© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected, all rights reserved.
The following distinction between gut versus steel bass strings is an important one to keep in mind in terms of the extraordinary facility Jazz bassist were able to develop beginning with Scott LaFaro's work in 1958 with Victor Feldman's trio [and later, of course, with Bill Evans] and culminating 20 years later when Marc Johnson joined pianist's Bill Evans' trio.
The commentary below is drawn from Keith Shadwick's masterful Bill Evans: Everything Happens to me - A Musical Biography [2002],
It forms an introductory annotation to Chapter 56. Consecration: The Last Complete Collection of the Bill Evans Trio by Todd Barkan [Alfa Jazz ALCB- 3918-3925] in my recently published A Bill Evans Reader Volume 2 The Notes.
“It is perhaps instructive to listen to these tracks alongside the 1961 Village Vanguard recordings where freshness and mutual inspiration were dominant. The original trio had then not been together very long; neither had Evans been playing the repertoire into the ground. In the same way that playing with Miles Davis had been pivotal in Evans's career, his first trio was the first full flowering of his own artistic vision, and it happened to coincide with Scott LaFaro's extraordinary purpose and drive, constantly pushing and pulling Evans into new and different impulses and directions. This last trio had a cohesion and mutual interdependence equal to that of the first, even though it was utterly unlike it in character. Now, Evans was pushing everybody else. And while Johnson uses LaFaro as a model - as well as many contemporary bass players - his rhythmic approach is different, and his tone and timbre mark out a bassist growing up in a completely changed world for the jazz musician. A number of bassists had brought new levels of sustain and drive to the double-bass: technical developments on the instrument, as well as their own musical imaginations, meant they could now swap at will between staccato and sustained notes.
LaFaro lived during a time when jazz bassists were generally still using gut strings. This meant that there was less opportunity to produce natural "sustain" for a note - a problem shared by the guitar until amplification gave it a completely new lease of life in the 1940s. His technique was therefore built upon assumptions about the physical nature of his instrument that no longer applied to bassists of Johnson's generation. LaFaro sustained melodic ideas often by using techniques associated with classical acoustic guitarists: rapid note repetition to sustain a melodic curve, especially in the upper registers; occasional plunges into the instrument's lowest registers for dramatic effect; and long diatonic and scalar runs interspersed with well-worked pauses and ostinato patterns, often on asymmetric rhythms. LaFaro's timbre was also much more biting, more conversational, than that produced by later bassists. Steel strings and the discreet use of amplification revolutionised the bassist's role in jazz within a decade of LaFaro's death, as the work of Richard Davis, Eberhard Weber and Miroslav Vitous, among many others, demonstrated.
In a sense, and without diminishing Marc Johnson's talent or role, his impact on Evans's work was to make it sound more like a well integrated but orthodox late-1970s piano trio."
Winner of the 2025 Jazz Journalist Association Special Citation for Historic Writings, Steven Cerra is the author of anthologies on Gerry Mulligan, Bill Evans, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Shelly Manne, Jazz West Coast Readers Vols. 1-3, Profiles in Jazz, Vol.1, Jazz Drummers A Reader Vols. 1-2, Jazz Saxophonists A Reader, Vol. 1, 2 & 3, Jazz Piano A Reader, Vols. 1, 2 & 3, Jazz Trumpet A Reader Vols. 1 and 2, A Companion Celebrating The 100th Anniversary of the Jean Goldkette Orchestras, 1926-2026 and a Companion to Jazz Interpretations of Porgy and Bess. He also hosts the jazzprofiles.blogspot and cerra.substack blogs.
