Bass Player & Arranger

I've loved the music of Django Reinhardt since I became aware of him as a keen jazz beginner in the summer of 2005. His cheeky style captured my musical imagination and I still play his records if I need cheering up. Don't be fooled though - Django is a guitarist of fearsome technique. He's not much of a 'scale player' and he prefers to outline changes with arpeggios. He also uses 'outside ideas' that tend to work through repetition and sequence (see bar 25). The A# in ba

John ‘Rhino’ Edwards has had a varied career to say the least but is perhaps best known for being the longest-serving bass player in UK rock band ‘Status Quo’ after joining full-time in 1986. He has also worked with Peter Green, Cliff Richard (on Dave Clark’s ‘Time’), The Pet Shop Boys, Kim Wilde, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and also extensively with Judie Tzuke. JRE has been a huge influence on me as a bass player with his greatest message being one of musical restraint. With

John Edwards is possibly the bassist that has had most effect on my own playing - his quirky use of the upper register for his rock style and his super funky Stanley Clarke like lines for the Judie Tzuke records in the 70s & 80s have been a source of real inspiration for me. I had the pleasure of meeting the man himself last month at a gig with his band ‘Rhino’s Revenge’ and they were superb. I bought an advance copy of the album (loads of great basslines on there!) and hav

Jaco Pastorius was a big fan of practising turnaround lines (they tend to round off a chorus of jazz or blues) and making up lines that imposed extended chords on simple harmony so I thought I’d have a go at putting one of my own together. Practice this in all 12 keys and get some of your own together. And for those of you who like to know the theory… This ‘lick’ is in the key of C. It opens with a scale containing two target tones of the chord (3 & 5). The F# creates a m

This week, I started working through some ideas for jazz improvisation with VERY BASIC ii V I arpeggio-based lines and I have posted three o

I’ve been shedding a lot of blues recently and I’ve been exploring new ways of playing over a ‘jazz 12′. I recorded one of my practice sessions and found this chorus that I played and so I transcribed it to analyse and pick apart my new approach… It’s a solo mainly based on arpeggios whereas I would have mainly played blues scale or pentatonics over these changes before. I like skipping onto the ‘blue notes’ such as the b5, b3, b7, and b9 too! The line over the ‘G7 altered