With their shifting textures and evanescent orchestral gestures, the compositions sound like a fever dream of jazz. The opener “Opera” sets the stage, beginning with crowd-noise-like chorale exclamations and dissonant orchestral statements before bass, drums, and sax instigate a loosely swinging jazz groove that fragments and re-emerges as orchestral colors fade in and out. Throughout the album Vitous only hints at traditional jazz-bass roles, instead providing commentary and counterpoint through lyrical passages and skittering flurries on works such as “The Prayer” and “Gmoong.” Appropriately, the tone he summons from his Czech-made acoustic is a more-muscular version of the singing, stringy sound produced by pioneering jazz-bass virtuoso Scott LaFaro, an acknowledged influence.

Speaking from his home in Italy, Vitous started the conversation with “I am ready for this,” and then launched into a wide-ranging discourse on his ideas about music and jazz bass.

Role-Playing

My biggest influence is Scott LaFaro, of course. Not only because of the way he played the bass, but because of the way he was working musically with [pianist] Bill Evans. They were the ones who started this trend: You no longer play the jazz roles where bass and drums go boom boom boom and the piano solos or whatever. That is the old system of jazz, and it’s quite limited. These things you can do at home by yourself or whatever, and that is not interesting to me anymore. In fact, it is so boring I don’t even want play that way, and I don’t. 

LaFaro and Evans were having a conversation, and this is what it is all about—constant communication and conversation among the musicians, regardless of what instruments they play. They are talking; they are not keeping with the roles. Sometimes of course even they would fall into that traditional thing—a piano trio is especially dangerous because piano players will try to show everybody how well they can play, forgetting there are other musicians to communicate with.

I Sing The Body Acoustic

[After leaving Weather Report] I stopped playing electric bass. I never really liked it; I had no feeling for it. There are no overtones, there’s no body, there’s no ringing. If you get used to the vibration of the body of the acoustic bass, you are hooked on it. It’s a wonderful thing. The natural overtones are not there on the electric instrument, so I just put it down and said, No, this is not for me. Besides, I can play twice as fast on acoustic bass than on electric, so what the hell would I be doing with one?

Practice Makes Predictability

Of course I practice. I have to keep the technical side of the instrument intact, especially the calluses, because if you lose the calluses you lose the tone and it’s very difficult to play—in fact, it’s quite painful. But I don’t practice like I used to. For the last ten years I have tried to play only what I hear, which is always new things and new ideas because my musical mind never stops thinking. It’s just growing by itself. 

When you practice one thing it’s very dangerous, because that is what you are going to play—your fingers are going to go this way whether you like it or not.

However . . .

I would like to point this out to young musicians: Make sure you get the fingerings and the technical information about the instrument as much as possible, through the classical books. Otherwise you’ll have ideas but you won’t have the fingers to play them with. I’ve seen so many students who cannot possibly get rid of the bad habits. It’s like you have to stop playing for a long time until your mind actually forgets where to send the hands, and only then can you learn a new way. You have to know your way around the instrument so you are free to execute your ideas. Because if you don’t you will not be able to develop your full potential.

Of Wood, Bad & Good

The reason I stopped playing arco some time ago is because the pickups I was using were so bad that I would be playing a beautiful note, and what would come out is a sound like when you cut wood. I said, “This is impossible. I’m sending a velvet tone, a beautiful tone full of love, but what is coming to the people is one of the ugliest sounds I’ve ever heard.”

Now I’m using a Richard Barbera pickup, which I find fantastic. It’s the first pickup I’ve come across that has the [response] speed. With other pickups if I was playing something very fast, the pickup would start choking. I couldn’t play continued lines because of this problem. The Barbera is much faster. So I don’t have the limitation of being stopped by the sound coming back at me. Also, it’s fantastic for arco because it responds immediately.

I also use an AMT [condensor] microphone. It’s a gooseneck mic that fits onto the bass. Together it and the pickup sound really good live. I can get a really good acoustic sound, plus the pickup adds power that you could not get with just the microphone.

The original bass I had for a very long time was made by a violin master named Homolka. This bass was in an accident in 1988, and then I got another bass which was also from Czech Republic, from Prague. It has more speed and projection in the upper register. It’s almost a factory bass, but it’s very well done. It’s not plywood—it’s real wood—but it’s not a violin master who made this bass. There’s no name.

The Homolka was resting for a very long time; it took 12 years before I had somebody put it back together, because it was really in pieces. They put it back together and it’s fantastic again, but I prefer to play the other instrument for pizzicato, and the older instrument I’m now using for arco. In the next album you will hear a lot of arco.

Stairway From Heaven

Just like I play my bass, the heavens play me. So all the music I project comes from some sort of a music spirit, and that comes through me. I am an instrument for the music. So whatever the music says, I hear and I realize. I don’t really question it. I’m thinking more in the way that each piece has its own essence, and I fulfill that piece to as full as a potential as I possibly can. And when I’m done with it, I’m done with it.

