a woman’s bass this far forward, and nobody had quite this much fun doing it.
4. Public Image Ltd — “Public Image” (First Issue, 1978)
John Lydon’s band after the Sex Pistols, and the real revolution was in the lower register: Jah Wobble, a bassist from Stepney who loved dub and played as if every note cost him money. The debut single went top ten in Britain while sounding like nothing else in the charts — slow, heavy, dub-soaked and enormous.
5. Massive Attack — “Angel” (Mezzanine, 1998)
Bristol, three men and a studio, and the album that made them the most patient band in electronic music. ‘Angel’ opens it with a sub-bass that walks in like something very large in the hallway, while Horace Andy sings his own song at half its old speed. Dread, engineered.
6. Roni Size / Reprazent — “Brown Paper Bag” (New Forms, 1997)
Bristol again, but the other direction. Roni Size and Reprazent took drum’n’bass out of the bedroom and put live bass and live drums in the middle of it — and won the Mercury Prize for it in 1997. ‘Brown Paper Bag’ is the one where the strings and the low end stop pretending they aren’t the same instrument.
7. Charles Mingus — “Haitian Fight Song” (The Clown, 1957)
Mingus made the double bass argue. ‘Haitian Fight Song’ was his own favourite of his compositions — one insistent line that turns into a march, then into a sermon, then back again, with Jimmy Knepper’s trombone and Shafi Hadi’s horn riding on top. Twelve minutes of low-end rhetoric from the man who wrote the book on it.
8. Ron Carter — “Bass Duet” (Where?, 1961)
Carter has played on more records than most of us have heard, and on this Prestige date he plays with himself: basses layered, one bowing a long line while another plucks underneath. No drums, no piano, no place to hide — just the instrument and the ear of the man playing it.
9. Jaco Pastorius — “Portrait of Tracy” (Jaco Pastorius, 1976)
Before he rewired Weather Report, the young Floridian made a solo record and put this two-and-a-half minute piece on it — harmonics, no effects, almost no bass-as-bass at all. He named it for his wife, and it is still the proof that the electric bass can sing without pretending to be a guitar.
10. Grace Jones — “Pull Up to the Bumper” (Nightclubbing, 1981)
Born in Jamaica, made in New York, and recorded at Compass Point with Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, the rhythm section every producer wanted and almost nobody could afford. Robbie’s bass on this is unhurried, oil-slick and utterly in charge: the most polite-sounding rude record ever made.
11. Richard Bona — “Mbanga Kumba (Two Cities, One Train)” (Reverence, 2001)
From Minta in eastern Cameroon to a five-string bass and a voice that carries all of it. Bona plays with his thumb and fingers in a way that puts a kora and a bass in the same gesture, singing in Douala over it. The title says two cities and one train; the groove says the train is the bass.
12. Arild Andersen — “Independency, Part 1” (Live at Belleville, 2008)
Norwegian, from Strømmen, an ECM mainstay since the 1970s, and here leading a live trio with Tommy Smith’s saxophone and Paolo Vinaccia’s drums. The title piece begins with a bass figure and then spends its length proving that the figure was the whole story. Northern, patient, and quietly ferocious.
Twelve tracks, six decades, five continents — and the bass in front of every one of them. The set is on the playlist below, and on YouTube Music for the walk home. Listen from the bottom up.
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