G erald Veasley wears many hats: bassist/ composer/ producer/ educator/ impresario. For nearly two decades, he’s enjoyed a well-deserved reputation among fellow performers, including giants like Grover Washington, Jr. and Joseph Zawinul, Joe McBride, Pat Martino, Nnenna Freelon, Philip Bailey and others. Born in Philadelphia, home to many a great musician, Veasley has traversed the globe with bass in hand. Since the 1990’s he’s released seven solo albums on the esteemed Heads Up label, the latest of which, Gerald Veasley At the Jazz Base, was recorded in concert at his own club in the Sheraton Reading Hotel in Pennsylvania. Intelligent, articulate and exceedingly gracious with his time, what follows is excerpted from our nearly two-hour conversation. After doing some homework about you, I rediscovered that you’re on one of my favorite Zawinul Syndicate tracks, “Medicine Man,” from the album Black Water. That tune is tight! What was it like to play with Zawinul, particularly after Jaco had made his indelible mark with him? Thanks! I felt first of all an affinity that I didn’t realize that I’d feel with [Joseph] Zawinul. It was like an immediate connection, which was kind of weird in one way. Because I thought I would have felt intimidated because…you know the history of Weather Report, the presence of Jaco, the musicianship of the band for all those years. And above all, the menacing glare of Zawinul on all those records. [Laughs] But from being a huge…I don’t want to say Weather Report fan because it was more than that. Like, somebody who just…I just loved their music and it just resonated with me. I idolized them as a band; it’s like their music just really spoke to me. I thought it was a perfect way of making music. Even though I didn’t know what they were doing technically or theoretically as a kid when I was listening to it, I just knew that’s what music “should be.” They were one of the first “World Jazz” groups out there. You go back and listen to their material today and you think, “So that’s where all that amalgamation started.” You’re exactly right. And also when you hear that music it still sounds fresh. I recently put on “Night Passage” and it still sounds fresh. There’s nothing that you could change about it. And it’s still Jazz. They never thought of themselves as a Fusion band per se, but considered themselves a Jazz band. And everything they did was related to that. It had some rock elements in terms of playing big, they could play stadiums and large venues. They were plugged in, but they were improvising. They were swinging! So when I met Joe, it was like visiting somebody at their home, “How ya’ doin’, Gerald. Here’s my living room, here’s my music room.” Scott Henderson was there, too; in fact, he picked me up from the airport. But we just started jamming. And it felt like I’d been doing that my whole life. It was so natural. And that was it; I was in the band from then on. For maybe a year and half, I was able to play with The Zawinul Syndicate, as well as Grover Washington, Jr.’s band, where’d I been for several years. I was able to go out with Grover to Japan, come home for a day or two, and then go out with Zawinul to Europe. How do you keep up that type of rigorous schedule, with very little down time? You spend so much time in your life waiting for opportunities, that when you get a little bit tired — or least me, like right now I’m very busy — you just sort of appreciate that people want to hear you or utilize your talents. I don’t think too much about jet lag, it is what it is. [Editor’s note: Gerald and I spoke about several other topics related to World Music, Funk and R&B, which led to the following question/responses]. Why is it that today’s Rap and Hip-Hop seems like a downgrade from the music of so many great R&B/Soul artists such as Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone and others? Well that’s another intriguing question... I don’t know if we should go there or not. [Laughs] I don’t know that I’ve arrived at an opinion except that I’ve made peace with the fact that it’s a different aesthetic. If you apply a ‘classic’ R&B, or jazz or blues, or soul or any kind of other music aesthetic to rap or hip-hop, it’s gonna’ fall short. It just is. Because it’s not about the melody; you’re not going to get great melody. Nor is it about musicianship. Its performance is based upon word play and swagger, not on the sort of things we measure like the soul and passion of Aretha Franklin or the smoothness of Eddie Kendricks or the songwriting craftsmanship of Stevie Wonder. It’s not going to touch you in those ways. It wasn’t created to do that. That’s not its purpose, you mean. Right. That’s the important thing to keep in mind. And that it’s about the pronunciation of the groove and the braggadocio — the word play and the gamesmanship. I wouldn’t mind it so much if rap and hip-hop existed side by side with R&B, funk and soul, but the fact that it’s circumvented those genres almost entirely in today’s pop music is what’s frustrating… The fact that it has displaced other music? Yeah, now here, this is the kind of unfortunate story of music. That something always displaces something else. Romantic Classical displaced Baroque. Punk displaced Prog Rock. Or that, in some circles, Smooth displaced Fusion Jazz. This always happens. Does that mean that earlier form goes away entirely? Not necessarily, but it can and often takes several steps back. So that’s our situation now. If one music becomes marginalized, like the good music that