Double Life

Indeed, Swallow has one of the strongest musical voices ever, on any instrument. Wielding a bass guitar in a world where upright is king, he’s unshakably solid, swinging and supporting with the intensity of true concentration. His contribution to ensembles transcends the traditional bass role, sculpting the music with unparalleled sympathy for the moment, agilely slinking through tunes, subtly urging any band to exceed its own limitations. When it’s time for a solo, Swallow constructs uniquely elegant and lyrical statements, each executed with remarkable fluidity and architectural simplicity. His musical voice isn’t limited to playing, either: He’s one of the rare jazz musicians who composes as successfully as he performs. Beginning with the now-standard “Eiderdown,” which he wrote for vibraphonist Gary Burton’s band in the early ’70s, Swallow’s mercurial compositions have entrenched themselves into the modern jazz vernacular.

Despite over 40 years in jazz, Steve considers himself a late bloomer, in part because of his mid-career shift to electric bass from upright. His professional career began in 1960, when as a Yale underclassman he met pianist/composers Paul and Carla Bley, dropped out of school, and moved to New York. He quickly found work in some of the period’s hippest bands, notably in the Jimmy Giuffre Three with Paul Bley and George Russell’s sextet, which featured wind-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy and pianist Thad Jones. Still an upright bassist, and a gut-string-favoring traditionalist at that, Swallow joined Art Farmer’s quartet in 1964, establishing a key partnership with Farmer guitarist Jim Hall. He forged another important link when he met Gary Burton in saxophonist Stan Getz’s mid-’60s band. Burton and Swallow would go on to record over 20 albums together, many featuring Swallow’s compositions. A fortuitous encounter with a Gibson EB-2 at the 1969 NAMM show inspired Swallow to double on acoustic and electric with the Burton band, and he made the full-time switch to electric in 1970. Throughout the ’70s, Swallow lent his sideman services to many artists, including Steve Lacy, George Benson, Herbie Hancock, Paul Motian, and João Gilberto. In 1980 Swallow joined guitarist John Scofield’s thrilling trio; the two have continued recording since, including last year’s live record En Route.

In addition to contributing amply to other bandleaders’ repertoires, Swallow has made some superb albums as a leader, each demonstrating a particular side of his expansive musical personality. Among recent solo releases, 2004’s Damaged in Transit, featuring saxophonist Chris Potter and drummer Adam Nussbaum, is an excellent exposition of Swallow’s well-reasoned compositional ideals. Faced with the self-imposed challenge of writing music without chordal harmony, he successfully channels traditional single-note counterpoint techniques through a modern-jazz conduit. His next solo project, So There, is his second tribute to his conceptual mentor, poet Robert Creeley.

Swallow’s most enduring partnership has been with Carla Bley, his “best friend” and housemate in upstate New York. Since he joined her band in 1978, Bley’s music has been linked to his playing with a peerless intimacy: While Bley’s creativity has found voice with a multitude of personnel, Swallow is often the one holding it down underneath. Their friendship seems to nourish each other’s creative spirits. While they don’t compose together, they are continually refining each other’s work, tempered by deep mutual respect and significant wit.

How do you reconcile being a bass player and composer?

Bass playing came first for me, and it still does. But composing has made me a far better bass player, particularly in ensembles. My composer self demands the rudimentary virtues of my bass player self. It wants me to play with clarity, simplicity, and definition; it directs me to pay attention to what else is happening in the band. If your attention is focused on what’s going on above you in the music, there isn’t enough of your brain left to play too much. It’s all you can do but play the simple thing that the music really needs. It’s a failsafe mechanism, if you direct your attention to the big picture.

How did you begin composing?

In fits and starts. I began playing the bass when I was 14 and began writing my first simple tunes soon after. At that time I was close friends with Ian Underwood, who would go on to be a Los Angeles studio musician and a member of the Mothers Of Invention. We explored music together, especially jazz. We’d get together, look at the clock, and give ourselves a half-hour to write a tune. Then we’d spend the next half-hour playing the tune, just the two of us on bass and alto sax. We’d go back and forth forever. Fortunately, I can’t recall what those tunes sounded like, but it got me focused on writing at an early age. Then I went to school and took the usual counterpoint 101 and harmony 101, but I aborted my formal education midway through college to go to New York.

