A jazz veteran stays plugged in

When bassist and composer Steve Swallow last performed in Prague, in 2005, it was with guitarist John Scofield's trio, featuring Bill Stewart on drums. Swallow's concert this week is a lower-key affair, but hardly less appealing. There is no one on the contemporary jazz scene who precedes Swallow on electric bass. While Stanley Clarke and Marcus Miller are more popular, Swallow bravely brought the instrument into jazz in the mid-1960s, and his style and influence are to this day unmatched.

Swallow, born in New York City in 1940, began to play acoustic bass in his teens after studying piano and trumpet. He studied composition at Yale, where he had had the opportunity to play with Pee Wee Russell and Buck Clayton. However, in 1960, after meeting Paul and Carla Bley, he fled to New York and was soon recording with Paul Bley in the Jimmy Giuffre Trio and the George Russell Sextet.

In the early '60s, he played acoustic bass in bands with various styles led by Benny Goodman, Chico Hamilton and Zoot Sims. At the same time, Swallow met and played with guitarist and composer Joao Gilberto, which opened his affinity to Brazilian music. And Carla Bley got him interested in the Motown sound.

Swallow was still playing acoustic bass in 1964 when he joined the Art Farmer Quartet, with Jim Hall. He subsequently toured with the Stan Getz Quartet (1965-68), where he met Gary Burton, who later formed the Gary Burton Quartet with guitarist Larry Coryell, drummer Roy Haynes and Swallow on bass. Seeing the Beatles at Shea Stadium with Burton in '65 also had a profound influence on him, leading both men to try to bring more outside influences into jazz, like the harmonic language of guitar-led groups and the amplification of their sound.

Swallow admits that Monk Montgomery was playing electric bass before he was. But there was still a strong antipathy to using it in jazz circles, which Swallow felt the first time he guiltily tried it at a music fair he was playing with Burton. Recalling the incident in a recent interview in the Boston Phoenix, Swallow said, "I picked up an electric bass and just fell in love. It was a kind of shattering experience. This happened to me and it was - the feeling hit me like a ton of bricks, and my immediate response was, 'Oh, shit. I'm in deep trouble here. This could really make life difficult.' "

Since the mid-'70s, Swallow's second love affair has been with the pianist and composer Carla Bley, who was first an important musical collaborator and, eventually, his life partner. Not surprisingly, his recordings with her are his most numerous and best-known.

At this week's concert in Prague, Swallow will be playing with Ohad Talmor (saxophone) and Adam Nussbaum (drums). Nussbaum has played with Swallow since they worked with Scofield as a trio, from 1980 to '84. Later, in 1996, Nussbaum became part of the Steve Swallow Quintet. Talmor, born in France in 1970, began collaborating with Swallow in 2002, and they've been reuniting for tours and recordings ever since.

On their just-released disc Play in Traffic (Auand Records), Swallow starts out at a surprisingly hard-driving pace and rarely lets up. His speed and finesse are never at a miss, and Nussbaum and Talmor play equally at full bore, or as nimbly as necessary.

As Swallow told Jazz Weekly in 2007, "One of the great things for me about the electric bass is that it has almost no history. When I played the acoustic bass, I did feel very strongly the presence of everybody looking over my shoulder. That history just doesn't exist with the electric bass. I have had the sense that I am plowing forward into a country that I have never been in before."

Nussbaum wholeheartedly concurs, telling The Prague Post, "Swallow is what I call a 'one in a row.' No one in this world has what he has. He is the only person on this earth who plays the electric bass with the depth of experience that he has. He comes from the jazz tradition."

All of which promises a rare and special night for jazz fans.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at
features@praguepost.com