Miles Davis notoriously clung to the middle register. Generations of trumpet players from bebop to hard bop to free jazz reached for the stratosphere while Miles was content to dawdle in the mid-range. It wasn’t lack of ability, he was Miles Davis, instead the mid-range is where he heard music. For whatever reason his ears hadn’t stretched into the upper octaves, but that all changed around 1970.
At 44 years old Miles released “A Tribute To Jack Johnson”. The record found him pulling notes from the clouds, blurting upper register frenzies from cover to cover. This new range continued throughout Miles’ 70’s electric period, his bands with Michael Henderson found him continually reaching for the stars. Years later in his autobiography Miles said of this period that suddenly he had begun to hear the upper register. After three decades as a professional musician, Miles had new ears.
I have spent the past nine years of my life dreaming of music, obsessing over dusty record bins, boring my wife and friends with the mundane of circumstances of an artists recording session or their use of deceptive resolution. During this time I could not hear the bass. It was a strange paradox, a native son of hip-hop who literally had no ear for the bottom end. During the most creative period of my life I spent several months emailing beats back and forth with a friend in San Francisco. Listening back now almost no bass lines exist on the tracks we created together.
In the past two years I have been a little absent from music. I got a job, got married and forgot why I wanted to be famous. But in recent months a change has begun. Suddenly I hear the lower register. Not only do I hear it, it is all I hear. I find myself hollering on my commute to work when Maxwell’s bassist changes his rhythmic pattern unexpectedly.
It’s funny this is just coming to the surface. My favorite moments playing guitar were the trancelike states that emerged from repeating the same one bar James Brown riff for eleven minutes on end. I may never know why it didn’t occur to me that a soul and funk obsessed musician with a pension for monotonous repetition would be well suited for bass.
What is important is that I have new ears, perhaps for the first time in my musical life. While I hope that most musicians are able to experience this significant a transformation without the urge to put down the instrument they have spent a lifetime mastering, it is a feeling that would be well worth the new challenges were that to happen. It is a liberating experience to have your entire sonic world turned on its ear. I hope you can one day relate to the feeling.