When I arrived in New York I was immersed in bass playing and in developing as a player, so I let the composition go by the wayside. The screws were on! There I was in New York, presenting myself to the professionals and claiming to be able to play, but in fact, I had a lot of work to do. Up until that point bass playing had been one of several things I was pursuing with real interest, including non-musical stuff, like literature. I started composing again after an experience I had in Berlin, when I was there with the Art Farmer band. I was rooming with the drummer, Pete LaRoca, and talking a good game about composing, spouting off about what made a good composition. Pete took it for a while and then effectively told me to put up or shut up. I had nothing whatsoever to show him—not a single tune to my credit. So I accepted his dare and wrote “Eiderdown,” which subsequently got played a lot. It was a tremendous stroke of good fortune. If I’d written a lousy first tune, I might have skulked back to my room and given up. But it came out well enough, so I did the obvious thing and kept writing, thinking, What’s the big deal? I subsequently discovered how wrong I was. Hours of drudgery and misery go by before I’m rewarded with something that gives me pleasure or satisfaction.

What’s your compositional method?

I approach composition like a factory job: I punch in. I learned this from Carla Bley. I learned a lot from her—not theoretical musical stuff, but day-to-day living as a composer. I’ve known her since 1959, so I’ve been watching a real composer at work for a long time. What struck me first and most forcefully was that she was remarkably self-motivated. As a player you don’t really need that—the phone rings, someone asks you to play, you go play. It’s a social act. If you play well there’s a demand for what you do, and you don’t have to get up in the morning and say, “Okay, I’m going to do it today.” It says right there in your book. But in the case of the composer, nobody is calling you up and demanding tunes or symphonies. You have to get up and say, “I’m going to write music.” Carla has that down. She has a fixed, virtually unwavering daily routine that I’ve adopted. We compose seven days a week and every day of the year when either of us isn’t doing something else.

The first and decisive rule of the day is we’re not allowed to drink our coffee at the kitchen table. As soon as the last piece of toast is consumed, we grab our coffee and face up to punching in and writing some music in our areas of the house. There are structured breaks, each with a different beverage, and then more work. There are five or six periods throughout the day when we hit the desk and hope for the best. I’m not of the opinion that you get a great song from walking in the beautiful woods and hearing an inspiring birdsong. That may happen to some, but I’m skeptical. It doesn’t happen to me.

Other than Carla, who are your compositional influences?

I’ve been influenced a lot by non-musicians. Foremost among them is the poet Robert Creeley. I’m paraphrasing, but he said, “Form is what you end up with.” When an idea has played itself out, that’s the form. This runs contrary to prevailing thinking in classical music, where the form is often a given. I feel like my lineage comes more from Tin Pan Alley. As a bass player, I’ve spent endless nights playing that repertoire—Cole Porter and Gershwin, the great American songbook. I’m acutely aware of those song forms. Tin Pan Alley songwriters were faced with deadlines, so they used these forms as a matter of convenience. The only deadlines I’m faced with are self-imposed, so I only use traditional forms when a song tumbles into one of them and I can’t resist the impulse.

Another key part of my education is listening to music, which I do voraciously and with an analytical ear. It’s both the blessing and the curse of a composer, to listen to any music you hear with the intention of stealing from it. It’s part of the game. In a way it takes away some innocence from the listening process. I’ll never again let music wash over and delight me. There will always be the composer-brain looking for something in the music to steal.

Do you still find music that transcends this?

Yes, and those things bump you out of the objective mode. You have momentary epiphanies; you remember them with real relish. Like the first time I heard Ornette Coleman: That shoved me off center in a way that was dizzying, intoxicating, and breathtaking. Weightlessness took hold and time went all out of sync.

Your next album is a collaboration with Robert Creeley. What are the challenges of setting poetry to music?

The album features Bob reading his own poems. The process of making the record was ass-backward, in that it began with Bob reading about 60 short pieces of his work that I’d chosen. I set 18 of the poems he read to music, and then the pianist Steve Kuhn and I flew to Oslo to record with the Cikada Quartet. I learned a lot about content and form in the three years I spent on the project. Most of the songs are linked to others, and there are only a handful of silences in the program.

