27th
On portability of means
On friday I am traveling by train from Netzaberg to Berlin. On saturday I will be performing in Berlin, at Staalplaat (the retail location of the Amsterdam-based record distributor of the same name; staalplaat is dutch for record). I will be performing on an American (Korean-made) 5-string banjo, which I will play on its back with two e-bows, loose pieces of metal, plastic and metal clips, a loose guitar string, and two contact microphones.
I am a bass player. When people ask me what I play, I say “bass.” By this I mean specifically the acoustic contrabass and also, less frequently but originally, the electric bass guitar. Every time I say “I’m a bass player” I want to say more, because there’s a lot more. When I perform, I still consider myself a bassist first and foremost, when in reality I play more than have of my performances with some other instrument or apparatus: laptop, banjo and electronics, electronics alone, some combination. Why is it I still think of bass first? There could be several reasons: 1.) Depending on who’s asking, I want to keep the answer short and simple. I often avoid getting into longer explanations of what I do, just so I don’t lose my interlocutor. If she or he is someone who plays “this music,” I probably won’t shorten my answer, but I may still start the same way. 2.) My own history of bass paying is tied into my general musical thinking on every level. Every time I learned a new way of making music, one that was further outside of western canon and further into a personal, self-made domain, it was with the bass: I composed notated music at the bass rather than at the piano; I learned to play Hindustani ragas on the bass guitar; I learned how to make my contrabass sound like a klezmer clarinet or like Sarah Vaughn; I learned how to make my bass sound like a bitten sax reed or like Sainkho Namchylak. Or maybe it’s just that 3.) “bass” sounds cool.
I could not do this so easily if I were trying to bring a bass. A major part of self-idiomatic musicianship, for many people, is the practicality of developing your own instrumental resources depending on your immediate needs, whether those needs be to fill a room with speakers or to be able to hop on a train and play at a record store or under a tree or in the Palais de Tokyo (maybe in the same trip). Bhob Rainey and Greg Kelley of nmperign once said to me about their soprano sax/trumpet instrumentation in an age of electronic gizmos sprawled across folding tables that they wanted to be ready for the apocalypse; when all the power is gone, they still would be ready to play. I guess that’s why I’ve got a banjo, with its resonant skin: Even though I can plug in the contact mics, if the grid goes down, you can still hear me.
