There is a definite difference between bass players now and bass players in my early days. Growing up in the ‘thirties and ‘forties, you were more involved in sound, basically. You couldn’t afford to get too involved in technique, because you didn’t have any amplification. There was one microphone in front of the whole orchestra, and the bass player was always at the back. Unless you were with Ellington—then you were up front. But it was very difficult to project; the faster you played, the harder it was hear what you were playing. It was a physical problem in those days. That’s one of the reasons the instrument wasn’t played as well—certainly not as fast.

A guy who’s twenty–five years old, at fifteen he started out with amplifiers, so he didn’t have to bother specifically with getting a sound—he never had a problem of being heard. Not having to jump that hurdle—it’s good in one way, and probably bad in another. It prevents them from working out that part of playing which involves projection. The classical players are still involved in that, but the jazz players, by and large, are not.

When I was starting, you had to develop a sound, so you could be heard. You had to pull the strings. Maybe it’s part of the reason I’m still there, after thirty–five years. As guys say, I have a certain sound—and I think it was developed back in those days. I haven’t lost it, I guess—because you spend a lot of time building it up, and you just keep it. But I’m sure that if I had grown up in the last ten or fifteen years, I wouldn’t have that sound—it wouldn’t be necessary for me to have it.

If not each era, each change of style produces a number of players doing certain types of things. The era that we have now—it’s largely a bunch of young players who can really fly up and down that thing; I mean, they can really play it fast—and clean, you know. And it’s good to hear. When I say young, I’m speaking of guys who are forty and below.

There’s something to be said for that era too. Sometimes, what gets misconstrued . . . somebody will be interviewed about some old record, and they’ll say: “Well, he didn’t have very much technique.” But there’s a reason—he would have wasted it, anyway, if he’d had it.

As far as I’m concerned—you’ve got to remember I crossed over some eras. If you play for thirty or forty years, you have to pass over into something different; you have to play faster now. I don’t play fast like the young guys do, but I was considered one of the fast guns in my time. And you had to cut through—you didn’t have any choice, if you wanted to work. It’s so strange to recall that we used to go to a dance, hear an orchestra—and you could hear the bass, just as clean as anything. You could be standing back at the end of the hall, and the bass would be booming right on out there, without the aid of a microphone.

You’d have to ask some of the younger players specifically how important the sound is when you don’t have to be involved in projection. Nobody has any problem being heard now; all you do is turn the amplifier up. So I can’t tell you what importance sound has to a young guy nowadays. I mean, he’s known nothing else, My own kids have asked me: “How did you make it without any air conditioning?” It was certainly just as hot as it is now—but, as I tell ‘em: “I never knew what air conditioning was.” If you didn’t know what it was, you didn’t miss it. You have to grow up with something first.

I guess I’ve been listening to bass players since the ‘thirties; so now you’re into the ‘eighties—that’s a long span of listening to pass through. A lot of things have changed; some are for the good—most are, I think; there are just a few snags here and there.

As for the sound of the bass being recorded better—no, they don’t bother with faithful reproduction, I’d say. Damn near every engineer now wants to take you direct, because he can get every note you play, without bothering to work the board up and down. If he’s just taking it off your bass, pure, then he’s going to have to reach for you sometimes when you go for high notes, and maybe drop back on some of the low things. But they’re too involved with sixteen tracks now, to have to watch anybody. Or else they’ll have to read the score and watch things like that, you know.

What would be great for your magazine, I think, would be to get about three musicians in their fifties or sixties, and an engineer in his sixties or seventies—somebody who recorded back in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties—together with some of the young musicians and a young engineer, then have a conclave and tape that whole thing. That would be very interesting, because most people don’t know what a real true bass sound is. They don’t get to hear it, you know—what the bass really sounds like. That goes for some other instruments, too. Whether all the technical advantages are for the good—that can be argued. I’m not taking sides here; I’m just acting as a kind of catalyst.

In those early days, with no microphones on the bass, if they got a good bass sound they got a pure bass sound. Ellington was one of the few people who really went out of his way to record the bass—you could hear it good on his records. And I think that’s why I took the instrument up in the first place—on account of Ellington, his bass players, his recording style and the way he featured the bass. One of the nice things of my life was making that album with him just before he passed—it kind of fulfilled something for me, that I’ll always cherish.