Bob died unexpectedly last year, so it’s unlikely that I’ll ever perform the material live. His importance to this project can’t be overstated. I’ve been learning from Bob since the ’50s, as much as I’ve learned from any musician. The music I wrote to his words derives from the structure of his poems, and the musical phrases adhere to his cadences. I tried to get inside Bob’s breathing as he spoke the lines. Paradoxically, I think this has resulted in my most heartfelt and personal music.

Do you use composition to understand specific musical concepts?

Absolutely. Every song I write is a description of what I’ve learned in a given period. I’m very slow, but that’s usually because I’ve had the good fortune to stumble on something I don’t quite understand. A song that comes out of this two- or three-week process could be titled, “This Is What I Learned Between These Dates.” Whatever I’ve learned laboriously through composition, I can then apply to bass playing in real time. I urge anybody to explore writing music. Without that component I would tend to practice the same stuff every day, constantly reiterating the same vocabulary. If I trust my music to my hands, it doesn’t progress as it does when my brain insists that my hands execute something they don’t want to. But it’s dangerous, too: The groove is at its most settled when the hands are doing what they know and love. You run the risk of throwing the groove overboard when you’re trying to stretch your vocabulary, and that should never happen. That’s the balance you’re weighing—whether to play the same old shit, or to put the groove into jeopardy.

Do you have a similarly methodical practice routine?

Practice is an intermediate step between what I discover and what I play on the gig. I have to practice thoughtfully and analytically to bring what I’ve learned into a place that’s comfortable. I tend to practice at the same time every day. Habits are easy to acquire and difficult to break; that makes bad habits especially dangerous, but it makes good habits relatively easy to acquire. If you sit down every day at 8:30 and play your instrument, it becomes easier, to the point where if you don’t sit down, you feel out of whack.

I’ve only learned to practice in the last couple of decades, which means I spent a lot of my early years as a professional not practicing well, failing to realize my potential. I started to practice better when I learned how to structure my time. I’m always shaping the practicing itself, dividing it into periods of specific work. I spend a certain amount of time doing stuff that’s purely gymnastic and mindless. To be honest, sometimes I’ll even read a magazine while I’m running scales and arpeggios and all of that. Then I’m also working on one or more specific musical projects that demand my attention. I also spend a lot of time with a metronome, and again that’s something I discovered late in my career. I’m a devout metronome believer. It gives me an objective sense of my capabilities at a given moment. Am I capable of playing a fluent eighth-note solo on “All the Things You Are” at half-note equals 122? Or can I push it up? Before I used the metronome, if I was practicing by improvising to changes, I did it at the tempo that I loved the best. It was fun, since I wasn’t pushing against my technical limits. But as soon as I began using the metronome in earnest I realized how limited I was. So more than anything else, I owe the metronome for pushing me beyond that. I’m now actively engaged. If I put it up to 130 bpm, am I lucid like Lester Young, or do I sound like a machine gun?

Luckily I live with another musician. Another part of the practice day usually involves the two of us playing together for an hour or so. What we play depends on what we’re working on. If she’s working on a piece and she’s reached the point where she wants to know if it’s working, she’ll write it out and we’ll play it. For me, that’s great in all kinds of ways. For one, I get to influence the outcome of her pieces, to make sure there’s a bass part lurking in there that I’ll enjoy. I’m also seeing her compositional process unfold. I’m seeing it at an early stage and then seeing it again as it advances along.

Bach’s Cello Suites are forever in there, too. They’re not only a technical challenge, but also a source of infinite pleasure. They’re magnificent! I’ve had them with me for almost 50 years, and I don’t feel I’ve even begun to come to terms with them. I’m always buying trombone books and treble-register stuff, also. Just trying to force myself to do things I wouldn’t do otherwise.

Do you do transcriptions?

Not lately, but I did at one point. The first transcription I ever did was [trumpeter] Bix Beiderbecke’s solo on “Singing the Blues.” Transcribing that solo was a talisman for me. It was the first time I stretched my mind in that way.

Who else has influenced you as a player?

First and foremost, Percy Heath. [See May ’04.] I love Percy Heath, especially his voice on the instrument. My love for him has directed me to address that—to see how essential it is to have a unique voice. It’s very subtle with Percy, too. He seldom soloed; he wasn’t a flashy player. But every time I heard him, there was something about the way he formed each note that drew my attention—the absolutely masterful way he used his left hand to shape the note envelope, and how that affected the groove. Doug Watkins is the guy of my generation who seemed to have learned the same lessons I was working on. I think he’s vastly underrated and tragically under-recorded, since he died in an accident at a young age. He had what Percy had, that ability to focus in tiny increments on not just the placement of the note, but the note’s shape, and the ways you can generate timbre with your hand, making even an accompaniment phrase sing instead of just lying there flat. If the accompaniment doesn’t breathe in the way a great solo breathes, the soloist is being ill served, and ultimately the soloist will get unhappy and find another bass player.

Since bass lines are often simple, repetitive, and occurring within a limited range, bass players are tempted to space out. Everybody else perceives this on the bandstand, and it impacts the music negatively with a kind of ripple effect. It breeds discouragement in every corner. The opposite is equally true: A really engaged bass line can energize the whole music.

I once spoke to [acoustic bass legend] Gary Peacock, and he talked about his meditative practice and attention to his physical self as a means of improving his playing. Where do you stand on non-musical practice as applied to your musicianship?

Everybody has his own path. Gary and I have talked a lot about this at various stages in our development. When he first came to New York he moved in with me, and we practiced together and talked a lot. Over the years we’ve bumped into each other and immediately engaged about this kind of stuff. His approach has a lot to do with what he’s learned as a practicing Buddhist. I’ve spent some time with that as well, and it’s been very helpful. I’ve also spent some time with yoga, and that’s had a strongly positive effect on my playing. But at this point, I’m not actively engaged in any specific discipline. In a way, it’s been boiled down to music. Music has become huge to me, and it certainly encompasses such things as concentration and meditation. I see playing the bass as a meditative act.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time over the years looking carefully at the relationship between breathing and playing. Breathing easily and deeply produces a kind of meditative state that seems to benefit playing in all kinds of ways, from producing a deeper groove to a more coherent flow of ideas. I’ve tried to instill the good habit in myself of responding to my breath patterns and regulating them in order to achieve strong phrasing. I’ve used as models for this all kinds of other musicians, most of them not bass players. Lester Young has been incredibly important to me. Also Frank Sinatra, Marvin Gaye, João Gilberto, Billie Holiday, and more. Vocalists are really concerned with breath.

Do you sing as you play?

Yeah, I often vocalize. Occasionally it becomes embarrassingly apparent in the recording studio! [Laughs.] On playback I’ll hear this horrendous bellowing, mostly because I had headphones on while I was tracking. I try to moderate it in a way that certain unnamed people like [pianist] Keith Jarrett don’t! I’ve been playing in a trio with John Scofield and [drummer] Bill Stewart, and we’re playing at a louder volume than I usually do. At the end of many of those gigs I’m hoarse, and I’m unaware that I’ve been singing the whole time.

You have an unusual electric technique, playing with a copper pick over the end of the fingerboard. How did this evolve?

When I first began playing electric I used my fingers. Even as an acoustic player, I was one of the last of the guys who played with their middle finger doubled over their index finger. I pulled the string as hard as I could, with gut strings, no amp, and very high action. That’s what I believed in, even though players were just beginning to use steel strings, lower their action, and use pickups. I resisted all of those things. When I switched to electric I realized that I needed to revise my technique completely. In my left hand it meant using all four fingers, rather than the three I had used because of my background in the classic Simandl method on the acoustic. It was absurd not to take advantage of the electric’s shorter scale and not use all four fingers. I also knew I couldn’t play the electric with just one right-hand finger, as it was absurdly forceful. For the first year or so of my electric playing, I tried using two fingers, but I wasn’t getting the sound I wanted. Admittedly, it was in part because of my choice of instrument and amp: I was playing a Gibson EB-2 through an Ampeg B-15. It was just so fat and warm. I was getting an agreeably dark and woolly sound, but I was suffering from lack of clarity.

