BZ Music

Von, Paul and Z (That's Me) I lucked out.  When I started playing music I happened to be surrounded by some of the best pickers in the entire Pacific Northwest.  And they all lived in Moscow, ID, my home town.  There were music parties at least once a month.  One of the first music parties I went to was, again, at Paul's house  I remember honking out the bass line for Mustang Sally while everyone at the party did a conga line.  The talent level of a few key individuals was so high that we could pull off almost anything with class and style.  I remember playing What a Wonderful World with Von and his daughter Jane to a silent crowd at a party -- the way the bass line hits the root with the melody on the octave, then follows the melody a third below til near the end of the run is fantastic.  I don't have a recording, but here's Louis doing it: Anyhow, I always thought that if I could be in a group with Paul and Von, I would have arrived....

Spare Time For a short time I was in a 5-piece band with Karen L, Terry G, Janet A, and Paul A.  I have few recordings and, it seems, no images.  Hey, Karen has one: Hey.  This is before I was even in the band.  Who's the previous bass player?  Didn't know there was one. Anyhow.  This was the first band I played in with Paul, recently deceased mando/fiddle/harp/cahone player, and all around Moscow music nut job.  And I know why.  You know, he seemed to have ADHD, and practices with him were and insane series of interruptions and bad puns.  But you could hear in his solos that he talked to God on a regular basis, and the guy had a laser-like focus on music.  If there were music going somewhere, Paul would sniff it out.  And he was the absolute best at involving and encouraging new talent.  The first time I tried out with this group he told me: "You make us a lot better." I will never forget that.  He just dragg...

My First Group Last time I explained how to think bass, which I kind of figured out instinctively.  Then I spent six months teaching my fingers to respond to my musical directions.  Then I started looking for someone to play with besides the radio. The cool thing about the bass is that you cant play it alone.  I mean, is there anything worse than a bass solo?  I could thump out a melody and say "Guess what that was." And nobody could ever guess. Now, you have to play with someone and split up the musical load.  You need a lead part, either a vocal or a guitar or mandolin or flute or whatever.  Then you need a rhythm and chord part, usually a combination of a bass and a guitar, maybe drums but I don't want to reveal my bias there yet. I found Carl sitting alone at a local eatery for lunch.  I'd known Carl for about 15 years from work, where we had worked with each other on specific projects off and on throughout that time.  I had never h...

Playing the Bass, Explained In the previous entry I explained how a "song" works, and roughly how a bass works, and included pictures of my new bass and a description of learning how to play roughly 30% of my Spotify play list.  A little more detailed description of how to play a bass is necessary. If this bores you, you may want to move on to the next entry which will detail a few of the early bands I was in, with pics and a few Soundcloud recordings (if I figure out how to upload songs to Soundcloud). As I described in the first blog of this series, when they teach you to play music in the school system, they only teach you to read and play the notes as written, and to behave yourself and don't cause problems.  But they don't really teach you why you are playing the specific notes that you are, or why the composer arranged the bass line in that way.  So you have to just know or figure it out. I talked about this a little in the second entry.  The bass essenti...

I Think I'll Learn How to Play a Bass Where was I?  Oh yes.  I was marching around wearing a chicken suit and a sousaphone (simultaneously), a super super senior in college, thinking I knew more about music than all the music majors at the Lionel Hampton School of Music.   So I had a career and a family and grew all up, sort of.  But the whole time there was one thing that I always wanted to do that I hadn't yet.  I wanted to get back into music.  I wanted to learn either bass (acoustic upright of course), or piano.  I fumbled around waiting for an opportunity for one or the other to crop up for years.  Then one day it arrived.  Our neighbor of ten years, Patty, taught piano to both our children, but for some reason I never thought to take a lesson myself.  But her daughter was the bass player in a folk group called "The Two Dollar Bills".  On nice evenings in the summertime we would hear the soft tinkling of stringed instruments...

‘Bout time for another adventure, wouldn’t you say? This one has a lot longer time scope than my previous adventures. So Ima have to back way up in time to get you up to speed.  Where to start? Mom and dad sat next to each in the band at North Bend High School in North Bend Oregon. I have no pictures of this. Wish I did. Pretty sure mom played an old silver baritone and dad played a cornet but that would make one or the other of them last seat. I’ll ask.  I am the youngest of four siblings and all were encouraged in music and allowed to choose their instruments, and I think there is an innate, if not enforced selection of a different instrument for each child. The eldest, Jeff played a beautiful silver trumpet. Sister Barb played a tenor saxophone. Brother Chris played trombone. Arriving last, I really had little choice, and was forced to pick up mom’s old silver Baritone. It wasn’t all that bad. It was narrower in diameter than the modern horns of the tim...