Yes, listening to Blanton with that band was part of my growing up. There were a lot of other bass players—Al Lucas, Oscar Pettiford, Wellman Braud, Billy Taylor, Senior. . . and I’m trying to think of the boy out of Ohio—Junior Raglan, that’s it. I can’t come up with all the names now, but Ellington always had good and imaginative bass players.

Some of the later guys, too—like Wendell Marshall, Joe Benjamin, Aaron Bell—a whole bunch of ‘em. But the two premier players who set the tone in that organisation were Pettiford and Blanton. Pettiford more for his solos, and Blanton because of his sound and his solo playing—he got a tremendous tone out of that bass. As. a matter of fact, there’s one picture that shows him playing—I swear that string is four inches away from the fingerboard! And he still had great technique too—specially for that era. I think that’s what got it started; it took off the ground, you know, and it’s been going ever since.

You had to put in hard work to project the sound, but you have to put in hard work to have a great technique also. I mean, that’s a lot of work too. They don’t necessarily go hand in hand. I think that developing a big sound—big enough to project through an eighteen–piece band—is going to negate some of your technique. They work against each other. But if you did learn to project the sound of the instrument, it would just make you sound better, even if you amplified yourself, you see, because you’d have a better tone and it would come through. You may not have to turn the amp up as loud, and the resultant tone would be more of a bass sound than an amplified sound.

Players today have to work hard in different ways. The bass is an instrument that you have to spend a lot of time with, anyway. You’ve got to put in a certain number of hours a day with the bow, as well as a number of hours a day on pizzicato. I still do that, when I have the time. Like, I’ve been in Europe now for six weeks, and it’s been great for me, because I’ve practised three or four hours a day since I’ve been over here. And it’s showing, you know—I feel better when I pick it up. I’ve been bowing a lot, and it’s starting to pay off.

I don’t think I’m necessarily getting over a better quality recorded product on bass now than in earlier years. There’s that problem immediately, of the engineer not being interested in my ‘sound’. They put eight microphones on the drums—one inside the bass drum, or right in front of it if he has a head on it, one on the hi–hat, one on each tom–tom, and one on each cymbal. It’s a whole different game now. Why is it so much of a problem to get the real sound of the bass now, instead of the amplified sound? Separation, first of all, is very difficult. At an LA Four session just recently, we had a big separation problem. The saxophone was leaking into the bass mike and the drum mike, and the drum was going into the bass and saxophone mikes.

We put up those barriers—but you feel like you’re standing in a phone booth playing; you can’t see the rest of the guys.

This separation thing has brought about a lot of problems. You make a record, and people only hear the result—they don’t know what it took to make it. We go to record sometimes, and the drummer’s in a booth with just a little glass in it, so he can see the conductor—but nobody else can see him. The only way you can hear him is either to put on earphones, or to listen to a click–track and play to that. So it’s not too simple. Some kind of discussion about this would be very enlightening, I think.

I have hassles with engineers daily. I guess the best recording I get to do is when it’s a movie or a TV film, because then you just play oh a microphone and they get a pure sound—and sometimes it’s very good. Once in a while, it’s not good—they may have a sixty–piece orchestra, and a lot of people to watch. But usually when we have big orchestras like that, they have a score in the booth; so they know who’s going to do what, and when, and why, and where. The engineer is sitting up there reading a score; he’s not necessarily a musician, but he understands how to see who’s supposed to solo, and what to bring out. Then, when you rehearse, he listens to it and makes notes about things he wants to catch.

I’m not overly elated with how I come over on recent albums. I can go back and get an album out I made in 1956 with Oscar Peterson in an outdoor tent in Stratford, Ontario. I had just one microphone sitting on the floor in front of me—and I don’t think I’ve gotten a much better sound than that in the studio yet. Maybe you ought to get that album, and some more of those old albums, play those, then play some new ones, and ask the engineers to explain it. I’m not talking about what we played—I’m just talking about the sound. The true sound of the group was reproduced, yes. With the feet on the floor and everything, you know—but it’s honest.

You practically can’t capture a thing absolutely exactly on a record—although there have been some live recordings that have turned out great. But you take the average musician, who has made, let’s say, two hundred albums, and ask him how many he really loves, whether they captured what he really does the way he does it—and see how many records he can name. There’ll probably be two or three from each guy. That’s the way it is with me—it’s called the nature of the beast, I guess.