When I was with Gary Burton’s band, I was merely trying to get competent on the electric. At the time, Jerry Hahn was the guitar player, and he has a wicked sense of humor. I’d often go practice after gigs, and he’d roam the hotel corridors until he found my room and heard me practicing. Night after night, there’d be a knock at my door. He’d say, “That sounds pretty good,” and then he’d whip out his pick and play some blisteringly fast and clearly articulated stuff. He’d say, “Hey, this little thing is pretty fun!” and hand it back to me. Meanwhile I’m playing like “Do Re Mi,” plodding through this basic stuff. His demonstration of the possibilities of the pick had the decisive effect of pushing me into pick playing. I’ve had the extreme good fortune of having played with a series of great guitar players, beginning first and foremost with Jim Hall. And they all played with a pick. It occurred to me that if Jim Hall could get this beautiful legato phrasing with a pick, so could I, an octave down. Just because it was a hard, blunt object didn’t necessarily mean that the notes had to have a violent attack and a staccato quality.

I didn’t take up the electric in order to be a rock & roll or R&B bassist. I had no desire to change the idiom I was playing. I was still trying to sound like Percy Heath. What was difficult, as much as the purely physical aspects, was persuading other jazz musicians that there was a place for the electric bass in jazz music. That’s still an ongoing mission. I lost some good playing friends, but I found some new ones, too.

Were there bass guitarists who inspired you?

When I initially started playing the electric bass, I was unaware of the great players on the instrument. One of the first things I did was to go out and buy a bunch of Motown to hear James Jamerson, and a bunch of Stax/Volt to check out Duck Dunn. I found that their playing had limited relevance to what I was trying to do, but I fell in love with Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding and the other great soul artists, and ended up learning a tremendous amount. I realized I had ignored a monumental area of American music in my single-minded pursuit of bebop. I subsequently came to love Larry Graham, but once again what he was doing wasn’t applicable to my thing. I loved Jaco and Anthony Jackson and all kinds of guys, and I’m sure I picked up one thing or another from them all. That’s what one does: steal as often as possible. But I think in the end I was stuck, for better or worse, with having to make up my own style in order to achieve what I wanted to do, which was to play jazz music with the same peers I grew up with as an acoustic bass player.

There was a time when I expected the electric bass to catch on like wildfire in jazz. It never occurred to me that it would replace the acoustic, but I thought it would assume its rightful place. That process has been a lot slower than I anticipated, and that’s tended to work to my advantage: I’m working on very particular things off there on my own, which has forced me to reach for my own solutions to many technical and conceptual problems without having models to refer to. It felt very liberating at first, not to have Paul Chambers looking over one shoulder and Ray Brown looking over the other.

Do you have an ideal tone in your head that you’re trying to achieve?

I’ll be forever convinced that I can buy a better sound, and I’m thus doomed to a life of buying stuff. But the truth is almost everything I buy hasn’t helped. I’m using the amplifier I got in ’72, a Walter Woods; I’ve come to suspect that this amp is somehow a part of my voice that won’t change. It’s small and lightweight, so I bring it with me wherever I go. Speaker cabinets are the least critical link in the chain for me. I prefer some to others, but I’m able to make almost any cabinet work. The bass itself has been an ongoing process with me [see below]. Over a series of encounters with instrument makers, I’ve been trying to arrive at an instrument that in many ways runs contrary to the conventional wisdom in terms of instrument design. Most bass players and instrument makers are looking for rigidity and stability, so as to produce a decisive attack and a long sustain. I’m looking for the opposite. I’m looking for instability.

What do you mean?

I’m looking for an instrument with genuine acoustic properties, like my current Citron bass. In effect, I’ve realized that I’m looking for what I loved about the acoustic bass. One of the wonderful aspects of acoustic instruments is that each of them is unique, with its own anomalies. Electric instrument manufacturers have worked to eliminate those anomalies, and understandably so. To build 100 identical instruments requires this. But I very much enjoy the process of discovering something over time and coming to love all of its flaws and virtues.