Multidimensional music is what I hear a lot. I started hearing this some time ago, like the second instrument would be playing not only a second voice, but would be playing from another dimension, another time, so to speak.

I don’t limit myself with any specific category. Jazz critics would put us into the jazz category, and as far as they’re concerned, we cannot do anything else. That happened a lot in the past; I think it’s getting better now. But still they keep us locked up in imaginary categories, saying we can do this and not anything else, and that’s crazy. Music grows, evolution goes on, and we are developing. It’s like trying to stop a tree from growing. It’s against nature.

I enjoy all great music that touches my heart, which I can feel and understand. There’s a lot of music that’s like a little branch of the tree here and there. Even some of the contemporary classical music is like a little branch—it’s not really a complete music. What I am after is a complete tree. It has to have melody, it has to have harmony, it has to have freedom most of all.

Role Rehearsal

When God created jazz, the bass player could not play because it was usually the tuba player or the trombone player who would pick up the bass, and they had no knowledge of the instrument. So everybody else could play like a maniac, but the bass player would play hardly anything. That’s how the role of the bass player came about—because the bass player couldn’t play. Then you go 30 or 40 years forward and you have some players who can really play. So all of a sudden the bass is going to start breaking the role it had been given and coming out of the darkness, or jail—that’s what it feels like sometimes when you play in a rhythm section, like a slave or something. So the bass player starts playing something different, and guess what—the music changes. If there are sensitive musicians around, they will respond to this and they will start playing different ways and they will start having a conversation.

This is what happened at the beginning of Weather Report—we were having three-way conversations. That’s the main reason the music started sounding completely different, because the bass playing was entirely different. I was not replicating the role of the bass player, and the whole music changed because of this. Of course there were some other elements, such as the development of the music and the fact that people were looking for new things. But I would say, really, that this was the biggest element in giving us music that was quite different from what we had been playing. I and my bass playing were more than one-third of that music being created, if not the reason it was created altogether.

Syncing Up Syncopations

Since the early ’90s, Miroslav Vitous has created music by combining live performance with sounds from his proprietary library of orchestral samples. Structured in MOTU Digital Performer, his compositions come to life as he and his fellow performers react to and interact with triggered samples, recording the results into Pro Tools.

For Universal Syncopations II Vitous expanded on that format: After recording a track with samples and live musicians, he wrote out the sampled parts and replaced them with live performances by orchestral players. As Vitous explains: “When we recorded we had the library in our headphones, so we were playing with that sound and we knew what was coming with the form. But we were improvising while we were playing. The musicians had some motives written out, and I would trigger the orchestra whenever I felt it was the right moment. The final phase of the recording is that those orchestral parts were written out and live players played them.”

While improvising, the jazz musicians maintained each composition’s integrity by adhering to the spirit of the written-out motives. “It’s not like, ‘Play this and then go completely bananas,’” Vitous notes. “This is why I choose musicians who have the taste and experience to stay within the essence of each piece. Sometimes when you have musicians play ‘free,’ they play the same old things. That’s not what happened here.”

Vitous At A Glance

Born 1947, Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic)
Current home Italy
Education Prague Conservatory, New York City jazz scene, 1967–1970
Major early gigs Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Herbie Mann, Chick Corea; co-founded Weather Report
Solo career Eight albums (mostly on ECM)
Etc. Former jazz-department chair, New England Conservatory; continues to do clinics in Europe

Currently Spinning

“When I compose and create—which is most of the time—I do not listen to anything else but my work. By the time I get done with the day’s work my head needs silence. And I don’t want other motives running in my head when I work on a new creation. Between projects I listen to any excellent music. It does not matter what kind, as long as it is honestly felt.

Gear

Basses Factory-made Czech acoustic for pizzicato, Homolka acoustic for arco, both 7/8-size, with Thomastik strings for pizz and Pirastros for arco. Both sets are intended for ADGC solo tuning but are tuned down to standard EADG.
“I always preferred the gut-string feel. So it was a big relief for me when I found the solo strings and tuned down.”

Setup “I like my action set very low, just before it starts buzzing, but high enough that I can to get a great tone.”

Live amplification Barbera Multi-Transducer pickup plus AMT S25B condenser mic through available house system

Studio sound Two Neumann U 87 mics plus Schoeps tube mic; Apogee Mini•Me preamp and A/D converter
“The left Neumann is about at the height of my eyes and facing down toward the bass to pick up the fingerboard. The right Neumann is not very far from the ƒ-hole, to get the projection of the sound and the depth. The Schoeps is a little above my head facing down, taking in the whole fingerboard.”

Selected Discography

As a leader (On ECM except where noted)
Universal Syncopations II
Universal Syncopations
Journey’s End
Infinite Search, Collectables
Mountain in the Clouds, Atco

With Chick Corea
Trio Music: Live in Europe; Trio Music
Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, Blue Note

With Jan Garbarek
Atmos
Star

With Weather Report (all on Columbia)
Sweetnighter
Live in Tokyo
I Sing the Body Electric
Weather Report