you’re referring to, that doesn’t mean that now nobody gets to perform that music and nobody listens to it, it just means we have to search a little harder to find it. It’s out there, you just have to dig a little deeper. A lot of what we’re talking about, too, it is what I call “the myth of progress,” in that many always think that the next thing should be a better thing. But sometimes, it’s the opposite; that’s the paradox… I don’t even know if it can be figured out. As soon as you make peace with something, with culture in general, let’s just say pop culture. You might say, “Well, I don’t get it, but I can tolerate it because other people get it. And therefore I can see some value in it.” But once you’ve made that kind of judgement, then sure enough, something comes along that is just so irritating, you’ll abandon that. Like Reality TV. [Laughs] You’ll be like, “Okay, I can deal with this.” Maybe it’s just my need to be tolerant; to understand what people get into. But as soon as I accept one thing, something else comes along and tests my tolerance. You know what I mean? [Laughs] “… ‘The Myth of Progress’… that’s the paradox” Maybe we don’t need diversity training. We need tolerance training. [Laughs] Right…so there’s a tension between wanting to check out everything and appreciate what other people are into, versus keeping your own standards high. That’s one of the challenges of living in America. …But that brings up yet another point. You may find this interesting. I love doing interviews like this where they kind of make me reinvestigate some of the things I think about, or talk about things that I’ve never shared with anybody. One is this idea of mining all that’s out there musically in terms of inspiration, like what we find in World Music. Weather Report was all about that, certainly in the Zawinul Syndicate as well. So it’s amazing on several different levels. One is for the sheer freshness of the sound that you can bring into your music and the sounds that you’re hearing and exploring. But another gets back to this theme of tolerance. If you can start to appreciate other people’s music and culture, then maybe you can start to appreciate them. You can become less xenophobic and let go of having an ethnocentric attitude. But somewhere along the line I thought about the music of Black America. Like really, the Roots music, the Blues music that in some ways, modern Black Americans have kind of shunned. That, in a sense, is another type of World Music. Vernon Reid has also talked about that, saying something like today, R&B is all R and no B. [Laughs.] So I started listening to these seminal blues artists like Robert Johnson, and I’ve been trying to put more blues music into my last couple of records. I’ve never shared that with anybody but that was my own kind of personal…inspiration or muse to explore something that’s available to us right here in America. Without the music of the African-American Diaspora, which includes the roots of blues, we wouldn’t have half of the music we listen to today… rock, jazz, funk, R&B, hip-hop… In fact, most of today’s popular music. Right. In a lot of ways, it’s the grandmother you don’t go to visit. [Laughs] I also have a natural affinity for it because I grew up in a household that was permeated with blues – Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf – I heard it all. So I’ve always liked it. “I’ve been trying to put more Blues into my last couple of records” Speaking of liking things, because we have to start talking more specifically about your work, I’m really digging the live album, Jazz Base! Kudos to your keyboardist, Peter Kuzma, who is an amazing bassist. He’s using a synth bass? I’ve not heard too many keyboardist who can play bass lines so “organically.” Thanks. He plays electric bass on the side, so he has a grasp of how bass is played physically and he’s able to emulate some of those techniques to the keyboard. So his phrasing is more appropriate, too. As is his spacing, which is important as well. Although we’ve never spoken about these things, we have an intuitive understanding when we’re playing together. That must give you a lot of confidence in being able to stretch out and do what you want to do. Oh, definitely! And sometimes I’ll get a little jealous and I’ll make him stop so I can play a little bass [laughs]. Well, it’s paid off. That album has some of the best keyboard bass work I’ve heard in years. Kind of reminds of what Dave Weckl was doing on Chick Corea Elektric Band’s album Beneath the Mask on the track, “Jammin E. Cricket.” I have that album; I’ll go check that out. But getting back to Peter, or at least keyboard bass, I flirt around with it on occasion, but for a lot of guys, it’s bread and butter – to play electric bass and then be able to step up and play synth bass lines. Like a lot of R&B groups now, it’s just a prerequisite of the gig to be able to do that. Adam Blackstone, with Phil Scott and Vivian Green, another Philly boy, great jazz player but is really making a name for himself on the soul scene. He’s making a name for himself by being able to play both. Guys like Ricky Minor, who’s the Hollywood TV show bandleader/contractor/music show producer, is a great R&B bassist, but also plays synth with no problems. They can switch back and forth seamlessly; and it’s just another tool to have in your arsenal. Tell me more about your Bass Camp and how would you compare yours to Victor Wooten’s or Jeff Berlin’s One-Week Intensive at the Player’s School of Music. I wouldn’t be able to make an accurate assessment, regarding the comparisons. I’ve taught at Victor’s camp. I respect Victor too much to misrepresent what he’s doing. But one thing that he does talk about is how to be more natural in our playing. That’s one of the things we admire most in great artists, in all genres, is their effortlessness and the naturalness in which they play. He asked himself what could be more natural than nature? Which I think is brilliant. So that’s something about his camp; just being enveloped in nature’s canopy. Being out there is something. So at that point, every body wants to have an acoustic bass guitar? Very much so! [Laughs] It’s so cool. Another thing just in terms of practicing, I keep mine out. So now my practicing can be a lot more spontaneous. Just grab it and play. I do the other kind of practicing as well. But any time I hear something in my head, and the bass is right there, I love its accessibility. But getting back to my camp: It’s intense. It’s a weekend, so it’s not very long; we cram a lot in. One of the things we try to do right away is break down the barrier between the instructors and students. Because we don’t want to lose time with the students being, “in awe” of us. It’s like, “Let’s get into this. Let’s start to answer your questions. Let’s start challenging you. Let’s encourage you to play.” How to achieve breaking down the performer/student barrier? One of the things I do is it make it a point to quickly memorize everybody’s name; to touch and interface with everyone in the camp. Sit down and have meals with everybody. The other thing is that in my orientation, I want to hear everybody’s story. Because there is a commonality that brings everybody to music, despite the diversity of our backgrounds. And the instrument. Well, the instrument is secondary, in a way. It’s almost tertiary. Because secondarily, it’s about music. Bass just happens to be what an instrument is. An instrument is a means, not an end. So I try to get participants to understand that. If you go to a music store clinic, it can be very inspiring, but the impact can be somewhat short term. Because it’s not hands-on. It’s often more about shock and awe. You see this fabulously talented bass player. You think, “Wow, I really want to do that.” You have some Q&A, you have a lot of Show&Tell by the fabulously talented bass player. They sign some autographs, and they’re gone. It’d be better if that was just the introduction to several days of intensive learning with the FTB. Exactly! So you could get to know the things that you need to learn. They could watch you play, listen to your phrasing, hear you play a piece, and give some tips and advice. You could really get into some details. But you miss the feedback element that’s an integral, natural and a necessary part of a lesson. So private lessons are absolutely the best way to learn how to play the bass, but next is having an intensive camp. But I didn’t even finish my statement about what the camp is really about. I said the tertiary level is playing the bass. And the second level is about music, and the effect of music in your life. But really the primary, powerful aspect of the camp is just the fact that we’re all living on this plane of trying to negotiate through life. And music – here again, we thought it was an end – becomes the means. Because it really is about life, you know. “An instrument is a means, not an end.” How do you teach that? What we do is…I tell a lot of great stories [laughs]. And relate to some of things that we learned through music as metaphors for life. Can you give me an example? A great example is…which one should I go for? [Laughs] Every year we have a theme. Last year’s theme was “Traveling Light.” We were looking at music, traveling through music as a journey. One of the important things, if you’re going on that journey, is that you don’t want to take any excess baggage. So as a bass player, certainly you don’t want to have things in your playing that are extraneous. You essentially want to get to the core of whatever your statement is as a bassist. Play the essential notes, get to the essential meaning of your story when you’re playing. But as people, you want to get rid of the excess baggage, too. A lot of that has to do with our negative self-image or what is not conducive to what we think we can be. So we may have this image of, “Man, I think I can be a great musician.” You might have that kind of fantasy, right? But then everything that you do is counter to that and doesn’t support it. You may do things like avoid practicing. Or you may do things like avoid playing with the best musicians. So there’s this duality where you feel like you’re deserving, but concurrently feel that you’re not deserving of opportunities or not deserving of success as a musician. This is something that many people deal with. Many times, people are drawn to the camp because of the bass. But then what they discover is that it’s a richer environment. That you really begin thinking about yourself and what is it that you really want to get out of music. How music enhances your life. So the idea of “traveling light” is to be aware of those things you’re carrying around. I put some of this in my journal on my website [http://www.geraldveasley.com]. We carry around these self-concepts as though they’re suitcases full of diamonds and we hold on to them no matter how outmoded or how harmful they are to us. And you start to accept it. “I’m just not a good player.” “I just can’t read music.” “I don’t