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| Photo by Didier Bonnet / ECM Records |
Sometimes you play music and it wasn’t planned to release it as an album.
That’s what happened with the first bass solo album in jazz. Barre
Phillips, the man who made that record, was asked by a friend of his, Max
Schubel, to record some bass sounds. Schubel wanted to use these sound for
“mixed music between tape and live“. Phillips agreed and played for
probably about an hour and a half without any breaks. Schubel was swept off
his feet and said that he doesn’t want to mess with that in an electronic
studio. Instead he wanted to release the music on his label. Phillips
later said in an interview that if I had known that someone hadn’t done
that already, he probably would have refused to publish it since he had
considered it to be much too pretentious. That’s how the story behind
Journal Violone (Opus One, 1969), which was the prelude to a series of many
solo works by Barre Philipps and of course to hundreds of solo albums by
other bass players. It is sad news that this pioneer and maestro of modern
music has now passed away.
Barre Phillips was born in San Francisco on October 28, 1934. Musically, he
couldn’t be pigeonholed from the outset. After studying Romance languages
and literature at Berkeley University, he moved to New York City in 1962,
where he had double bass lessons with Frederick Zimmermann, the first
bassist of the New York Philharmonic. However, he also put out feelers for
the jazz scene early on and especially Ornette Coleman introduced him to
many players of the new thing. In 1963, he appeared in a third-stream
project by Gunther Schuller with Eric Dolphy at Carnegie Hall, but almost
simultaneously he recorded a concert by Larry Austin with the New York
Philharmonic as a soloist under the direction of Leonard Bernstein. From
1964 he was a member of Jimmy Giuffe’s trio. In the mid 1960s he came to
Europe for the first time with George Russell’s sextet. Between 1965 and
1967, he worked primarily with guitarist Attila Zoller and saxophonist
Archie Shepp. In 1967 he went to Europe permanently, moving to the south of
France in the early 1970s, where he stayed for more than 50 years. In
Europe, he worked with virtually every musician who had a name in the jazz
scene, from Mike Westbrook to Rolf and Joachim Kühn and Michel Portal to
the style-defining The Trio with John Surman and Stu Martin. Later he
played with Derek Bailey and Gunter Hampel as well as Jeanne Lee, and since
1986 he has also enjoyed working with Barry Guy, especially with the
bassist’s London Jazz Composers Orchestra. In the 1990s, Phillips recorded
with Ornette Coleman, Evan Parker and Paul Bley. As to free jazz there’s
hardly any great name who hasn’t worked with him: Peter Brötzmann, Peter
Kowald, Joëlle Léandre, David Holland and Lol Coxill and many more.
However, Phillips not only played with Americans and Europeans, he also
regularly recorded albums in Asia from the 1990s onwards, for example with
Motoharu Yoshizawa, Keiji Haino, Kim Dae Hwan and Masashi Harada.
Additionally, as a composer and performer, he has repeatedly worked for
film, dance and theater productions. For example, he has written music for
films by Robert Kramer, Jacques Rivette, William Friedkin and Marcel Camus,
to name but a few. Ultimately, however, Phillips was one thing above all:
an avant-gardist par excellence. “I was as enthusiastic about Bartók,
Schönberg and Stravinsky as I was about Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and
Ornette Coleman“, he said in an interview. That’s why there were always
excursions into the realm of classical music. In 1992, Aquarian Rain
featured a collaboration with electroacoustic composers James Giroudon and
Jean-François Estager, juxtaposing Phillips’s bass with a tape collage.
Already Mountainscapes (his ECM album with The Trio from 1976) contains
sensitive duets with synthesizer player Dieter Feichtner, which could be
considered as if foreshadowing Face à Face, his collaboration with György
Kurtág Jr. from 2022. Towards the end of his life, Barre Phillips returned
to the United States in early 2022, he settled down in New Mexico.
There are many records of Barre Phillips’s immense output that must be
recommended. Of course the above-mentioned Journal Violone (Opus One,
1969), a ground-breaking album indeed. Also, other solo albums are worth
being mentioned, Call Me When You Get There (ECM, 1984) and his last one,
End To End (ECM, 2018), 50 years after Journal Violone. Phillips has
released excellent bass duos as well. You can’t go wrong with Music From
Two Basses (ECM, 1971) with Dave Holland (the first album for two basses
ever recorded), Die Jungen: Random Generators (FMP, 1979) with Peter Kowald,
Arcus (Maya Recordings, 1991) with Barry Guy and Oh My, Those Boys
(NoBusiness, 2018), a recording from 1994 with Motoharu Yoshizawa. The
Trio’s Mountainscapes (ECM, 1976) is a marvelous recording, as well as
Sankt Gerold (ECM, 2000) with Paul Bley and Evan Parker. Very personal
recommendations are his albums with Joe and Mat Maneri Tales of Rohnlief
(ECM, 1999) and Angles of Repose (ECM, 2004), the second of which was
recorded in the old Sainte Philomène chapel adjacent to Phillips’s
Puget-Ville home. If you want to see what a great team player he was, you
might listen to the Gunter Hampel All Stars’ Jubilation (Birth, 1983) or to
the very early The Horizon Beyond (Emarcy, 1965) with Attila Zoller’s
Quartet (Zoller on guitar, Don Friedman on piano and Daniel Humair on
drums). My personal favorite is Michel Portal / John Surman / Barre
Phillips / Stu Martin / Jean-Pierre Drouet: Alors!!! (Futura Recods, 1970).
A true giant is gone. The gap he leaves behind is enormous.
Watch Phillips playing solo in a church at Kaleidophon Ulrichsberg: