The Night Gary Burton Gave the Bassist Some
Since the Substack I posted yesterday focused on Larry Coryell, I reluctantly pulled a passage I’d written about Coryell’s great colleague in Gary Burton's band: bassist Steve Swallow. Here it is.
The Gary Burton Quartet’s February 23, 1968 concert at Carnegie Recital Hall, which I wrote about yesterday, marked the second time that Steve Swallow recorded Bob Dylan’s “I Want You” with Burton—Swallow had also played it, though with nothing like his Carnegie performance’s beauty and impact, on Burton’s 1967 country-jazz experiement Tennessee Firebird.
In 1968, Swallow was not long for the traditional stand-up bass. Two years later, to the tongue-clucking of jazz purists, he became the first jazz bassist to exclusively play an electric bass guitar. Sticking to his guns, he has played it for the duration of his long career—Swallow is still out there today, at 84.
I don’t know if Swallow ever recorded “I Want You” on electric bass—it would take hours, days, of detective work to find out. My point is this: could he have played the song, one of the evening’s highlights, so heartbreakingly on an electric bass, with its lack of woody resonance, of the upright bass’s instant response to the slightest touch of the hand?
It’s not all that often (Jaco, Mingus and whoever else notwithstanding) that the bassist steps into the spotlight. As Swallow abundantly shows, he’s more than up to the challenge. I’ll note in passing that in choosing to play a Dylan song, he was carrying out the Burton Quartet’s precise mission: to ignore genre boundaries and see what happens.
Taking Dylan’s rudimentary five-chord song and, and with the band’s whispering accompaniment (drummer Bobby Moses is especially tuned in), Swallow turns “I Want You” inside-out, exploring every corner, and with an unabashed emotionality that turns Dylan’s sneer heartbreaking. For almost the last 20 seconds, Swallow leaves the song entirely behind, insistently repeating a lick that only he is hearing. The ardent applause that greets his final notes shows how thoroughly he has touched the audience’s heart. And how smart Burton was, knowing that he had the man for the job, to get out of the way and let Swallow sing his song. If this performance doesn’t move you, well, you’ve got a heart of stone.
I recently saw that Bassist with John Scofield when they played there Country Programm at Moods in Zürich 2018.
Great Stuff.
Check your email