understand soloing.” “My groove sucks.” “My ear’s bad.” You start to learn things that people tell you or you tell yourself via negative self-talk. It becomes calcified. It becomes so hardened that you can’t get rid of it, no matter what. And you forget that it’d be more healthful to get rid of it. But instead you just accept it. So on the one level you may think, “I want to learn how to improvise,” but there’s another part of you – the part that is now hardened – that says, “I can’t improvise.” My point is you have to break through all that in order to make the progress that you want to achieve. You have to bust down those walls first. Other than that, your body is trying to learn a skill that your soul won’t accept. How’s that? That’s why I said that we try to break down some of these barriers between students and instructors. But we also try to break down some of the barriers between the student and himself or herself also. I had no idea a bass camp could touch upon all that. I’m coming up to Philly! When is your next camp? March 17 through 19th in 2006. Again there are more details on my website [www.geraldveasley.com]. One comment that I will make about Victor’s camp is that the goals are similar, although Victor does it in a different way. Whereas I do it more directly, kind of teaching these concepts. He does it through the metaphor of nature. If you can start to understand, appreciate and live with nature, and the fact that nature can be unforgiving, and so that you kind of have to fold yourself into it and understand it, instead of trying to conquer it. Those kinds of things help to break down your ego. That’s the number one thing he teaches in his camp. Because if the ego is there, people can’t learn. That’s the first step. And he also breaks down their resistance by making them physically exhausted by responding to the challenge of surviving outdoors. It’s very well thought out. It’s about breaking down these barriers between your ego and the real you. But since I don’t have the same access to nature that he does, I have to approach some of these same goals more directly. By making people rethink some of these “mis-concepts” they may have about themselves. I call it Unlearning. The idea of traveling light requires learning how to drop all the excess baggage you’re going around with. You know, for better or worse, there’s a paradox about the bass. Do tell. And that is, you can buy a bass Saturday morning, and by Saturday night be making music with it. That people can actually tolerate. Whereas if you bought a violin, or a trumpet, later that night your landlord’s gonna’ be calling [laughs]. Bass has that immediacy. That’s a good way to put it. You can learn to play a song the first day. “...There’s a paradox about the bass.” Like the bass line to “Louie, Louie” or what have you. Right. And in some ways that’s awesome. But therein lies the trap. Because you now have to have some inspiration to go further. So as long as we can function physically on the instrument, it requires a lot more for us to slow down and learn more about the music. So when you ask a student why’d you play that particular note or what scale are you playing off of and why, they can tell you. Or to read music! Reading music often comes last with many bassists. I did a feature interview with Jeff Berlin in issue #38 and that’s one of his shticks. I think he’s right to be hard core about it; although I’m not as much as he is because I realize in the real world, what we just discussed is how it happens. But from my perspective, when a student can play, when they can make music on the instrument but they may not know a minor arpeggio from a Buick [laughs]… Those students, when you can show them something so that when it clicks, and they get that “A-Ha Moment,” that’s the best feeling in the world. Because someone who has a groove and who has an ear, and that all they have to do is learn some of the mathematics of music, then it’s really easy. It’s easier to learn that information than it is to teach somebody how to groove. Or teach somebody who is “tone deaf,” whatever that means, the difference between a minor second and an octave. I would never disagree with such an extraordinary talent and gifted teacher as Jeff, but some people can “get it” later in their development. And when they do, it’s a really special moment. So let’s talk a little bit about practicing. What does your practice routine consist of and what do you recommend for your students? Particularly for a student who, as you said earlier, has this idea of wanting to be a good bassist, but hasn’t yet integrated the discipline of regular, consistent practice. Not only in terms of how often, but what to practice? One of the things I’ve learned about practicing is that everybody knows that they have to practice. So there’s no mystery about that. And everybody, to a certain extent, avoids it. [Laughs] I’ve been trying to sort this out for years…What is it about it? I think there is the quality of, “I play music to free myself. But in order to do so, I have to be bound to this thing called ‘practice.’” So it’s like a Catch-22. So there’s this disconnect between this ideal sense of freedom that we seek versus the requisite of having to methodically practice. Freedom of expression, freedom of lifestyle…some people may not talk about it. But in a way the bass or music might be an escape from something that might be much more constricting like a job or school or relationships. “…Everybody, to a certain extent, avoids practicing.” If you have to write a term paper, for instance, it’s pretty clear what you have to do. You have to locate your resources, you have to read the doggoned books, or you get somebody else’s papers [laughs]. No, really, you have to make your outline, you have to write your rough draft, you have do your paper, right? And you have to do it all, you can’t skip any steps. “So, darn it! When I wanna’ practice, man, I just want to funk out!” You see what I mean? I read a book by a classical guitarist once who proposed, there’s a difference between playing per se and practicing. Practicing is taking an isolated challenge or ‘problem’ about music and working on it methodically, slowly, with concentration, until you “get it right.” Whereas playing is spontaneous music-making on your instrument. He encouraged both, but necessarily emphasized practicing as means for continuous improvement. Right! That’s exactly how I feel. What I’ve come up with is that you have to integrate the play — in every sense of the word — with the practice. And so how is that achieved? Well what I say to a student, is that you have an X-amount of time. And I’m not going to say a specific amount of time, because, there again you get into the guilt trip. Like, if someone asks me “How long should I practice?” Then right there, we’re dead. Really! We are. Because now if I say, you should practice three hours a day, and because of your own life circumstances you’re unable to do so – spouse, life, job, girlfriend, school, and you’re trying to be a person in society, and integrate your love of music. Should you not have three hours a day, now we get into the issues that we talked about. “I suck.” The negative self-talk. So I say whatever free amount of time that you have, then decide what it is you’re going to do with it vis-à-vis your instrument. As you pointed out, practicing is a solution to a problem. If you know you’ve a problem with dexterity, or that’s something that you just want to be better accomplished at, well then, why not spend a third of your time on that? Why wouldn’t you? Or if your particular challenge is improvising, and if you have some sort of method or materials, or you have a lesson that you’re supposed to prepare for, then one ought do it. “… You have to integrate the play… with the practice.” So what I’m saying is that there is a prescriptive element to practice. If you go to a doctor, you’re not going to just walk in the door and they’ll say, “Take this, this, this and this and do this or don’t do that.” They’re going to ask you what are your symptoms, right? They’re going to say, “What seems to be the problem?” Because everybody is going to need something different. I think it was Stanley Clarke who once said the thing you really need to work on is the thing that’s most difficult for you. Don’t do the easy thing. It’s so easy to pick up the instrument and do the stuff that you can already do. It’s the most natural thing in the world, because here again, you want to feel good. Here again, the immediacy of the instrument “tells you” to do that. You just do the things that you can do and you feel good [laughs]. It’s that whole play thing again. Well, it’s not just that because I’m going to define “play” a little bit differently. But I’m going to say that part of doing what you do already, and treating that as practice, is limiting because there’s not much growth in that. There’s pleasure. Well, now here again, the only pleasure you get out of that is like taking the same route to work everyday. To me, it’s not even play. To me, what play is, for instance, is when Michael Manring experiments with different tunings. Or when Victor Wooten starts figuring out how to tap “Amazing Grace.” Or if somebody wants to figure out how to play “Happy Birthday” in thirds. Or whatever. You need time to experiment and discover. Deep Bass Exploration. [Laughs] Right! That’s “Play.” Like children in a sandbox. Get “in a sandbox” with your bass, throw the rules out the window for a minute and just see what happens. That’s play. Now, where am I headed for this? If you only have a certain amount of time to practice, then leave a little bit of that time in there for play. Because you need that. There’s growth in that. But you also leave time in there to systematically tackle the stuff that you’re having difficulty with as well. A great jazz player once said there are three phases to learning an instrument. The Orientation Phase, Assimilation Phase, and the Innovation Phase. In the first, you become physically adept at playing the instrument. Knowing where the notes are, and being able to play phrases, scales, chords, arpeggios, etc. So there’s a technical component. Then the Assimilation Phase, where you’re taking the knowledge and wisdom of other players – whether it’s through books or multi-media materials, or whether it’s transcribing stuff off of CDs or copping great licks or what have you. The Innovation Phase, which is fairly obvious, whether it’s getting your own improv down, developing new techniques, whether it’s play…whatever it is that makes you as a musician you. But I don’t know if those things are necessarily sequential. So maybe that’s another way of approaching practicing — that these phases are concurrent and simultaneous. So that part of one’s practice time, whether it’s over a week or over a single practice session, encompasses a little bit of all of them. For more great material featuring Gerald Veasley, see Bassics Back Issues #33, #40 BASSICS MAGAZINE GERALD VEASLEY (Official Website)